Miracles in space

[Commentary] Fifty years ago, we took a giant step in communications history with the first transatlantic live television broadcast connecting Europe and America.

For the first time, Europeans saw the Statue of Liberty, the Chicago Cubs playing the Philadelphia Phillies at Wrigley Field, President John Kennedy's news conference, buffalo roaming the Great Plains and a boy admiring a Sioux chief in North Dakota in real time. Americans saw the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben and reindeer in the Arctic Circle. Today, communications satellites every day perform miracles we never thought or dreamed of 50 years ago. They connect cable systems and broadcast networks, carry telephone calls and data all over the United States and the world. With the development of computers, digital technology and their marriage with satellites, the world has become much smaller. Satellite communications enlarge television choices for viewers, enable people around the globe to watch the Olympics at the same time, see the Sept. 11, 2001, disaster unfold and make it possible for a woman in Ghana to speak to her son in Chicago. And this is only the beginning.

At age 86, I will not be here for the 100th anniversary of communications satellites on July 23, 2062. But I have suggested to my grandchildren that they write that date down and remember that great advances happen when the imagination of science is combined with the bipartisan spirit of cooperation by industry, labor and government — and that ideas last longer than men and women.

[Minow served as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission under President John Kennedy]