Author: D. Whalen
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137396938
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
After pioneering this technology and growing the market, COMSAT fell prey to changes in government policy and to its own lack of entrepreneurial talent. The author explores the factors which contributed to this rise and fall of COMSAT.

Author: Brian C. Odom
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031634101
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description

Author: Dan Schiller
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197639259
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 833

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Book Description
A sweeping, revisionist historical analysis of telecommunications networks, from the dawn of the republic to the 21st century. Telecommunications networks are vast, intricate, hugely costly systems for exchanging messages and information-within cities and across continents. From the Post Office and the telegraph to today's internet, these networks have sown domestic division while also acting as sources of international power. In Crossed Wires, Dan Schiller, who has conducted archival research on US telecommunications for more than forty years, recovers the extraordinary social history of the major network systems of the United States. Drawing on arrays of archival documents and secondary sources, Schiller reveals that this history has been shaped by sharp social and political conflict and is embedded in the larger history of an expansionary US political economy. Schiller argues that networks have enabled US imperialism through a a recurrent "American system" of cross-border communications. Three other key findings wind through the book. First, business users of networks--more than carriers, and certainly more than residential users--have repeatedly determined how telecommunications systems have developed. Second, despite their current importance for virtually every sphere of social life, networks have been consecrated above all to aiding the circulation of commodities. Finally, although the preferences of executives and officials have broadly determined outcomes, these elites have repeatedly had to contend against the ideas and organizations of workers, social movement activists, and other reformers. This authoritative and comprehensive revisionist history of US telecommunications argues that not technology but a dominative--and contested--political economy drove the evolution of this critical industry.

Author: Christine E. Evans
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262546906
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
The compelling and little-known history of satellite communications that reveals the Soviet and Eastern European roles in the development of its infrastructure. Taking its title from Hannah Arendt’s description of artificial earth satellites, No Heavenly Bodies explores the history of the first two decades of satellite communications. Christine E. Evans and Lars Lundgren trace how satellite communications infrastructure was imagined, negotiated, and built across the Earth’s surface, including across the Iron Curtain. While the United States’ and European countries’ roles in satellite communications are well documented, Evans and Lundgren delve deep into the role the Soviet Union and other socialist countries played in shaping the infrastructure of satellite communications technology in its first two decades. Departing from the Cold War binary and the competitive framework that has animated much of space historiography and telecommunications history, No Heavenly Bodies focuses instead on interaction, cooperation, and mutual influence across the Cold War divide. Evans and Lundgren describe the expansion of satellite communications networks as a process of negotiation and interaction, rather than a simple contest of technological and geopolitical prowess. In so doing, they make visible the significant overlaps, shared imaginaries, points of contact and exchange, and negotiated settlements that determined the shape of satellite communications in its formative decades.

Author: Hugh R. Slotten
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421441233
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
A fascinating account of how the United States established the first global satellite communications system to project geopolitical leadership during the Cold War. On July 20, 1969, the world watched, spellbound, as NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped off the Apollo 11 lunar module to walk on the moon. NASA estimated that 20 percent of the planet's population—nearly 650 million people—watched the moon landing footage, which was made possible by the first global satellite communications system, the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization, or Intelsat. In Beyond Sputnik and the Space Race, Hugh R. Slotten analyzes the efforts of US officials, especially during the Kennedy administration, to establish this satellite communication system and open it to all countries of the world. Locked in competition with the Soviet Union for both military superiority and international prestige, President John F. Kennedy overturned the Eisenhower administration's policy of treating satellite communications as simply an extension of traditionally regulated telecommunications. Instead of allowing private communications companies to set up separate systems that would likely primarily serve major "developed" regions, the new administration decided to take the lead in establishing a single world system. Explaining how the East-West Cold War conflict became increasingly influenced by North-South tensions during this period, Slotten highlights the growing importance of non-aligned countries in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. He also underscores the importance of a political economy of "total Cold War" in which many crucial aspects of US society became tied to imperatives of national security and geopolitical prestige. Drawing on detailed archival records to examine the full range of decisionmakers involved in the Intelsat system, Beyond Sputnik and the Space Race spotlights mid- and lower-level agency staff usually ignored by historians. One of the few works to analyze the establishment of a major global infrastructure project, this book provides an outstanding analytical overview of the history of global electronic communications from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.

Author: Anthony J. Badger
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812250729
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
In chronicling the life and career of Albert Gore, Sr., historian Anthony J. Badger seeks not just to explore the successes and failures of an important political figure who spent more than three decades in the national eye—and whose son would become Vice President of the United States—but also to explain the dramatic changes in the South that led to national political realignment. Born on a small farm in the hills of Tennessee, Gore served in Congress from 1938 to 1970, first in the House of Representatives and then in the Senate. During that time, the United States became a global superpower and the South a two party desegregated region. Gore, whom Badger describes as a policy-oriented liberal, saw the federal government as the answer to the South's problems. He held a resilient faith, according to Badger, in the federal government to regulate wages and prices in World War II, to further social welfare through the New Deal and the Great Society, and to promote economic growth and transform the infrastructure of the South. Gore worked to make Tennessee the "atomic capital" of the nation and to protect the Tennessee Valley Authority, while at the same time cosponsoring legislation to create the national highway system. He was more cautious in his approach to civil rights; though bolder than his moderate Southern peers, he struggled to adjust to the shifting political ground of the 1960s. His career was defined by his relationship with Lyndon Johnson, whose Vietnam policies Gore bitterly opposed. The injection of Christian perspectives into the state's politics ultimately distanced Gore's worldview from that of his constituents. Altogether, Gore's political rise and fall, Badger argues, illuminates the significance of race, religion, and class in the creation of the modern South.

Author: Annette Froehlich
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030713857
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
This book is the highly anticipated sequel to the previous volume under the same title, dedicated to presenting a diverse range of timely and valuable contributions on the legal and policy related questions evoked by satellite constellations, including emerging mega-constellations. Given the proliferation of activities in the field of satellite constellations, and the critical roles they play in supporting and enabling communication, navigation, disaster monitoring, Earth observation, security and scientific activities, the insights of legal and policy experts from around the world have been gathered in this second volume to help expand the scientific literature in this precious field. Topics range from legal obstacles and opportunities facilitating small satellite enterprise for emerging space actors, international cooperation in the compatibility and interoperability of navigation systems, the designation of satellite constellations as critical space infrastructure, to an analysis of the paradigm shift which has occurred over the last decade to make the proliferation of small satellite constellations possible, and more.

Author: Luisa Bonolis
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004529136
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 744

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Book Description
This book provides the first comprehensive historical account of the evolution of scientific traditions in astronomy, astrophysics, and the space sciences within the Max Planck Society. Structured with in-depth archival research, interviews with protagonists, unpublished photographs, and an extensive bibliography, it follows a unique history: from the post-war relaunch of physical sciences in West Germany, to the spectacular developments and successes of cosmic sciences in the second half of the 20th century, up to the emergence of multi-messenger astronomy. It reveals how the Society acquired national and international acclaim in becoming one of the world’s most productive research organizations in these fields.

Author: Rosanne Welch
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 161069094X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1155

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Book Description
From the invention of eyeglasses to the Internet, this three-volume set examines the pivotal effects of inventions on society, providing a fascinating history of technology and innovations in the United States from the earliest European colonization to the present. Technical Innovation in American History surveys the history of technology, documenting the chronological and thematic connections between specific inventions, technological systems, individuals, and events that have contributed to the history of science and technology in the United States. Covering eras from colonial times to the present day in three chronological volumes, the entries include innovations in fields such as architecture, civil engineering, transportation, energy, mining and oil industries, chemical industries, electronics, computer and information technology, communications (television, radio, and print), agriculture and food technology, and military technology. The A–Z entries address key individuals, events, organizations, and legislation related to themes such as industry, consumer and medical technology, military technology, computer technology, and space science, among others, enabling readers to understand how specific inventions, technological systems, individuals, and events influenced the history, cultural development, and even self-identity of the United States and its people. The information also spotlights how American culture, the U.S. government, and American society have specifically influenced technological development.

Author: Patricia Margaret Sterns
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319270877
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
The law of outer space is rapidly evolving to adapt to changes in the economic drivers as well as advancements in technological capabilities. The contents of this book are a reflection of this changing environment as evidenced in the writings of the second and third generations of space lawyers. Theoretical aspects of space law are explored by chapters relating to fundamental concepts central to the corpus juris spatialis. Practical aspects of space law are probed by examinations into international and domestic regulation of commercial activities, with particular emphasis on African, Asian, and European perspectives. International policy considerations are scrutinized in relation to military uses of outer space. The scientific Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is the subject of a concise history of the discipline vis-a-vis the role of the SETI Permanent Committee of the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA), and also of a study of the policy and other ramifications of social media in the event of the discovery of intelligent extraterrestrial beings. The book concludes with the republication of the seminal and highly influential Relations With Alien Intelligences The Scientific Basis of Metalaw by Dr. Ernst Fasan, first published in 1970. Scholar, author, and attorney Ernst Fasan was among the original space lawyers, a small, pioneering group of visionaries who recognized that the movement of man into space must be accomplished without the shackles of history and in an environment free from the threat of the use of space as an instrument of armed aggression. The influence of Dr. Fasan has extended beyond the international legal community to the broader scientific community, especially to the field of astrobiology, as he pursued groundbreaking investigations into what could be the ultimate in legal relationships - metalaw - the interaction of sentient beings from different planets. The contributors to this Liber Amicorum are among those who can trace their own work to the foundations of space law placed in part by Ernst Fasan.