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Hughes Space and Communications Company was formed as a subsidiary of Hughes Aircraft in 1961 following the merger of the company's Space and Communications Group and the Hughes Space Systems Division.
This division built the world's first geosynchronous communications satellite, Syncom, in 1963 and followed it closely with the first geosynchronous weather satellite, ATS-1, in 1966. Later that year their Surveyor 1 made the first soft landing on the Moon as part of the lead-up to the moon landings in Project Apollo. Hughes also built Pioneer Venus in 1978, which performed the first extensive radar mapping of Venus, and the Galileo probe that flew to Jupiter in the 1990s. The company built nearly 40 percent of commercial satellites in service worldwide in 2000.
in 2000, Hughes Space and Communications Company became part of Boeing Satellite Systems.
