Battle Station

by Ben Bova

  One of the “resources” that the Third World claims is the geostationary orbit itself. In 1976 the equator-straddling nations of Brazil, Colombia, Congo, Ecuador, Indonesia, Kenya, Uganda, and Zaire signed the Declaration of Bogotá, in which they claimed possession of the Clarke Orbit. The industrialized nations, including the United States and the Soviet Union, have denounced this claim, and insist that the geostationary orbit is in free, international space as defined by the Outer Space Treaty of 1967.

  But how many satellites can fit along that one choice orbit? And who decides which satellites will get the preferred slots up there?

  According to Comsat Corporation’s “Geosynchronous Satellite Log,” there are 126 communications satellites functioning in the Clarke Orbit at present, plus another 29 meteorological, scientific, and experimental satellites also in the twenty-four-hour orbit. Of the communications satellites, 32 are Russian, 31 are American (19 of those are Defense Department satellites), and 2 belong to NATO. Six of those satellites are DBSs. Direct broadcast satellites have been orbited by the Soviet Union, a consortium of Western European nations, the People’s Republic of China, Japan, West Germany, and France.

  Added to these active satellites are an almost equal number of geostationary satellites that have ceased to function. Even so, at first glance it would seem that the geostationary orbit, which is slightly more than 140,000 miles in circumference, would scarcely be crowded.

  Yet planners worry about crowding at certain preferred locations along the geostationary orbit. For example, more than forty commsats are either already in orbit or planned to be orbited between 60° and 150° west longitude, where they can “see”—and be seen by—most of North and South America.

  While there is no danger of the satellites bumping each other in the vast emptiness of orbit, they still must be placed at least four degrees of arc apart from one another, so that their transmitting beams do not interfere with each other. This means that there are, at most, twenty-two available slots along the geostationary orbit between those two longitudes.

  One way to resolve the crowding problem is to go to higher frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum. Most commsats today operate at C-band frequencies, six and four gigahertz. One hertz equals one cycle per second. Household electrical current runs at sixty hertz. Six gigahertz is 6,000 million hertz.

  Some satellites are already operating in the Kuband, at fourteen and twelve gigahertz, where they can use ten-foot-wide antennas instead of the thirty-foot-wide dishes required for C-band. The Ka-band, at thirty and twenty gigahertz, can shrink antenna requirements to five-foot diameters, and offers more than three times the message-carrying capacity of C-band. Satellites operating at these frequencies can be spaced only one degree apart without fear of signal overlap.

  Engineers are satisfied that Ka-band equipment can meet the expected growth in communications demand, including DBS’s, through the 1990s.

  But while the electronics technology may be ready to face the remaining years of this century, the politics of communications satellites—and especially DBS —lags behind.

  Many national governments do not want their citizens to receive television broadcasts from other nations. Dr. Jerry Grey, author of Beachheads in Space (Macmillan, 1983) and a veteran of many international meetings and conferences on astronautics, says, “Television is too powerful a medium; they’re afraid of it. Most of the governments of the world don’t want TV broadcasts going directly from a satellite to their citizens.”

  Most of the world’s governments are authoritarian, if not outright dictatorships. Freedom of speech, taken for granted by Americans, is a rarity elsewhere. But signals beamed from a satellite to the ground are very difficult to jam. To stop DBS, governments have turned to legalistic formulations.

  Dr. Grey, in Beachheads in Space, traces the political turmoil succinctly:

  International opposition [to DBS] arises from … national sovereignty concerns … . Unlike radio [which can be jammed], direct-to-citizen television was seen by many governments as too powerful a medium to be allowed to develop along the same relatively open lines as international radio. [Ordinary] television could be received only by relatively large, expensive ground stations, from which any retransmissions could be controlled … . But direct citizen access to geostationary satellites whose coverage could conceivably range over a third of the globe was worrisome to many governments.

  Those governments, mostly Third World and Eastern Bloc nations, pushed through a ruling in the United Nations that the U.N.’s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space should set up controls to regulate DBSs.

  “The vote,” Dr. Grey reports, “was 102 to 1, the United States alone defending vigorously its established policy of unrestricted free flow of information.”

  As a result, regulations were approved in which every nation, no matter how small, was awarded a geostationary orbital slot and five DBS channels. Thus the small nations have gained control of most of the future slots along the geostationary orbit. They are apparently willing to sell or lease those slots to nations that can actually place DBSs in orbit, providing that they have some measure of control over the programming being beamed to the ground.

  This ruling applied, essentially, to the eastern hemisphere—the nations of Europe, Asia, and Africa —although the precedent can and probably will affect the availability of future orbital slots for North and South America.

  As far as communications technology is concerned, this ruling makes certain that nations cannot place DBSs in orbit on a haphazard, first-come, first-served basis, which could result in a chaos of satellites beaming signals that overlap and interfere with each other, producing bedlam on the ground.

  On the political side it ensures that virtually any nation on Earth can exert a controlling power over the transmissions beamed from DBSs to its citizens. These nations have the right to refuse to allow another nation or consortium to place a DBS in an orbital position assigned to them, unless and until they are satisfied that the satellite will not broadcast anything which that government does not want its citizens to receive.

  For example, suppose France wants to place a DBS in an orbital slot above the Pacific, where it would beam transmissions to the islands of French Polynesia. The French would have to borrow, rent, or buy a slot from one of the nations that has been assigned an orbital position above the Pacific Ocean. That nation’s government, presumably, could extract a promise from France not to broadcast any material to which the “host” government might object.

  Another way that governments may restrict their citizens’ access to foreign DBS signals is to control the frequencies that each satellite uses and the frequencies receivable by the TV sets owned by their citizens. Thus a government might prohibit the sale, within its borders, of TV sets that can receive broadcasts from neighboring nations.

  The Group of 77’s “New International Order” includes a “New World Information Order” in which, among other things, news correspondents would have to be licensed by the nations they are reporting about, and data from Earth-resources satellites could not be disseminated without the permission of the nation whose territory was surveyed. Jeffersonian freedom of information is antithetical to such attitudes, and the Group of 77 will continue to use its voting power at the United Nations to place as many restrictions on DBSs as possible.

  The struggle, then, is between those nations that insist on an unrestricted flow of information and those that insist that every nation has the right of prior approval of the information transmitted to its citizens. Of the former, only the United States has voted consistently in favor of Jefferson. Our allies have often deserted us, either abstaining from critical votes or voting with the other side.

  Nandasiri Jasentuliyana, of Sri Lanka, the executive secretary of the U.N. Conference on Outer Space, points out that many of the nations of the world believe that their national sovereignty is just as important as Western ideas of freedom of speech. Even leaving aside the politic
al aspect, he says that a nation’s internal social and cultural values must also be carefully considered.

  “Who am I to say, for example,” he asks, “that one religion’s ideas on family planning and birth control should or should not be broadcast to people of a different religion?”

  To Americans raised on Jeffersonian ideas of free speech and tolerance for ideas different from our own, such regulation of DBSs smacks of censorship. Certainly a relatively closed society such as the Soviet Union would not want its citizens to see American situation comedies or game shows. Would Americans tolerate the six o’clock news as Tass would transmit it?

  But Antenna Technology’s chairman Nelson appears unworried by the Third World or even the Soviet-dominated Second World:

  “Once people realize that they can put up a cheap antenna and get television programs from all over the world, no government on Earth will be able to hold them back.”

  Perhaps he is right. Certainly many engineers and industrialists see a brilliant future for commsats in general and DBSs in particular. After all, the biggest auction ever held by Sotheby Park Bernet was in 1981, when the famed auction house sold off seven-year leases for seven channels in an RCA satellite for a grand total of $90.1 million.

  The ever-optimistic Clarke even foresees the advent of a global communications network that transcends national boundaries and, more important, national politics.

  “During the coming decade,” he believes, “more and more businessmen, well-heeled tourists, and virtually all newspersons will be carrying attaché case-sized units that will permit direct two-way communications with their homes or offices, via the most convenient satellite. These will provide voice, telex, and video facilities … . As these units become cheaper, they will make travelers totally independent of national communications systems.” (Clarke’s italics.)

  Commsats, according to Clarke, can help to unify the world. “It means the end of closed societies.” Nations that refuse to allow visitors to bring “such subversive machines across their borders” will face economic suicide, “because very soon they would get no tourists, and no businessmen offering foreign currency. They’d get only spies, who would have no trouble at all concealing the powerful new tools of their ancient trade.”

  Even if the politicians are dragging their feet, satellite communications is already a big business —and it is growing.

  But like it or not, the fact is that DBS broadcasts are now, and will continue to be, under the control of national governments that have scant tolerance for freedom of information.

  Despite the technology of DBS, we have a long way to go before that “global village” opens its gates. And the Jeffersonian struggle of knowledge over ignorance, of freedom over despotism, has found a new battleground in space.

  Isolation Area

  Like the Earth, space is not for the military alone, thank goodness!

  If you have read Prometheans, a collection of fact and fiction published in 1986 by Tor Books, you have already met Sam Gunn. He’s the feisty little astronaut who … Well, if you’ve read the story, you already know, and if you haven’t, I shouldn’t spoil it for you.

  “Isolation Area” deals with a later period of Sam’s life, when he takes that first scary step toward becoming the solar system’s premier big-time space entrepreneur. In a subtler way it is also the story of the friendship between two men, and of the new freedoms that we will find as we begin to live and work—and love—in space.

  Incidentally, the best way to see that the military role in space is minimal is to maximize the peaceful, civilian, commercial aspects of space development. In his own cash-and-carry way, Sam Gunn strikes a blow against militarism with every sale he makes.

  They faced each other suspiciously, floating weightlessly in emptiness.

  The black man was tall, long-limbed, loose, gangling; on Earth he might have made a pro basketball player. His utilitarian coveralls were standard issue, frayed at the cuffs and so worn that whatever color they had been originally had long since faded into a dull gray. They were clean and pressed to a razor sharpness, though. The insignia patch on his left shoulder said Administration. A strictly nonregulation belt of royal blue, studded with rough lumps of meteoric gold and clamped by a heavy gold buckle, cinched his narrow waist and made him look even taller and leaner.

  He eyed the reporter warily. She was young, and the slightly greenish cast to her pretty features told him that she had never been in orbit before. Her pale blond hair was shoulder length, he judged, but she had followed the instructions given to groundlings and tied it up in a zero-gee snood. Her coveralls were spanking new white. She filled them nicely enough, although she had more of a figure than he cared for.

  Frederick Mohammed Malone was skeptical to the point of being hostile toward this female interloper. The reporter could see the resentment smoldering in the black man’s eyes. Malone’s face was narrow, almost gaunt, with a trim little Vandyke jutting out from his chin. His forehead was high, receding; his hair cropped close to the skull. She guessed Malone’s age at somewhere in the early forties, although she knew that living in zero gravity could make a person look much younger than his or her calendar age.

  She tried to restart their stalled conversation. “I understand that you and Sam Gunn were, uh, friends.”

  “Why’re you doing a story on Sam?” Malone asked, his voice low and loaded with distrust.

  The two of them were in Malone’s “office”: actually an observation blister in the central hub of space station Alpha. Oldest and still biggest of the Earth-orbiting stations, Alpha was built on the old wheels-within-wheels scheme. The outermost rim, where most of the staff lived and worked, spun at a rate that gave it almost a full Earth gravity. Two thirds of the way toward the hub there was a wheel that spun at the Moon’s one-sixth gee. The hub itself, of course, was for all practical purposes at zero gee, weightless.

  Malone’s aerie consisted of one wall, on which were located a semicircular sort of desk and communications center, a bank of viewing screens that were all blankly gray at the moment, and an airtight hatch that led to the spokes that radiated out to the various wheels. The rest of the chamber was a transparent plastic bubble, from which Malone could watch the station’s loading dock—and the overwhelming majesty of the huge, curved, incredibly blue and whiteflecked Earth as it slid past endlessly, massive, brilliant, ever-changing, ever-beautiful.

  To the reporter, though, it seemed as if they were hanging in empty space itself, unprotected by anything at all, and falling, falling, falling toward the ponderous world of their birth. The background rumble of the bearings that bore the massive station’s rotation while the hub remained static sounded to her like the insistent bass growl of a giant grinding wheel that was pressing the breath out of her.

  She swallowed bile, felt it burn in her throat, and tried to concentrate on the job at hand.

  She said to Malone, “I’ve been assigned to do a biography of Mr. Gunn for the Solar Network …”

  Despite himself, Malone suddenly grinned. “First time I ever heard him called Mr. Gunn.”

  “Oh?” The reporter’s microchip recorder, clipped to her belt, was already on, of course. “What did the people here call him?”

  That lean, angular face took on an almost thoughtful look. “Oh … Sam, mostly. ‘That tricky bastard,’ a good many times.” Malone actually laughed. “Plenty times I heard him called a womanizing sonofabitch.”

  “What did you call him?”

  The suspicion came back into Malone’s eyes. “He was my friend. I called him Sam.”

  Silence stretched between them, hanging as weightlessly as their bodies. The reporter turned her head slightly and found herself staring at the vast bulk of Earth. Her mind screamed as if she were falling down an elevator shaft. Her stomach churned queasily. She could not tear her eyes away from the world drifting past, so far below them, so compellingly near. She felt herself being drawn toward it, dropping through the emptiness, spinnin
g down the deep swirling vortex …

  Malone’s long-fingered hand squeezed her shoulder hard enough to hurt. She snapped her attention to his dark, unsmiling face as he grasped her other shoulder and held her firmly in his strong hands.

  “You were drifting,” he said, almost in a whisper.

  “Was I … ?”

  “It’s all right,” he said. “Gets everybody at first. Don’t be scared. You’re perfectly safe.”

  His powerful hands steadied her. She fought down the panic surging inside.

  “If you got to upchuck, go ahead and do it. Nothing to be ashamed of.” His grin returned. “Only, use the bags they gave you, please.”

  He looked almost handsome when he smiled, she thought. After another moment, he released her. She took a deep breath and dabbed at the beads of perspiration on her forehead. The retch bags that the technicians had attached to her belt were a symbol to her now. I won’t need them, she insisted to herself. I’m not going to let this get me.

  “Feel better?” he asked.

  There was real concern in his eyes. “I think I’ll be all right. Thanks.”

  “De nada,” he said. “I appreciate your coming out here to the hub for the interview.”

  His attitude had changed, she saw. The sullenness had thawed. He had insisted on conducting the interview in the station’s zero-gravity area. He had allowed no alternative. But she was grateful that the shell of distrust seemed to have cracked.

  It took several moments before she could say, “I’m not here to do a hatchet job on Mr. Gunn.”

  Malone made a small shrug. “Doesn’t make much difference, one way or t’other. He’s dead; nothing you say can hurt him now.”

  “But we know so little about him. I suppose he’s the most famous enigma in the solar system.”