Hughes Electronics Corporation

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The Galileo spacecraft and its Inertial Upper Stage booster (cylindrical section) leaving Earth orbit and the space shuttle Atlantis for Jupiter in October 1989, in an artist’s rendering. Hughes Aircraft built Galileo’s probe, which parachuted into Jupiter’s atmosphere when the spacecraft arrived at the giant planet in December 1995.

NASA

Hughes Electronics Corporation, American provider of wireless telecommunication services and formerly a leading manufacturer of satellites. The company was formed in 1985 as GM Hughes Electronics, a wholly owned subsidiary of General Motors Corporation, and renamed in 1995 as Hughes Electronics Corporation. In 2000 Hughes sold its satellite-manufacturing business to Boeing Company. Headquarters are in El Segundo, California.

Hughes Electronics comprises four major business units. Hughes Network Systems designs, manufactures, and installs advanced telecommunications networking technology for businesses and governments. Hughes’s DirecTV, Inc., a provider of satellite-based, direct-to-user entertainment and information programming, is the leading digital satellite television service in the United States. DirecTV Latin America, LLC, serves subscribers in Central and South America and the Caribbean. PanAmSat Corporation, in which Hughes Electronics holds an 81 percent share, is a major provider of international television, Internet, and telecommunications services delivered via a global network of satellites. Until the sale of its Hughes Space and Communications Company and associated businesses to Boeing, Hughes Electronics built commercial communications satellites, weather satellites, and specialized spacecraft and instruments for civilian and military programs of the U.S. government.

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Howard Hughes, American aviator, industrialist, and motion-picture producer, 1936.

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Hughes Electronics has its roots in Hughes Aircraft Company, established by the American aviator and industrialist Howard Hughes in the mid 1930s as a division of Hughes Tool Company. The focus of Hughes Aircraft initially was on the design and development of experimental planes, exemplified by the Hughes H-1 Racer, which established several speed records and introduced more technical innovations than any prior aircraft. During World War II the company developed military electronic equipment and began experimenting with radar. In 1947 Hughes Aircraft won a development contract for a guided missile, which later led to the Falcon, the world’s first radar-guided air-to-air missile to enter operational service. In the same year, it received a contract from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission to design and build an electronic measuring instrument for explosion experiments, which marked the company’s entry into large-scale production of electronics. In the 1950s it increased its involvement in missile development, becoming one of the largest suppliers of weapons systems in the United States.

In 1953 Howard Hughes donated Hughes Aircraft to his newly created Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a nonprofit organization, so that the company would operate tax-free. During the early 1960s Hughes Aircraft built Syncom 2, the world’s first communications satellite placed in a geosynchronous orbit (launched 1963), and in ensuing decades built a number of scientific spacecraft for the U.S. space program, including the Surveyor series sent to the Moon (1966–68), the Pioneer Venus craft (launched 1978), and the atmospheric probe for the Galileo mission to Jupiter (launched 1989). Hughes also pioneered development of an array of modern electronic systems including thermal imagers, night sensors, and four-colour liquid crystal displays.

In the 1980s the U.S. Internal Revenue Service began to question the tax-free status of Hughes Aircraft. In response, Howard Hughes Medical Institute sold the company to General Motors (GM) in 1985 in a sealed-bid auction. GM formed GM Hughes Electronics as an umbrella for Hughes Aircraft and its own automotive electronics subsidiary Delco Electronics. The automaker’s goal in this purchase—to make its cars more competitive through application of the high-technology expertise of Hughes—failed to materialize to the extent expected. After GM’s acquisition of the company, the percentage of its defense-related sales declined, and Hughes announced its intention to focus on automotive electronics and telecommunications. That announcement notwithstanding, Hughes acquired the missile business of the General Dynamics Corporation in 1992.

The fastest-growing business of Hughes in the 1980s and ’90s was its satellite and telecommunications segment. Its Galaxy I satellite, launched in 1983, revolutionized the American television industry by delivering television channels to cable service providers around the country and led to an extensive satellite communications network, run by Hughes’s Galaxy satellite services operations, for delivering television programming and business data. In 1987 the company introduced its HS 601 communications satellite, which became the world’s most popular series of large commercial spacecraft. In 1994 Hughes launched DirecTV, a direct-broadcast digital television distribution system in which programming was beamed via satellite to a home-installed, platter-sized dish antenna and set-top box. By the end of 1999, DirecTV boasted 7.8 million subscribers and was one of the most successful consumer electronic products in the United States.

In 1997 General Motors sold the defense business of Hughes Electronics to Raytheon Company and consolidated Delco Electronics with Delphi, another GM automotive electronics subsidiary. In the same year Hughes merged its Galaxy operations with PanAmSat Corporation to create a new subsidiary, which kept the PanAmSat name. PanAmSat was founded in 1984 by the telecommunications entrepreneur Rene Anselmo as a commercial alternative to the intergovernmental satellite monopoly Intelsat. In 1988, with the launch of its own satellite, it became the first private-sector international satellite service provider.