Before The Web: My Encounters With The 3 Spin Doctors
For that satellite dish on your roof and the phone calls you make to Japan, you can thank Harold Rosen.
By Guy Gugliotta
When I arrived at Hughes Space & Communications in 1979, Dr. Rosen known as the father of Syncom, the first geostationary satellite was the Vice-President of Engineering. According to this IEEE account, he was leading “the development of communication satellites that are to Syncom what modern jet liners are to Kitty Hawk”. I remember meeting him but was too young to really appreciate what Syncom meant(a topic for another post). Mostly I when I hear his name, I remember so many really bright senior people being in awe of him – he apparently set the bar very high. Hudspeth I don’t recall meeting but remember was highly respected intellectually too. Don Williams was dead long before I got there but as it turns out one of my early assignments involved analytical techniques for satellite nutation(the wobble that happens to a spinning top) he’d developed and crystalized in a FORTRAN computer program. My task was supposed to be simple – plug some data into the program and use the ouput to determine the appropriate design parameters for a new satellite. Things went pretty much as planned – at first. Then after getting some strange outputs I started asking “why” the program had been written the way it was. I realized that much of the underlying math was way over my head so I asked a supervisor who referred me to one PhD who referred me to another. Nobody dismissed my question(I seem to have a knack for finding these kinds of things) but there were no answers. Eventually I was shown an enormous amount of on-orbit and test data which indicated that the outputs I thought were strange were well within the accepted range. There seemed to be a collective sigh of relief – nobody appeared very anxious to dive into the “why” of what Dr. Williams had done. It was like going up against Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods or Michael Phelps. The 3 spin doctors were exceptional achievers who really ought to be more well known. Beyond DirecTV and transcontinental phone calls, they opened to door to the internet era
The 1963 launch of Syncom, the world’s first geosynchronous communications satellite, vanquished forces of time, cost, and geography to begin a communications revolution.
