NASA Headquarters is in Washington, D.C. Human Exploration and Operations (HEO) also manages the space agency’s efforts to nurture the emerging American private spaceflight industry, which NASA wants to fill the crew- and cargo-carrying shoes of the retired space shuttle fleet. 04, General Electric. 05, New York Central (railroad), 06 Lockheed, 07 State of California, 08 AUTOVON (used to facilitate expansions of AUTOVON over non-AUTOVON telephone infrastructure, as a more cost effective way to provide AUTOVON lines at smaller installations), 09 American Airlines, 10 Boeing, 11 Westinghouse, 12 Western Electric, 13 IBM, 14 North American Aviation. That lead to companies like Western Union and MCI joining the network, and the introduction of least-cost routing to select the carrier. People who work in such a career can get the ability to work with mobile companies and design technologies that can improve the efficiency of cell phones. The Universal Service Fund, for example, levies a fee on telephone lines to subsidize the provision of telephone service to those who would otherwise be unable to afford it. We currently find ourselves in something of a series, working our way from private lines to large private line systems like the four-wire private-line national warning system.

The nature of the CCSA is pretty much in its name: it is a switched private line service, but it makes use of common control equipment to minimize costs. After it was introduced, the “meatball” was the most common symbol of NASA for 16 years, but in 1975 NASA decided to create a more “modern” logo. He said that if NASA invested $10 billion in research over the next 10 years, the technology would likely become cost-effective enough to begin launching satellites. I was invited to have a review on one of the papers submitted which was within my research interests. In practice there were complications and details to how this was set up, but this description gives you the idea: your telephone was now connected to the switch in a different central office from the one your local loop was actually connected to. There are two reasons: first, GE had an early and large CCSA—the largest CCSA outside of the federal government, at the time.

Most state governments used large Centrex-and-WATS arrangements, but some combination of the large size of California and GTE’s different approach to the network steered them in the CCSA direction. I didn’t bring it up without reason, the concept of the CCSA was developed in large part in order to bring the cost of FTS under control. High costs and lackluster service plagued FTS in its early years. I do think it is fair to say that the CCSA emerged largely as a response to the high price of AUTOVON, as building FTS based on the pattern of AUTOVON was deemed completely unrealistic on a cost basis. Incidentally, a precursor to AUTOVON was called SCAN, the Switched Circuit Automatic Network. Skimming through a telephone tariff almost always turns up some interesting details, one of them being that a few state telephone tariffs describe Switched Service Networks as being private line service based on either CCSA or SCAN.

Foreign exchange service was expensive, because it took up private line capacity, so various combinations of WATS, InWATS, zenith numbers, toll-free numbers, etc. have pretty much replaced it. Still other locations used a small PABX connected via tie line to a larger PABX at a larger office, in this case the dialing prefix “18” was recommended to first dial a trunk from the satellite PABX to the main PABX, and second from the main PABX to the telephone exchange providing GE SSN service. The configuration wasn’t the same at every office, but the recommended practice was to use a 9 prefix (or “exit code”) to dial on the public telephone network, and an 8 prefix to dial on the GE SSN. This summer I enjoyed both at the same time as I stood in a yard/mosquito-infested swamp on Chincoteague and watched NASA shoot off a Black Brant rocket. Editor’s Note (5/27/20): Because of unfavorable weather conditions, the historic launch of two NASA astronauts on a SpaceX crew module and rocket has been postponed until Saturday, May 30, at 3:22 P.M. Four astronauts from four different nations and space agencies worldwide have launched on a SpaceX rocket towards the International Space Station for a six-month mission.