Feb 23 1976
From The Space Library
Western Union filed with the Federal Communications Commission a tariff designating 11 more major metropolitan areas as "Satellite Access Cities." WU had already placed on line to Westar, the first U.S. domestic comsat system,.9 major metropolitan areas-New York, Washington, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston, and Pittsburgh-served by 5 ground stations, located near New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, and Los Angeles. The Glenwood, N.J., station (near N.Y. City) would serve Boston, Buffalo, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Wilmington under the new access. The station at Lake Geneva, Wis. (near Chicago), would serve Detroit, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and St. Louis; the station at Cedar Hill, Tex., would serve Kansas City. In operation for more than a year, the 2-comsat Westar system had been used by several hundred corporations for both voice and data transmission; Westar also included TV centers in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Dallas that had been transmitting increasing amounts of U.S. video news and sports coverage since July 1975. (WU news release 24 Feb 76)
In a close race to tame the hydrogen-bomb reaction process-fusion-to make electricity, the U.S. and USSR were both ready for larger engineering units to demonstrate the practical production of electricity by the mid-1980s, reporter Robert Toth said in the Los Angeles Times. The Kurchatov Institute in Moscow had announced earlier in Feb. a "breakthrough" in the first successful test conducted in its Tokamak-10, the last purely experimental machine intended to prove feasibility of the approach. Last November, U.S. had announced a comparable achievement with the Alcator Tokamak at the Mass. Institute of Technology, described as a major development in fusion research. Although U.S. scientists claimed a fusion process had been first tested at Los Alamos 20 yr ago, it was not seriously pursued, whereas the late Dr. Lev Artsimovich of the USSR had worked along the same line independently and given the machine its name-a Russian contraction for current machine chamber-upon achieving the first success.
Advantages of the fusion process were that it was the most efficient reaction known, producing 180 times more energy than consumed; fuel, the heavy forms of hydrogen, would be as inexhaustible as the seas; and the process left no radioactive waste like that from atomic-power plants based on the fission reaction. Fusion would require containment of the reaction in a magnetic field, which had been accomplished, and continuous production of energy would require temperatures of a million degrees Centigrade and a density of 100 trillion ions for a second conditions beyond the capability of present machines. Both the U.S. and USSR results had been 5 to 10 times less than needed, although they were 5 to 10 times greater than previously achieved. (W Post, 23 Feb 76, A-1)
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