When Engineers Had the Stars in Their Sights

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Thursday, Oct 1, 2015

This 1964 ad attests to the enduring lure of the final frontier.

At the height of the space race in the 1960s, Hughes Aircraft Co. was one of many companies that recruited engineers by boasting of its involvement with space projects—even when that involvement was peripheral or the company was looking to fill unrelated positions. But Hughes was the real deal: This ad, from IEEE Spectrum’s January 1964 issue, features Hughes’s Syncom, the world’s first geosynchronous communications satellite.