Administrative Science Quarterly 2024
Christine E. Evans and Lars Lundgren. No Heavenly Bodies: A History of Satellite Communications Infrastructure
Abstract
The recent tension around the privately owned Starlink satellite system during the Russian invasion of Ukraine once again illustrated the importance of global satellite networks as key infrastructures of communication. That satellite communication could have unprecedented consequences was realized early on. Christine E. Evans and Lars Lundgren bring us back to these early days, opening with a quote from Hanna Arendt on Sputnik. They focus on broadcasting, a radio service distinctly different from many others in its public reach with overt political consequences, and combine the interest in networks with that of content. In a five-chapter, co-written volume they cover the 1960s and 70s, but also give a prehistory and an epilogue. Thus the book offers a comprehensive history of the integration of satellite communication during the Cold War, merging new archival material from Soviet and socialist sources with those of the US and international broadcasting institutions. In the introduction and throughout, Evans and Lundgren bring together literatures that a few decades ago were separate, and draw simultaneously on, for example, science and technology studies, media-and communication studies, and history of technology with a particular focus on hidden integration and infrastructure, the latter underscored by the volume belonging to the infrastructures series of MIT Press. The following chapters begin with a prehistory of satellite networks in the 1950s, offering dreams and visions as well as early collaboration. Ch. 2 details the preparations for a global live satellite broadcasting event, which eventually did not materialize as one but two events, one western with the BBC as the central node and the other Soviet and the eastern bloc. Then follows a rewriting of one of the key processes in satellite history, namely the US global ambitions with Intelsat, European discontent, and Soviet Intersputnik. Ch. 4 tells the story of the construction of the ground segment
- DOI
- 10.1177/00018392241289359
- Sources
- openalex semanticscholar