A Satellite for All: Law, Technology, and Empire in the Global Cold War, 1959-1973

Abstract

"A Satellite for All" unpacks the law and technology behind an invention that transformed the modern age: the communications satellite. The first generation of communications satellites was based on Syncom II, a satellite no wider than a bicycle wheel. Launched in 1963, it facilitated commerce and empire, communicating with diplomats, troops, and masses on an unprecedented global scale. The dissertation argues that a feat of such historic proportions required not only technological ingenuity but also legal strategy. Engineers and lawyers disputed and negotiated public/private partnerships, entangling corporations and agencies through contracts, patents, bilateral agreements, and many other legal tools. Revolving between industry and government, these actors extended Syncom II’s influence abroad, developing a concept of “free space” and drawing on property theory to reconfigure jurisdiction and sovereignty prior to major treaties on the law of sea, outer space, intellectual property, and decolonization. As Syncom II, alongside its ground stations and signals, traversed the world as a “free space,” leaders from Cuba, Nigeria, South Africa, and elsewhere contested the imposition of the satellite overhead and the stations and signals penetrating their territories. The dissertation shows that lawyers and engineers from industry and government battled and cooperated to birth a new kind of empire, abstract and de-territorialized. The dissertation uses its focused study of a single satellite as a way into the larger histories of spaceflight, property, regulation, and extraterritoriality during the global Cold War. It approaches the histories of law and technology from the bottom up, examining how attorneys and engineers conscripted a series of legal tools into the development of the satellite. By examining legal practices, as opposed to discourses, it demonstrates that the ascendancy of corporate power usually attributed to late twentieth-century “neoliberalism” began in the legal worlds of postwar research and development. Similarly, attention to legal practice reorients historical literature on law and U.S. empire toward legal practices that shaped extraterritorial conduct on the ground. Through numerous quotidian domestic and international legal mechanisms—contracts, patents, regulations, bilateral agreements, and so on—engineers and lawyers sought to ensure that technologies and corporations reoriented U.S. empire across the twentieth century.