CONTENTS

• June 5 NASA History Talk by Andrew Ross
• Aeronautics and Space Report of the President: Fiscal Year 2023 Activities

Please join us for the next NASA History Presentation:

U.S. Missile Tracking Stations and the Politics of Military Basing across the Atlantic, 1947–1957

By Andrew Ross
Ph.D. candidate in Georgetown University's History Department

June 5 at 12:00–1:00 pm ET on Teams (link below)

Contact: Michele Ostovar

Since the United States began launching large ballistic missiles high into the atmosphere in 1946, and eventually satellites into orbit in 1958, it has also sought the means to track and communicate with these high-flying objects as they soared across the skies. Establishing tracking stations for aerospace vehicles first began locally, not far from their launch site, in places like Southern New Mexico. But, as the potential range of U.S. rocketry grew in size, state officials sought to locate missile and satellite tracking stations within foreign territories—envisioning networks of missile and satellite tracking stations all across the world.

Andrew Ross’s talk will explore the diplomatic negotiations that went into establishing one particular hemispheric-spanning network of missile tracking stations, one whose name changes several times, but will be referred to as the “Atlantic range.” Beginning at Cape Canaveral, the Atlantic range eventually extended past the coast of South Africa and included 13 integrated tracking stations to test, talk to, and track experimental missiles across thousands of miles of flight. But the politics of basing tracking stations on foreign soil was not simple. Ross will trace the diplomatic wranglings between the U.S. negotiators and the national and local interests at strategically placed tracking sites across the Atlantic.

Andrew Ross is a rising fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in Georgetown University's History Department. His dissertation focuses on the tracking and communications infrastructure associated with missile and satellite technologies. This project examines how networks of missile and satellite tracking stations reshaped U.S. power projection the world over. Deeply tied up within the politics of the Cold War and global decolonization, his work investigates the connections between U.S. aerospace dominance and the diplomatic underpinnings of the United States as a global power in the post–World War II world.

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Aeronautics and Space Report of the President: Fiscal Year 2023 Activities

The Fiscal Year 2023 edition of the Aeronautics and Space Report of the President produced by the NASA History Office staff is now available! You can access this report and all previous reports going back to 1958 at https://www.nasa.gov/history/history-publications-and-resources/aeronautics-and-space-report-of-the-president/.