Engineering vs. Politics
I HAVE BEEN A DEVOTED READER OF Invention & Technology since the first issue, in 1985. Most of the articles have been very interesting and informative, but “Telstar,” in the Fall 2000 issue (by Robert Zimmerman), crossed the boundary between objective scientific reporting and political commentary. The article minimizes the successes of government programs while exaggerating private-sector successes. It makes a broad claim for the failure of the Communications Satellite Act despite admitting its accomplishments, and makes little mention of the development by NASA and its predecessors (using large amounts of public money) of the launch vehicles and related technologies that AT&T needed to implement Telstar. The three million dollars NASA charged for the rocket and associated services seems modest indeed, and the “extremely high cost” in patent rights that the article claims the government charged AT&T came in an era when the company, with a virtual monopoly in telecommunications, had little to fear from potential competitors. Furthermore, as the article admits, AT&T later reaped “a huge profit” from the sale of its Comsat stock.
Contrary to the article, it is not clear, to me at least, that “the outlook for private space-based commerce is bright” now, with public support having gradually declined. Corporations have had a very hard time developing viable launch vehicles and usually use governmental ones, from countries such as the United States, France, China, and Russia. Supposed commercial applications for the manufacturing of materials such as crystals and biochemicals in space have been slow to emerge. And the Iridium system, conceived and executed by the private sector, was a commercial failure though an apparent technical success.
The argument in favor of purely private enterprise and free-market competition in space is questionable at best. On the contrary, Telstar and subsequent space-based communications systems appear to demonstrate the superiority of co-operative publicprivate collaborations.
Larry J. Eriksson
Madison, Wis.
|
