Remembering the Space Age. - Black Vault Radio Network (BVRN)

170 reMeMBerINg the SpaCe age
the generally negative news from Vietnam. In april 1969, president richard
Nixon’s participation in a celebration for the apollo 13 astronauts in hawaii
quite literally ofered public cover for a secret high-level war meeting about
stepping up pressure in Cambodia. 35 Space accomplishments projected the
United States as cooperative, technologically superior, and successful in this
era when news from Southeast asia often marked the country as high-handed,
technologically threatening, and wedded to a failed policy.
If the highly visual media helped promote Space age projects, so the new
technologies looped back to accelerate transformation in the media environment.
In 1962, Congress created the Communications Satellite Corporation (Comsat),
a public-private venture to manage an international system, Intelsat. Comsat
paid NaSa a fee for use of rocket and launch facilities, and within fve years
communication satellites had become a commercial success. In august 1964,
a satellite telecast the opening ceremonies of the Olympic games in tokyo.
By 1969, with sixty countries belonging to Intelsat, geosynchronous satellites
served the pacifc, atlantic, and Indian Oceans. 36 live space spectaculars, which
the United States displayed but the Soviet Union concealed, could now go
global—in real time.
NaSa worked especially closely with representative Olin teague,
who became the space program’s primary rainmaker and one of its most
efective publicists. a democratic representative from texas, the chair of the
Manned Space Flight Subcommittee, and one of Congress’s most decorated
combat veterans, teague was in charge of convincing members of Congress
to lavish funding on the space program. he kept them aware of how much
space spending was going into their districts; brought models of spacecraft
and rocketry to the house foor; and stressed the spinofs of space spending
for medicine, computerization, and fabrication of various kinds. like other
space race supporters, he emphasized that putting a man on the Moon was
not an end in itself. the real beneft from the program would be to push the
nation forward “in many important felds: science, engineering industrial
development, design, mathematics, biology—the whole spectrum of scientifc
and technological accomplishment.” 37 the media enthusiastically embraced
this teague/NaSa message, which helped translate space accomplishments
into the everyday realm of audience interest.
35. robert dallek, Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power (New York, NY: harper Collins, 2007), pp.
191-192.
36. Wernher von Braun and Frederick I. Ordway, III, History of Rocketry and Space Travel (Chicago,
Il: J. g. Ferguson publishing, 1966), p. 186. hugh r. Slotten, “Satellite Communications,
globalization, and the Cold War,” Technology and Culture 43 no. 2 (2002): 315-350 provides a
basic history and cites the relevant literature on this issue. heather e. hudson, Communications
Satellites:Their Development and Impact (New York, NY: Free press, 1990) is a thorough history.
37. house Committee on Science and technology, Toward the Endless Frontier, pp. 163-172 [quote
p. 172].