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Notes and Sources, page xi.

Something New Under the Sun is about the ideas of these men and the global, national, and local influences that shaped them.

In the case of Transit, most of the primary source material comes from APL and some of that material could be extracted for me only by people with the necessary security clearances, so there may well be things I am missing that I do not know about. The story is told through the eyes of APL, even though I have tried to set it in context. I'm sure someone viewing the story from outside APL would have a different tale to tell, but as written, I hope it gives a sense of what it was like to develop a satellite sysrem in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Meteorology satellites were more difficult to write about because the story is intricately linked with the change from art to science that meteorology was undergoing in the 1950s and because much of the primary source material was still classified when I was writing. But key participants helped to steer me through a sea of partial information. Verner Suomi is one of several who played a critical role in the early days, and perhaps more should be said about the others. If anyone writes the story at greater length, perhaps more will be said.

The early days of communications satellites are described mainly from the point of view of the Bell Telephone Laboratories and the Hughes Aircraft Company. Much of the text is based on material I collected from the archives and company records of AT &T and Hughes, supplemented by interviews and by other documents that participants passed on to me.

Echo and Telstar are names that still bring a flash of recognition to some faces. They are part of this book because John Pierce, whose ideas were important in many ways, was involved either direcdy or obliquely with them and because they highlighted AT&T's plans for global satellite communication, which raised antitrust concerns that shaped American policy in this strategically important new field. For these reasons, I have concentrated on Echo and Telstar rather than the NASA-sponsored Project Relay.

The most famous satellites that were based on Rosen's initial ideas were the Syncom satellites and Early Bird. These opened the era of commercial communications satellites.

Navigation, meteorology, and communication-ancients arts that have become sophisticated science and technology. The application satellites that ring the earth did much to help in that transition. Our social

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