Posted: 26 Jul 2013 11:25 AM PDT
Thomas Hudspeth, left, Harold Rosen and Don Williams (not pictured) designed the electronics, propulsion and power system for a communications satellite. (Boeing)
Hughes engineer Harold Rosen's team overcame technical and political hurdles to send the Syncom communications satellite into orbit 50 years ago.BY RALPH VARTABEDIAN
July 26, 2013
In the fall of 1957, the Soviet Union's newly launched Sputnik satellite would regularly streak across the Los Angeles sky, a bright dot in the black night.
back to Earth, but the technical achievement by the communists had stunned America. Perhaps nobody was more taken aback than a group of engineers and scientists at the defense electronics laboratories of Hughes Aircraft in Culver City.
They would trudge up a fire escape to the roof and watch the satellite with a mix of astonishment, excitement, envy and fear. Among them was Harold Rosen, a young doctorate engineer from Caltech, who while he watched Sputnik was hatching an audacious plan to eclipse the Russians.
What he imagined by 1959 was a revolution in communications: an extremely lightweight, solar-powered telephone switching station in orbit 22,000 miles above Earth. In those days, an international telephone connection required making a reservation because the existing system — copper cables and radio signals — carried few calls. Many countries could not be called at all. A satellite could change all of that.
I considered it me against the world."
Rosen recruited two other engineers, Thomas Hudspeth and Don Williams, and began designing the electronics and the propulsion and power system needed for a communications satellite. Not only was the task technically tough, but they also were fighting many of the nation's top experts who did not believe their idea would work. Even their bosses — at a company founded by the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes — were not sure their project was worth a modest investment.
"I considered it me against the world," Rosen said about the initial lack of government and industry support.
Inside their labs on Centinela Avenue, the men pushed the technology ahead at blinding speed and found key allies in government who were willing to bet on a trio of unknown engineers.
On July 26, 1963 — exactly 50 years ago — they launched a 78-pound satellite called Syncom that could receive signals from Earth and then transmit them back across the globe.
Of all the technological breakthroughs made in Los Angeles during the Cold War — the laser, the first supersonic jet fighter, the Apollo moon ship, stealth aircraft, the space shuttle, the intercontinental ballistic missile system and much else — the creation of a communications satellite has had the largest and most enduring cultural, social and economic impact.
The little Syncom has morphed into communications satellites the size of school buses, weighing more than 13,000 pounds, operating with solar wings the length of a basketball court and running electronics with more power than a typical house wired to the electrical grid.
Electronic credit card authorizations, international television signals, email and social media — all the things that define our modern connected culture — were not even imagined by the public in the 1950s and would not exist today in many areas of the world without communications satellites.
About 500 such satellites are orbiting Earth, allowing cruise ships to communicate with ports, music to be beamed down to radios and television shows to arrive in living rooms, all because of a technology nearly as unknown by the public as Rosen himself.
Geosynchronous satellites in orbit
Since the Syncom satellite launch in 1963, hundreds of communications satellites are now in the skies above Earth in geosynchronous orbit. The locations of many modern-day commercial satellites are below.
In some instances, satellites are co-located at the same latitude. To accommodate this, co-located satellites have been moved further out in the graphic, so they do not appear overlapped.
Source: Boeing, National Space Science Data Center
Armand Emamdjomeh, Los Angeles Times
Rosen is an athletic 87-year-old with a full head of sandy-colored hair. He's lived in the same Pacific Palisades home — with ceiling-to-floor windows that overlook a lush garden — for 60 years.
His parents emigrated from Montreal to New Orleans, where he was born. After studying engineering at Tulane University, he dithered over whether to continue his education at Harvard or Caltech. The decision was made when he saw a Life magazine story about beach parties in Southern California. He bought a train ticket.
"I came out on the Sunset Limited and never looked back," Rosen recalled. "I still love the beach."
Harold Rosen with models of his satellites at his home in Pacific Palisades. (Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)
By the time Rosen arrived at Hughes in 1956, the company was gaining prominence in the scientific world. He began designing airborne radar that could spot Russian bombers, but the Air Force canceled the program and his bosses challenged him to find something new.
When Rosen's team proposed Syncom, many of the nation's top experts, notably at Bell Labs, thought they were on the wrong track. Instead, Bell Labs and others were working on a large network of satellites in low Earth orbit that would require a complex system of ground tracking stations.
Rosen was confident that he could build a satellite to operate at 22,000 miles directly above the equator, which would allow it to remain stationary and provide continuous coverage over a third of the world. The problem was that American rockets of the 1960s lacked the power to launch heavy payloads to high orbits. Rosen would have to keep Syncom as light as possible, which became the key to its success.
Top Hughes executives were reluctant to invest in a prototype, even after Rosen, Williams and Hudspeth each offered to invest $10,000. Rosen went to government offices, universities and competing electronics companies to find encouragement and a financial partner.
After Raytheon Corp. offered Rosen and his team jobs and the chance to develop Syncom there, Hughes executives changed their minds and committed to a $2-million investment.
"It was a vindication for everything we had gone through," Rosen said.
Rosen pioneered the overall concept and design: The satellite would remain stable by spinning like a gyroscope, and a propulsion system would maintain its orbital position. The barrel-shaped spacecraft was covered by solar cells that supplied electrical power.
Hudspeth designed an extremely lightweight antenna and the satellite's electronics.
Williams came up with a key innovation: using a single lightweight rocket engine to control the spinning satellite's position with short bursts of thrust. The resulting Williams patent, by itself, yielded Hughes millions in royalties.
By 1961, they had built a working 55-pound prototype, which they took to the Paris Air Show and used to transmit photos across the room.
Don Williams, left, Thomas Hudspeth, center, and Harold Rosen designed the electronics, propulsion and power system for the Syncom communications satellite. This photo shows Syncom Three, which launched in 1964. (Boeing)
The trio still needed federal government support to build and launch an operational version, though. Help came from a former Hughes executive, John Rubel, who was deputy research director at the Defense Department.
Rubel was overseeing a troubled attempt by the Pentagon to build its own communications satellite. Virtually no hardware had been created and the projected weight was in the thousands of pounds, recalled Rubel, now 93.
A friend told him about Rosen. Rubel remembered, "He had this thing that weighed 55 pounds and it was immediately obvious to me that this was it, the solution to all of our problems."
He arranged a deal to allow NASA to fund the launch. The first attempt in early 1963 failed because of a rocket malfunction. But the second launch was successful.
Test signals to a Navy ship docked in Lagos, Nigeria, confirmed the satellite was working. In a later check of the system, Rosen handed the telephone to his wife, Rosetta, and a sergeant on the other end said hello. She dropped the phone and said, "My God, Harold, it works."
Rosen said he never doubted it would work. "We had overcome all these hurdles — all these political hurdles more than technical hurdles — and the way was clear," he said.
With Syncom, Hughes not only had beaten out every other corporation in a landmark achievement, but it also had started a technological revolution.
"We very quickly could feel that we had the world by the tail," said Robert Roney, 90, the Hughes research director who had hired Rosen. "We were way ahead of the curve. All of us felt like we were the luckiest people alive."
Albert Wheelon, who would later become chief of the Hughes satellite business, was at the time deputy director of the CIA. He remembered reading about the Syncom launch in a newspaper.
"I said this is really important for what we are doing at the agency," he said. "Instead of putting these listening posts around the Soviet Union, we could put one of these things up in the sky and listen to everything."
Secret work for intelligence agencies later became a big part of Hughes business.
One day a few years after the Syncom success, Williams visited Rosen with something on his mind. He apologized for not including Rosen's name on the patent for the rocket control system. Rosen insisted no apology was necessary. (Rosen would eventually have his name on more than 50 patents, including the basic patent for Syncom.)
Later that day, Williams went home and killed himself. He was 34.
The third engineer on the team, Hudspeth, died in 2008 at the age of 89.
Rosen still works a couple of days a week on satellite systems at a Boeing office in El Segundo and sometimes gives lectures to young engineers at Caltech. On occasion, he exercises on Santa Monica beach with his wife, Deborah Castleman, a former satellite engineer and deputy assistant secretary of Defense during the Clinton administration. Rosen's first wife, Rosetta, died in 1969.
Rosen has a shelf full of medals, including the Charles Stark Draper Prize, considered the Nobel Prize of engineering, which he shared with his rival John Pierce, a Bell Labs expert who in the 1950s had advocated low-Earth-orbit satellites.
The satellite technology that Rosen, Williams and Hudspeth created is now a $190-billion-a-year industry. Boeing acquired Hughes' satellite business 13 years ago and still operates a sprawling manufacturing plant with 5,200 employees in El Segundo. It has an order backlog of 32 satellites, 17 of them commercial and the balance for defense, intelligence or space agencies.
Over the years, seven Hughes employees who worked on satellites or data transmission were admitted into the National Academy of Engineering. They included Rosen, Wheelon, Roney and Eddy Hartenstein, now publisher of the Los Angeles Times, who pioneered the technology for delivering satellite television directly into homes and then created DirecTV.
Several weeks after the Syncom launch, President Kennedy inaugurated international satellite telephone service to Nigeria, where the Navy had stationed its receivers. The symbolic phone call to Nigerian Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa lasted two minutes.
Kennedy and Balewa traded pleasantries, briefly mentioned the nuclear weapons test ban treaty signed that year, and talked about a boxing match in which Nigerian middleweight boxer Dick Tiger had retained his title against an American.
The next year, 1964, the third Syncom satellite transmitted live coverage of the Summer Olympics from Japan, and Hughes Aircraft was on the way to dominating the commercial satellite industry.
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Posted: 25 Jul 2013 01:50 PM PDT
BY ESKINDER NEGAPublished: July 24, 2013
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia — I AM jailed, with around 200 other inmates, in a wide hall that looks like a warehouse. For all of us, there are only three toilets. Most of the inmates sleep on the floor, which has never been swept. About 1,000 prisoners share the small open space here at Kaliti Prison. One can guess our fate if a communicable disease breaks out.
I was arrested in September 2011 and detained for nine months before I was found guilty in June 2012 underEthiopia’s overly broad Anti-Terrorism Proclamation, which ostensibly covers the “planning, preparation, conspiracy, incitement and attempt” of terrorist acts. In reality, the law has been used as a pretext to detain journalists who criticize the government. Last July, I was sentenced to 18 years in prison.
I’ve never conspired to overthrow the government; all I did was report on the Arab Spring and suggest that something similar might happen in Ethiopia if the authoritarian regime didn’t reform. The state’s main evidence against me was a YouTube video of me, saying this at a public meeting. I also dared to question the government’s ludicrous claim that jailed journalists were terrorists.
Under the previous regime of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, I was detained. So was my wife, Serkalem Fasil. She gave birth to our son in prison in 2005. (She was released in 2007.) Our newspapers were shut down under laws that claim to fight terrorism but really just muzzle the press.
We need the United States to speak out. In the long march of history, at least two poles of attraction and antagonism have been the norm in world politics. Rarely has only one nation carried the burden of leadership. The unipolar world of the 21st century, dominated for the past two decades by the United States, is a historical anomaly. And given America’s role, it bears a responsibility to defend democracy and speak out against those nations that trample it.
I distinctly remember the vivacious optimism that inundated the United States when the Soviet Union imploded in the early 1990s. This was not glee generated by the doom of an implacable enemy, but thrill germinated by the real possibilities that the future held for freedom.
And nothing encapsulated the spirit of the times better than the idea of “no democracy, no aid.” Democracy would no longer be the esoteric virtue of Westerners but the ubiquitous expression of our common humanity.
But sadly America’s actions have fallen far short of its words. Suspending aid, as many diplomats are apt to point out, is no panacea for all the ills of the world. Nor are sanctions. But that’s a poor excuse for the cynicism that dominates conventional foreign policy. There is space for transformative vision in diplomacy.
Sanctions tipped the balance against apartheid in South Africa, minority rule in Zimbabwe, and military dictatorship in Myanmar. Sanctions also buttressed peaceful transitions in these countries. Without the hope of peaceful resolution embedded in the sanctions, a descent to violence would have been inevitable.
Now that large swaths of Africa have become safely democratic, ancient and fragile Ethiopia, where a precarious dictatorship holds sway, is dangerously out of sync with the times.
In May, America’s secretary of state, John Kerry, visited Ethiopia and lauded the country’s economic growth. His words showed how little attention he paid to reality. The State Department’s annual report on human-rights conditions has been critical of Ethiopia’s government since 2005. I’d like to think that report represents the real stance of America’s government, rather than Mr. Kerry’s praise for our authoritarian leaders.
Not much has changed since our last dictator, Mr. Meles, died last August. There have been no major policy changes. The draconian press and antiterrorism laws are still there. There has been no improvement when it comes to press freedom.
With a population fast approaching 100 million, Ethiopia, unlike Somalia, is simply too big to ignore or contain with America’s regional proxies.
As Ethiopia goes, so goes the whole Horn of Africa — a region where instability can have major security and humanitarian implications for the United States and Europe. Al Qaeda has a presence here, and hundreds of millions of aid dollars flow into the region while millions of emigrants flow out.
In other words, Ethiopia must not be allowed to implode. And it would be irresponsible for the world’s lone superpower to stand by and do nothing.
It is time for the United States to live up to its historical pledge by taking action against Ethiopia, whose reckless government has, since 2005, been the world’s star backslider on democracy.
I propose that the United States impose economic sanctions on Ethiopia (while continuing to extend humanitarian aid without precondition) and impose travel bans on Ethiopian officials implicated in human rights violations.
Tyranny is increasingly unsustainable in this post-cold-war era. It is doomed to failure. But it must be prodded to exit the stage with a whimper — not the bang that extremists long for.
I am confident that America will eventually do the right thing. After all, the new century is the age of democracy primarily because of the United States.
Here in the Ethiopian gulag, this alone is reason enough to pay homage to the land of the brave.
Eskinder Nega, an Ethiopian journalist and the recipient of the 2012 PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award, has been imprisoned since September 2011.
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Posted: 25 Jul 2013 12:05 PM PDT
July 23, 2013
By : Abebe Gellaw
 It has come to my attention that my brief Facebook comment regarding a few controversial statements made by Jawar Mohammed has been posted on ECADF’s website as an article. I had no intention of writing a series piece on the issue. Quite obviously, there is a big difference between a well-thought out lengthy commentary and a brief message in a particular context.
My intention was just to appeal for calm and harmony, a necessary effort lacking in our political discourse. Often times, a message without its context is open to misinterpretation and misunderstanding. So there seems to be a need to clarify.
Politics, as far as I understand, is a mechanism of managing conflict of interests. It is a means of building consensus through dialogue and compromise. Since the early 1960s, the major political conflict in Ethiopia has been between ethno-nationalists and nationalists. The forces on both ends of the political spectrum have not still found a middle ground that can bring them towards consensus and compromise.
My understanding is that Jawar is an ethno-nationalist. As an ethno-nationalist, he says he is an Oromo first. Unlike him, I am a nationalist. But that is not the major problem. The problem is the way he has chosen to articulate and present his views in question that have been widely perceived as inflammatory and divisive.
I firmly and fervently believe that I am an Ethiopian first. I do not wish to allow the ethnic origin of my predecessors and parents to define me as a human being and overshadow my Ethiopian identity.
Jawar said Ethiopian identity was imposed on him. On the contrary, I argue that such a position is fundamentally flawed. Nowhere in the world is anyone given choices of national identity.
The Chinese-American writer, Eric Liu, once said: “The next time someone uses denial of citizenship as a weapon or brandishes the special status conferred upon him by the accident of birth, ask him this: What have you done lately to earn it?” Our predecessors, who have bequeathed us a country called Ethiopia with all its faults, challenges and problems, have made huge sacrifices in blood and flesh so that we’ll never be stateless. We should rather make sacrifices to reclaim our country and make our citizenship more meaningful by winning our rights, as citizens, to live in our country with full dignity, freedom and equality. We should make Ethiopia a country where every citizen and ethnic group is equal.
Unfortunately, our birthplaces also define the major problems and opportunities we inherit. Ethiopia is not a perfect nation. Far from it, it is defective and faulty as a result of the age-old tyrannies and injustices we have been condemned to suffer collectively.
Like any nation, it offers unique challenges as well as opportunities. With all its problems and baggage, Ethiopia is a nation of 80 million people. Our destiny is intertwined. We are diverse and yet we are all Ethiopians, whether we like it or not. I believe that rejecting Ethiopia as our country is not a solution to any of the problems we are supposed to confront. We should rather make strenuous efforts to reconstruct Ethiopia as a country where all of its citizens live in freedom, harmony, justice, peace and prosperity.
In the new Ethiopia we envision, there should be no room for inequality, injustice and tyranny. It should never be a prison for its children, regardless of their political, ethnic or cultural backgrounds. No ethnic or political group should be allowed to impose hegemony at the detriment of the majority.
The worst challenges all citizens of Ethiopia, except the oppressors, face are political oppression, grinding poverty, indignity, inequality, injustice and discrimination, just to mention a few among so many. At this time and age, what has been imposed on us is not national identity but the tyranny of the TPLF, an extremist ethno-nationalist group whose aim was nothing more than seceding Tigray. That is why we should continue struggling to throw off this backbreaking tyranny from our shoulders.
As I have clearly stated in another Facebook post, addressed to Jawar, “No nation-state was formed through consensus and democratic deliberations. Nation-states emerged out of conflicts, conquests, occupations and colonialism. While almost all African states were created by the colonial powers, Ethiopia was formed through internal processes. It was a painful process but not even as painful as what Native Americans and Europeans, who had gone through two devastating [world] wars.”
“We Ethiopians do not need to be bitter about the past. We are not part of the old history. But we certainly need to preserve our country and make it a nation for all correcting past injustices and mistakes. We need to move forward with a united spirit. As long as we can bring about real equality, justice, freedom and democracy, we will be fine. That is what we should all fight for rather than dwelling on the past [and gnaw old bones]. It is the present and the future that really matter….”
While I called for unity rather than condemning each other, making such inflammatory and controversial statements that turned out to be divisive are not only wrong but also damaging to our common cause for freedom. I said Jawar had misspoken. The dictionary definition of misspeak is not to endorse or approve. It means, “To speak mistakenly, inappropriately, or rashly.” I think that should be clear enough. It was particularly wrong for Jawar to speak in such a divisive ethno-religious tone at a time when we desperately need to unify to overcome and overwhelm the divide-and-rule tyranny of the TPLF. That is where he misspoke, in my humble opinion, without completely disregarding so many positive contributions.
I was under the impression that calling for sanity and unity at this critical juncture in our struggle would not also be misconstrued as a sign of weakness. I always see myself as a moderate. Compromise for the sake of the greater good is at times a mechanism to avoid unnecessary conflict and feelings. Even if that was my intention, I believe that we Ethiopians should never compromise on anything that undermines our unity, freedom, harmony and peace.
After all, our aspiration is to rebuild a united nation that will accommodate every citizen as equal and guarantee the freedom of every individual citizen including those who believe that they are the byproducts of their cultural and ethnic heritage. For that to happen, we need to preserve Ethiopia, a country that we will all be proud of when we claim our freedom despite its troubles and predicaments.
Anyone is not entitled to apologize on behalf of Jawar. If any apologies are needed, no one but only Jawar is entitled to make. As far as I am concerned, I am nobody’s apologist.
That said, I will be disingenuous if I do not repeat my main message. Let us move on with a united spirit and focus on our just cause for freedom, equality and justice. That is much more important than the war of attrition and divisiveness that is derailing our gains. Whenever we have problems, we should first have the courage to address them in a civilized manner. Again let us move on united as Ethiopians…
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fredag 26. juli 2013
How a satellite called Syncom changed the world
What we are doing today shows what can be done through the peaceful use of space."
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