NASA HISTORY TALK: INVENTING
SYNCOM: PUBLIC, PRIVATE, GLOBAL
Time/Date/Location: 4 – 5 pm, Wednesday September 14, virtual via
MS Teams link (please note the time for this talk)
Description:
This talk traces a partial history of Syncom, a joint NASA-Hughes Aircraft Co. project in the 1960s. Our speaker, Haris Durrani, will focus on the project’s first successful launch, Syncom
II, the first geosynchronous communications satellite. The satellite's historic orbital maneuvers were operated by a control system that spanned beyond US territory: a series of US military and civilian stations located in Maryland, New Jersey, Nigeria,
and South Africa. The ingenuity of the invention and its extraterritorial nature led to several legal disputes surrounding the satellite’s underlying patents and the jurisdiction of the US legal system.
Haris Durrani is a Ph.D. student in the history of science at Princeton University and holds a J.D. from Columbia Law School.
Contact: Steve Garber (stephen.j.garber@nasa.gov)
or hq-histinfo@nasa.gov
Stephen Garber
(he/him)
NASA History Division
Office of Communications
NASA Headquarters
Mary W. Jackson Building, Room 5P25
Washington, DC 20546
202-358-0385
