11 thoughts on “Apollo Nostalgia”

  2. Most people aren’t aware that JFK pushed hard to create COMSAT so that there would be a precedent of private ownership and operation in space before the tranzi diplomats could create a treaty that outlawed all private operation in space — which was what the Soviets were proposing in their drafts of the Outer Space Treaty.

    In the long run, that’s probably JFK’s biggest contribution to space, not Apollo.

  5. Most people aren’t aware that JFK pushed hard to create COMSAT so that there would be a precedent of private ownership and operation in space before the tranzi diplomats could create a treaty that outlawed all private operation in space

    Most people aren’t aware of that for very good reason — it isn’t true. Comsat was not private, it was state-owned. The precedent for private ownership and operation in space already existed. The first commercial satellite was built and operated by AT&T, not Comsat. Kennedy created Comsat to end to private ownership, not create a precedent for it. By nationalizing the Comsat industry, he also put an end to Len Cormier’s attempt to sell Reusable Atlas (which would have been the first fully reusable TSTO) to AT&T as a Telstar launcher. Since we still don’t have such a system today, that arguably set the development of commercial and human spaceflight back more than 40 years.

    COMSAT, while not perfect, definitely created a viable industry. I researched it a little a couple years ago.

    Then you need to research it some more. The communications satellite industry did not really take off until the 1980’s, when a few companies found legal weeks to break the government Comsat monopoly. That is what created a viable industry.

  6. It is quite a stretch to call the AT&T of 1962 a private company and COMSAT not. They were both government-sheltered monopoly corporations and “chosen instruments” (along with Pan American World Airways), which was a popular policy in those days. But they were both publicly-traded corporations with private ownership. Under US and international law their satellites were private property. TELSTAR was not an adequate precedent because it was a one-off, not an ongoing system; it was a placeholder for AT&T’s bid for a monopoly on US comsat operations, and they weren’t going to launch another one unless they got monopoly privileges, which was politically unacceptable. COMSAT was the compromise result of that standoff.

    As for Cormier’s attempt, I knew Len and respect him as a pioneer. But he was nowhere near to having firm capitalization. The closest thing to a real attempt to commercialize launch came from GE, which had the capital and capacity, and it was not the creation of COMSAT that stopped them, it was NASA.

  7. The closest thing to a real attempt to commercialize launch came from GE, which had the capital and capacity, and it was not the creation of COMSAT that stopped them, it was NASA.

    Where’s a good description of this GM/NASA tale?

  8. By pleasant coincidence, I came to Transterrestial Musings via Rand’s essay in The New Atlantis, having just got around to reading same for the first time. Thanks for that essay, Rand — it’s very informative.

  9. Kennedy gets way, way too much credit when it comes to HSF. Before it became a national security issue, he didn’t give a crap about it. If anybody deserves the credit/blame for Apollo, it’s Johnson.

  10. I’m really going to miss my Apollo nostalgia…

    Not me. The mileage was terrible and I had to replace the carburetor every three years, like clockwork.

  11. It is quite a stretch to call the AT&T of 1962 a private company and COMSAT not. They were both government-sheltered monopoly corporations and “chosen instruments” (along with Pan American World Airways), which was a popular policy in those days.

    Hm. You just said Kennedy created Comsat to establish “a precedent of private ownership and operation in space.” If there was no difference between Comsat and AT&T, why would there be a need to create Comsat in order to establish a precedent for something that AT&T had already done?

    Obviously, Kennedy did recognize a difference between AT&T, an organization that was not under his control, and Comsat, which was.

    As George Oslin wrote in The Story of Telecommunications (page 391), “US President John F. Kennedy refused to participate in the Telstar inauguration or telecasts because he opposed AT&T, the private enterprise company that developed satellite communications and spent hundreds of millions to help the United States catch up to Russia and gain supremacy. Kennedy opposed AT&T’s having ownership or control of its own satellite.”

    If his goal was to establish a precedent for private ownership and control, he picked a funny way to go about it.

    As for Cormier’s attempt, I knew Len and respect him as a pioneer. But he was nowhere near to having firm capitalization

    I did not say he had firm capitalization. I said that Kennedy’s nationalizing the communication satellite industry ended his attempt to obtain capitalization.

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