‘But, before that remarkable event,’ he said in his clipped, received-pronunciation voice, ‘viewers on both sides of the Atlantic will be given a glimpse inside the control room that is in charge of transmitting the president’s words to the Telstar 1 satellite, which is travelling high above the ocean in its orbit as I speak, and which will in turn relay the broadcast signal to antenna stations in Goonhilly Downs in Cornwall and Pleumeur-Bodou in France.’

Telstar 1 had been launched on top of a Thor-Delta rocket from Cape Canaveral ten days earlier. It was the result of a joint initiative that involved AT&T, Bell Labs and NASA in America, the Post Office in Britain, and its French equivalent, PTT It was a revolutionary piece of technology, and the kind of potent statement that many in the West were keen to make about the power of cooperation between governments and private industry.

At the heart of the satellite was a unique transponder that could capture and retransmit television and phone signals from one point on the planet to another. It took two and a half hours for Telstar 1 to orbit the planet, and for twenty minutes of every cycle it came within range of the American and European antenna stations. For that short window it could relay real-time signals between the two continents.

The camera began to pan across the control room in Cape Canaveral. Walter Cronkite, the CBS journalist who had taken over presenting duties from Dimbleby when the live feed switched to America, listed some of the more notable members of the NASA team who were appearing on screen.

‘There we can see John Robinson Pierce, the leader of the project,’ Cronkite said in his sonorous, southern drawl, as a tall, thin man in heavy glasses stalked across the frame, flanked by people carrying clipboards.

Then the camera settled on two more middle-aged men talking to each other. ‘And I believe that’s James M. Early, the man who designed the satellite’s transistors and solar panels, and Rudy Kompfner, the physicist who invented the travelling wave tube amplifier on which Telstar 1’s advanced transponder is based.’

Several of the people watching in Holland’s office started to lose interest ahd chat among themselves. They wanted to see Kennedy, not a bunch of technicians. Knox, White, and Holland, however, kept their attention firmly on the screen.

Holland was watching out for any high-ranking officials the camera might catch. White was soaking up as much information as he could from the control boards the camera drifted over—he wondered how much of the technological spectacle was for show, a flickering metal curtain hiding a hundred invisible mathematicians frantically crunching numbers. And Knox was looking for one person in particular. Then for one brief moment he saw her.