Bertrand Manuali is a French telecommunications engineer. After five years in industrial research laboratories, he joined the French space agency CNES, where he contributed to the development of the D-2 satellites and of the Franco-German telecommunications satellite Symphonie. From 1967 he was responsible for France's navigation satellites: he designed and championed the Dioscures project, a global navigation-satellite system for aviation and shipping, and represented CNES in the international working groups devoted to such systems. His book L'exploration spatiale et ses techniques (Hermann, 1967; Marabout, 1969), with a preface by General Aubinière, stands among the few works of technical popularization written by a serving engineer of the French space programme.