The Office of Transfer of Knowledge, in collaboration with the research team TECHNIS and the Postgraduate in Innovation and Entrepreneurship TIME Master’s in Business Economics organizes on Tuesday 24 May at 17:00 the 11th seminar of the Office for the period 2021-2022.

The speaker is Mr. Haris A. Durrani, from Princeton University.
The title of the presentation is “Inventing Syncom: Public, Private, Global”.

To receive the Zoom link, contact Mr. Andreas Panagopoulos at least one hour before the seminar.

Abstract: This article traces a partial history of Syncom, a joint project between the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and Hughes Aircraft Company, in the 1960s. In 1963, the project’s first successful launch, Syncom II, became the first geosynchronous communications satellite when it maneuvered into that orbit. The 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 led to several legal disputes surrounding the satellite’s underlying patents. It also spurred debates about the regulation of the sea, outer space, and the electromagnetic spectrum—all domains in which Syncom II, its signals, or its control system operated.