Outer Space and Earthly Politics

...The Conference will have the task of re-apportioning the electromagnetic spectrum, that is, the available radio frequencies, among various users and claimants...

...American dominance in this multibillion-dollar industry is of real international significance...

...But between a concern for the physical survival of our society on the one hand and the "mind-blowing" potential of wide-ranging cosmological inquiry on the other, there exists a large group of practical and highly significant problems and issues...

...The satellites, all of American manufacture, are launched for the consortium by Comsat, which contracts with NASA for the service...

...now it owns only about 30 percent...

...Virtually every country on earth is affected...

...First come, first served" is the general principle, taking into account how new applicants might interfere with frequencies already in use...

...But it is only prudent to make diplomatic and political preparations as well, to anticipate that the sessions might become a bit rough...

...The Soviets are involved in this venture (they will own about eleven percent of the stock...

...In 1977, Intelsat earned about $160 million, distributed to the members in proportion to their equity in the system, an equity in turn proportional to their respective use of the system...

...For example, in a move that will result in "the most significant improvement in maritime communications since the invention of the wireless," 40 nations are about to form an International Maritime Satellite Organization to operate a new global system called "Inmarsat...

...The agency has launched 45 meteorological satellites since 1960, and the data has been routinely shared with the World Meteorological Organization, a United Nations agency with 145 members...

...The Board has registered about a half million frequencies and the transmitting facilities which use them...

...What lags is not the space effort per se, but the ability of people to assimilate the meaning of the latest scientific information or the advanced techniques used to gain it...

...Satellite communications, especially, is good business and has been getting better...

...Now, so far as Americans are concerned, the "space race" ended ten years ago in an American victory, the manned moon landing of 1969...

...Viewed against the vociferously anti-Western behavior of UN majorities whenever mere "global" issues are under discussion, one can readily imagine what the UN's General Assembly will contribute to a discussion of a "New Celestial Order...

...The American Telephone and Telegraph Company reports a 20 percent annual growth rate in this area, the fastest growing segment of AT&T's business...

...it may be the only international organization that operates smoothly and efficiently, while turning a tidy profit...

...The search, which began in this country in 1959 at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in West Virginia, is now shared by the Soviets and the Canadians...

...And as Senator Harrison Schmitt of New Mexico (geologist, former astronaut, member of a Senate subcommittee on communications) has pointed out, "We cannot expect a majority of the other nations of the world to look after our national interests [at the conference] if we do not do so...

...The telegraph union merged with a newer radiotelegraph union in 1932...

...Hundreds of commercial satellites will be launched in the coming decades...

...In one way or another, they are all related to what we will do, and how we will think about what we do, in outer space...

...Moreover, America's membership in the International Telecommunications Union is a treaty obligation...

...Obviously, the agreements made in Geneva will have a profound effect on communications until the twenty-first century...

...A conceptual clash at an obscure international meeting concerned with maritime communications may seem but a prophet's cloud on the horizon, as yet no larger than a man's hand...

...There is a "nonaligned press pool," whose governing principle is that no information about any member of the pool can be disseminated by the pool without the prior consent of that member...

...The ITU joined the United Nations in 1947, and is the oldest of its "specialized agencies...

...In fact, technological advances have increased the spectrum "supply" over the last fifty years...

...The seeming insurmountability of the American lead places space in the category of "finished business...

...Intelsat's membership has since grown to 102...

...These bilateral undertakings understate the involvement of NASA on the world scene...

...Thus, in 1964, the United States, through Comsat, owned about 60 percent of the system...

...Dominance in that particular "new frontier" could not be allowed to pass into the hands of hostile forces...

...Whole new television networks, broadcast and cable, are expected to spring from new satellite systems...

...In fact, the International Communications Satellite Organization-"Intelsat''-is an impressive model for organizing and exploiting privately- or governmentally-developed technology in an international setting where the medium (in this case, outer space and the "ether") is not under the control of any one country...

...Last May, Peter Jankowitsch, Austria's representative to the United Nations and Chairman of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, testified before the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Space Science and Applications...

...It conveniently links the political issue of freedom with the space issue of access...

...The "decolonization of information" (another Soviet term) has been pursued in several ways...

...Predictably, they had wished Inmarsat to operate solely on ''the rules of the United Nations and other intergovernmental organizations," rather than on the Intelsat rules...

...Here, ideology has taken on the form of a practical program...

...It takes time for political and governmental systems to absorb the implications of such rapid technological and commercial development, especially in the international arena...

...Our military forces, for example, now rely quite routinely on space satellites for communications, intelligence-gathering, navigational assistance, and early warning of surprise attack...

...Claims are pressed on the spectrum from every direction...

...The implications may be starkly military or purely scientific...

...domestic communications in large countries like the United States, Australia, India, Brazil, and China will inevitably become more reliant on space systems...

...Outside of this system, there has also been a proliferation of communications satellites...

...Not that they haven't tried...

...its supply is constant at a given level of technology...

...The potential of pure research in space is also awesome...

...The first is a wholesale campaign against freedom of information itself...

...Many of the same people met again in Dubrovnik in September and, in the words of Yugoslavia's "news" agency, agreed "that it is necessary to radically change the structure of communications and circulation of information in the world...

...These systems are now well-enough established for their creators to believe that they can be operated on a long-term international basis, with an equitable division of costs and benefits...

...While the organization has, in other meetings, dealt piecemeal with a few specific frequency allocation issues, the September meeting will be the first wholesale review since the modern era of satellite usage began...

...But for those who do not share such elevated conceptions, space is but another place to pursue their mundane totalitarian aspirations...

...Various rhetorical ingredients can be folded into each other, yielding an argument that the "majority'' ought to take control of the spectrum as a whole and, after the pattern of the oil cartel, sell the resource for whatever the traffic will bear...

...People of this cast of mind also have available an economic theory whereby they can proclaim that the electromagnetic spectrum is one of nature's finite resources, a part of the "common heritage of mankind...

...Ambassador Jankowitsch reported that his committee, now 20 years old, had grown to 47 members, and was seeking ways "to provide for even fuller participation by all states members of the United Nations...

...But here, too, there have been remarkable successes...

...In turn, the defense of military satellites against attack implies a whole new group of space-based weapons-orbiting lasers, orbiting particle-beam generators...

...The spectrum is already crowded, and the demands upon it are growing...

...the machine provided information about the movement of ships, icebergs, storms, tides, and currents all over the globe...

...any changes made in the ITU regulations, if they are to bind the United States, will require ratification by the United States Senate...

...Thus far, then, the commercial exploitation of outer space has proceeded in a style that Americans find eminently sensible...

...For the first time in twenty years, the International Telecommunications Union will convene a World Administrative Radio Conference...

...But the stakes are already far too substantial to expect anything other than a major effort to alter the "regime" of the space business, and to alter it to our disadvantage...

...The entire Intelsat system of satellites and earth stations represents an investment of about a billion and a quarter dollars...

...Television programs and batches of data also travel this route...

...In mid-1978, NASA launched a so-called Seasat to monitor the oceans...

...Indeed, the fundamental lack of appeal of Soviet-style alternatives is reflected in the continuing advance of international space efforts still based on the Western model...

...How does it work...

...And it is with them, unhappily, that we must deal...

...And picking up on a theme first systematically developed by Soviet theoreticians, they also went on to say: The radio broadcasting organs of developed countries continue to have as their goal to propagate through their powerful transmission facilities political messages directed essentially against the movement of progress for the peoples and the cause of liberation of nations...

...It was founded with eleven members in 1964...

...The Soviet Union's answer to Intelsat is called Intersputnik, formed by the Soviet Union and eight of its political satellites in 1971...

...Every 20 years, the ITU convenes a general "administrative conference...

...These, and other interesting instances of the NASA impulse toward international cooperation, derive from that early image of peaceful space research as unifier of men...

...The current frequency allocation rules derive from the International Telecommunications Convention of 1947, signed in Atlantic City...

...Many countries, and groups within countries, have their own views and their own claims...

...The system has had a revolutionary impact on crop forecasting, flood control, geological research, mapping, mineral exploration, and ocean shipping...

...This past August, representatives of the "nonaligned," concerned for the first time with satellites and broadcasting as such, met in New Delhi...

...Will the effort to reapportion the electromagnetic spectrum come under siege by the advocates of a "New World Information Order...

...Kalmann Schaefer, Foreign Affairs Advisor to the Federal Communications Commission, makes the accurate observation that while the analogy of the spectrum to other natural resources is valid to a point, there is a very significant difference which one frequently overlooks...

...And, he added, "unless this is understood and recognized by the technically advanced states [read: "the United States"] I fear that the years of cooperation we have enjoyed thus far in the peaceful uses of outer space will become more frequently marred by confrontation rather than cooperation.'' This phraseology is not innocuous...

...A half dozen countries have agreements with NASA which allow them to build ground stations and receive data directly from the satellites...

...The marriage of these "energy weapons" to satellites will surely prove as strategically and morally challenging as the earlier mating of nuclear weapons to ballistic missiles...

...The spectrum is conventionally divided into eight bands, ranging from "very low frequencies" now utilized for long-range communications of at least a thousand miles, up through conventional radio and television broadcasting, and then to the highest frequencies, used by various types of satellites...

...Among the early pioneers of human activity in outer space, among the scientists and visionaries who saw a grand human future in the tasks of space exploration and even of space colonization, it was an article of faith that space activities would overcome earthly political differences...

...The 200 ground receiving stations are owned not by the consortium, but by the individual members who operate them...

...The Department of State is supposed to fashion these "representations" into a coherent American position at the world meeting...

...It and its two successors have been a remarkably valuable source of information about almost everything that goes on below them...

...The experts themselves added a link, and noted the "dialectic existing between the dominant position occupied by the developed countries in the use and range of frequencies and the monopoly available to them in the planning, implementation, and distribution of information...

...The theme, this time as reported by India's official news agency, was "collective effort on the part of the nonaligned countries to , break the monopoly enjoyed by the richer nations in the use of communications satellites...

...The different parts of the spectrum are best suited to different purposes...

...Those radio astronomers who were described earlier as searchers for extraterrestrial intelligence have begun an international lobbying effort to secure a fixed portion of the electromagnetic spectrum for their own investigations...

...Even though the "peaceful uses" were more than the humane gloss for security concerns, space activity was primarily something we carried on for ourselves and our friends...

...Technology continues to expand the useful range of the spectrum so that the very highest frequencies, not yet formally allocated, may some day be usable, thereby freeing some places at the lower end of the scale...

...the programs range from joint experimentation to the provision of vehicle-tracking facilities...

...A compromise of sorts was reached, but the experience suggests how the Soviets will join their own political objectives to their commercial participation in international ventures...

...These commitments to restructuring the international communications system in theory will be tested in practice at an extraordinary international meeting, to begin in Geneva in September 1979...

...Charles Homer is Senior Legislative Assistant to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York...

...They were addressed by the ranking Algerian in this field who urged a "united front" at the Geneva conference so as to eliminate "the monopoly of information held by the developed countries...

...Space enthusiasts-and government bureaucrats with programs to fund-may lament the loss of the emotional intensity of two decades past, but their efforts continue unabated...

...Continued advances in technology hold great promise in this regard...

...This issue dominated the UNESCO conference in Paris this past November, and resulted in a "compromise" which was an accommodation to the Soviet offensive...

...Miracle follows upon miracle with almost perfect predictability...

...Both the "public" and "private" sectors of the United States are involved in space activities on an international scale...

...The American participant is the Communications Satellite Corporation, an investor-owned organization chartered by Congress in 1962 expressly for this purpose...

...In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission has the task of "representing" nongovernmental users of the spectrum, while a subdivision of the Department of Commerce "represents" the federal agencies that use the spectrum...

...Such differences do appear inconsequential when measured on the cosmic scale...

...One can hope that this is correct, that the dozens of Americans preparing for the September meeting in Geneva will develop a case of such persuasiveness that even the most anti-American ideologues will find themselves at a loss for words-or votes...

...Linking the two parts involved stems from an overall vision, all of it oriented toward the acquisition of material goods and control of the political instruments of independeace and progress...

...They raise novel questions about the rules of international law and the roles of government...

...Unlike other natural resources, the electromagnetic spectrum does not diminish in supply...

...In fact, the outlines of that assault, in both its ideological and practical forms, are already visible...

...the proceedings were rightly described in a New York Times editorial of November 27 as ''an affront to the very idea of communication...

...Last year, Americans placed about 90 million overseas telephone calls, and about half of these were relayed by satellite...

...The machine succumbed to an inexplicable short-circuit after only three months of operation, but the concept has been proven...

...The last such, held in 1959, met just two years after the launching of the first artificial earth satellite...

...The immediate "enemy," in the Soviet parlance from which this campaign derives, is "informational imperialism," that is, the influence of the Western press agencies-AP, UPI, Reuters, the Agence France-Presse...

...For example, a variation relevant to space issues is the so-called "New World Information Order...

...He stressed that the "current inability of some states to contribute to the advanced technology of outer space does not mean that these states are not aware of their stake in the future implications of decisions taken now...

...The preparation of the world administrative conference on radio communications cannot ignore the fundamental complementarity between the two claims...

...They certainly are aware of the opportunity...

...For by and large, a political case cannot be overcome by a technical case, no matter how sound...

...The consequences of failure were grave, the expectations for success almost unlimited...

...The ITU now has 154 members, and the Convention binds them to respect the frequency allocations registered with the ITU's International Frequency Allocation Board...

...Comsat" in turn leases satellite channels to American companies in the international communications business...

...The "nonaligned" also maintain an Intergovernmental Council on Information Coordination which, at its meeting in Havana last April, denounced the Western news services...

...The Soviets also offer their services as builders and launchers of satellites, but the takers have been few and far between...

...Twenty years ago, American efforts in outer space were an important national concern...

...The International Telecommunications Union, which has charge of this process, can trace its history to the International Telegraph Union formed in 1865...

...Such "monopolies of the word," because they are believers in and practitioners of a free press, must be brought under the effective control of authoritarian and totalitarian governments...

...Many so-called "nonaligned" states, having endorsed the concept of a ''New World Information Order'' at one of their meetings in Tunisia in November 1976, have attempted to give other expressions to the idea...

...it is an area not yet successfully penetrated by the political adversaries of the West...

...Though the proportionate American equity in the Intelsat consortium has declined, there are no real competitors in the business at large...

...Take, for example, the international organization created under American prodding to develop and operate the international communications satellite system...

...From the rhetoric already in place, it is easy enough to extract some political tools...

...Having failed to penetrate the system technologically, its enemies will seek to undermine it politically...

...Radio astronomers, for example, despite the derision which frequently greets their efforts, carry on a cosmos-wide search for "extraterrestrial intelligence...

...Since 1972, for instance, the Soviet Union has been working to secure adoption in the United Nations Economic, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) of a "declaration of principles" governing the mass media that would enshrine the doctrine of state control over the dissemination of information...

...We may regard this proposition as self-evident, and it has contributed to the view within our own government that somehow the reallocation of frequencies can remain a technical, rather than a political, issue...

...Programs in missiles and satellites possessed overwhelming strategic significance, and there was much talk of their peaceful use...

...Space activity has also been stimulated by another strong American interest-commerce...

...The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is properly committed to continuing these investigations, the results of which may someday provide no end of work for moral and political philosophers...

...The National Aeronautics and Space Administration maintains formal, cooperative space agreements with 50 countries...

...It is clear, he said, "that sometime in the early 1980s the United Nations will convene a worldwide conference on the peaceful uses of outer space...

...But satellites are only one part of the problem...

...They are important to our foreign policy, to the health of our economy, to the organization of commercial activity around the globe, and to the question of ''world order'' in an era when many political and economic controversies have acquired "global" dimensions...

...Last May, Algeria hosted a meeting of "nonaligned" radio and television experts...

...it owns eleven operational satellites...

...The first of these was launched in 1972...

...Hence there is justifiable concern over tests by the Soviet Union of putative anti-satellite weapons...

...its impact may prove even more difficult to absorb...

...NASA has also pioneered in the development of "earth resources satellites," most notably the Landsat series...