The information opportunity - communication satellites - Defense & Technology

National Review, July 31, 1995 by Robert S. Walker

TAKING advantage of the information revolution during the Persian Gulf War, General Norman Schwarzkopf knew his stealth fighters had destroyed their first targets in Baghdad when CNN's Baghdad reporters went off the air because they had lost the satellite uplink carrying their reports to the world. By contrast, when Andrew Jackson's forces defeated the British on January 8, 1815, in the largest battle of the War of 1812, they contributed nothing to the war's outcome: negotiators had ended the conflict two weeks earlier. Unfortunately, word of the peace didn't reach Washington until February 13.

For most of human history, communication was limited to the speed of the fastest horse or an occasional signaling system. The ``information revolution'' began in 1842 when Congress paid Samuel Morse $30,000 to run an experimental telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore. Two years later, Morse inaugurated the first practical means of using electricity to send messages long distances nearly instantaneously with the astonished invocation, ``What hath God wrought!''

In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell called his assistant in the next room over the first prototype of a practical telephone. Western Union, which had invested considerable sums in wiring the United States to use Mr. Morse's telegraph, turned down his offer to sell the patent for $100,000, demonstrating that we often fail to recognize the portent of new technologies when they first arrive.

Electronic communication evolved steadily until 1962, when AT&T placed Telstar 1, the first commercially financed active communication satellite, in orbit. At the time, the transatlantic cable could carry just 138 conversations between Europe and North America. With the advent of the communication satellite, it became possible to send massive amounts of information overseas instantly. Now, some 145 commercial communication satellites carry millions of conversations between parties virtually anywhere in the world.

Tied to modern computing and data- storage technologies, communication satellites launched a virtual revolution in the way human affairs are governed. Today, an entrepreneur in Pennsylvania can tap the venture-capital resources of Japan to employ people in Florida making products for sale to Europe. As Walter Wriston, former chairman of Citicorp noted, the daily volume of trading on the U.S. foreign-exchange market rose from just $10 billion in 1980 to $183 billion by 1989.

Meanwhile, states lost their monopoly on the control of information. Consequently, totalitarian states lost the ability to dictate ``truth'' -- one of the causes of the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Future prospects for the information revolution appear even brighter. Several private companies plan to launch constellations of low-earth-orbit communication satellites that will further reduce the cost of communication by portable phone. One system, Teledesic, is expected to have some 840 satellites capable of carrying some 9.6 million simultaneous conversations between virtually any two points on earth.

The tangential benefits of the information revolution are also impressive. Tapping private-sector resources to develop space commercially will bring new revenue streams into space activity and strengthen the U.S. aerospace industry, reducing government's need to finance all the overhead needed to conduct federal space missions. The government will become a consumer of space services, instead of a provider. This has already happened in the communication industry; during the Persian Gulf War, 24 per cent of U.S. military long-haul communications were routed through commercial satellites, and DoD's demands for satellite communication are expected to quintuple by 2010. Use of existing and planned commercial satellite systems will enable the military to meet many of its low- to medium-priority communication requirements without the exorbitant cost of designing, building, launching, and operating its own satellites.

The military would not be the only beneficiary of private investment in space. NASA's Mission to Planet Earth (MTPE), for example, could meet its scientific goals at a substantially reduced cost by exploiting private-sector investments in earth remote sensing satellites and geographic information systems (GIS). Already, at least four U.S. firms are financing, designing, and preparing to launch their own remote sensing satellites to gather high-quality data about cloud formation, surface reflectivity, ocean activity, and ice-sheet formation that will help scientists better understand the planet we inhabit.

So far, unfortunately, MTPE seems bent on reinventing techniques for data storage, retrieval, and analysis that the GIS industry is well on the way to creating privately. If it continues on that course, MTPE will not only waste federal resources building satellites to collect data available in the private sector, it could also drive commercial firms out of the earth remote sensing business, undermining federal efforts to promote creation of private-sector jobs in commercial space activity and world leadership in this industry. Instead of proceeding blindly with MTPE, NASA needs to learn from the success of satellite communication and foster development of private-sector activities that will lower government costs.