Satellite Communnications: A Case Study of Technolog's Impact on Politics

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One of the challenges which democracies face is to preserve the essential liberties of their citizenry while undergoing continual, even drastic, economic and technological development. Mario Einaudi has described the New Deal as an effort to translate eighteenth-century agrarian democracy into twentiethcentury industrial democracy without evacuating the unique values which the Founding Fathers wished to be transmitted. Since the days of FDR, the United States of America has created a distinct “social breakthrough” by being the first nation to enter the postindustrial age of nuclear energy, computers, television, rockets, missiles, wonder drugs, psychedelic techniques, fertility control techniques, and supersonic jet travel. That political processes cannot be divorced from the wider environmental matrix of sociotechnological innovations is a proposition which is gaining in acceptance. Acknowledging the incidence of technological invention on the political process, we have singled out for case study the history of the communications satellite technology, the creation of an unprecedented “chosen instrument” to establish a global system of communications satellites, and the subsequent formation of an international consortium whose members have codominion over the space segment of the global system. What interests us in this study is how technological leadership becomes converted into other forms of power such as economic, political, and commercial.