No Heavenly Bodies

The compelling and little-known history of satellite communications that reveals the Soviet and Eastern European roles in the development of its infrastructure.

Taking its title from Hannah Arendt’s description of artificial earth satellites, No Heavenly Bodies explores the history of the first two decades of satellite communications. Christine E. Evans and Lars Lundgren trace how satellite communications infrastructure was imagined, negotiated, and built across the Earth’s surface, including across the Iron Curtain. While the United States’ and European countries’ roles in satellite communications are well documented, Evans and Lundgren delve deep into the role the Soviet Union and other socialist countries played in shaping the infrastructure of satellite communications technology in its first two decades.

Departing from the Cold War binary and the competitive framework that has animated much of space historiography and telecommunications history, No Heavenly Bodies focuses instead on interaction, cooperation, and mutual influence across the Cold War divide.
Evans and Lundgren describe the expansion of satellite communications networks as a process of negotiation and interaction, rather than a simple contest of technological and geopolitical prowess. In so doing, they make visible the significant overlaps, shared imaginaries, points of contact and exchange, and negotiated settlements that determined the shape of satellite communications in its formative decades.Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1 "Towers in the Sky": Satellites and Emerging Global Media Infrastructures 19
2 Promising Liveness: Contested Geography and Temporality in Live Satellite Broadcasting Events 45
3 Fragmented from the Beginning: The Entangled Origins of Intelsat and Intersputnik 69
4 "Space Begins on Earth": Selling, Building, and Representing Satellite Earth Stations 91
5 Hotlines, Handshakes, and Satellite Earth Stations: Infrastructural Globalization and Cold War High Politics 125
Epilogue 143
Terms and Abbreviations 159
Notes 163
Bibliography 207
Illustrations 225
Index 227“Evans and Lundgren provide a stunning new narrative from Soviet and Russian perspectives of global communication satellites during and after the Cold War era. A fantastic book!”
—James Schwoch, Professor, Northwestern University
 
“Shifting the gaze toward space, the authors deftly present the fascinating story of how socialist space technology fundamentally reshaped the environment on Earth.”
—Andrew Jenks, Professor of History, California State University, Long BeachChristine Evans is Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her first book, Between Truth and Time: A History of Soviet Central Television, received an Honorable Mention for the 2017 USC Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies.

Lars Lundgren is Associate Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Södertörn University. His work has been published in Media History, European Journal of Cultural Studies, and International Journal of Communication.