Category NASA in the World

SITE was conceived as a classic communication system consisting of an informa­tion source, a channel, a receiver, and the destination. The operation and execu­tion of the experiment was dependent on a network of complex technological systems. Occupying the central node in the whole network was the ATS-6. It functioned as a relay station for receiving and sending signals originating in India; in other words it acted as a channel of communication between the trans­mitter and the receiver. The retransmitted signals from ATS-6 were received on the ground by a Direct Reception Systems (DRS). The United States provided the satellite while the full responsibility for the ground segment—earth stations, DRS, and television programs (software)—fell on India.

The declassified version of the Cox Report (or just the Cox Report in what follows) released on May 25, 1999, created a sensation. An editorial in the Washington Post caught the mood that day: it quoted Cox as saying that “[n]o other country has succeeded in stealing so much from the United States,” with serious and ongoing damage to the country.18 The Republican House majority leader Dick Armey said, “It’s very scary, and basically what it says is the Chinese now have the capability of threatening us with our own nuclear technology.”19 The ensuing sense of urgency led to calls for a transformation in the legal and administrative structure of international cooperation. Tighter controls on hard­ware and knowledge flows were imperative.

The Cox Report was a three-volume, 872-page glossy publication filled with photographs suitably labeled and a punchy overview that used color and other techniques to highlight key findings and to have them spring to the eye.20 Though most of the committee’s time was devoted to the Hughes and Loral cases, in the latter stages of its hearings it branched out into the “theft” of other sensitive technologies, notably for nuclear warhead design. Volume 1 of the report focused on this domain and on the diversion of High Performance Computers (600 of which had been sold to the PRC) from civilian to nuclear weapons applications. Volume 2 was devoted to the contacts between engineers at Hughes and Loral and their Chinese counterparts, particularly after the launch failures. It also had a section devoted to launch-site security in the PRC or, rather, the lack thereof. The short technological core of the third volume dealt with the efforts made by the PRC to improve their manufacturing pro­cesses by acquiring machine tool and jet engine technologies.

The report claimed that the PRC had “stolen design information on the United States’ most advanced thermonuclear weapons,” including the neutron bomb, from the four major weapons labs (Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, Oak Ridge, and Sandia).21 This would give China design information on such devices “on a par with our own,” and would materially assist the country “in building its next generation of mobile ICBMs, which may be tested this year,” with “a significant effect on the regional balance of power.” China had also “stolen or illegally obtained U. S. missile and space technology that improves the PRC’s military and intelligence capabilities.” The information passed by US satellite manufacturers to their Chinese clients—without obtaining the requisite licenses, even though they knew they were needed—had “improved the reliabil­ity of PRC rockets useful for civilian and military purposes,” including ballistic missiles. These security lapses were compounded by poor security at launch pads and by the liberal sharing of technical information with foreign brokers and underwriters of satellite insurance. The knowledge thus acquired would not only strengthen China’s military capability, but the PRC was also “one of the lead­ing proliferators of complete ballistic missile systems and missile components in the world,” and had helped improve weapons programs in Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea.

Two factors had facilitated these major breaches in the security wall. First, there were recent changes in international and domestic export control regimes that had reduced the ability to control the flow of militarily useful technology.

Supplementing this, there was China’s determination to obtain advanced US military technology, which it had actively sought for at least the past two decades. As the report put it, “To acquire U. S. technology the PRC uses a variety of techniques, including espionage, controlled commercial entities, and a network of individuals and organizations that engage in a vast array of contacts with sci­entists, business people, and academics.” In short, the Cox Report emphasized, “The PRC has mounted a widespread effort to obtain U. S. military technologies by any means—legal or illegal.”

As regards space policy, the Cox Report urged the executive branch to “aggressively implement the Satellite Export Control Provisions”22 of the Strom Thurmond Act. It demanded that the State Department be responsible for licensing the export of satellites and any satellite launch failure investigations. The Department of Defense, not satellite firms, was to be responsible for secu­rity at foreign launch sites, and had to establish appropriate monitoring proce­dures to ensure that no information of use to its missile programs was passed to the PRC. The report also insisted that “export controls are applied in full to communications among satellite manufacturers, purchasers, and the insurance industry, including communications after launch failures.”23 Recognizing that the American firms were seeking launch providers abroad because the United States had insufficient domestic launch capability (itself a result of the decision to cut back the production of expendable launchers so as to secure a market for the shuttle), the Select Committee also recommended that steps be taken to stimu­late the nation’s “commercial space-launch capacity and competition.”24

The Cox Report proved highly controversial. Joseph Cirincione, the direc­tor of the Carnegie Non-Proliferation Project, objected that the report had “taken a real problem and hyper-inflated it for political purposes.”25 The Center for International Security at Stanford University asked four experts (Alastair Iain Johnston, W. K. H. Panofsky, Marco di Capua, and Lewis R. Franklin) to review the report from different angles. Throughout their critique the authors stressed that the analysis was marred by “imprecise writing, sloppy research, and ill-informed speculation,” as Johnston put it.26 In a vigorous riposte Nicholas Rostow, a staff director on the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, in turn identified what he called “50 Factual Errors in the Four Essays” that comprised the “Panofsky” critique.27 And toward the end of 1999 the National Academies’ Committee on Balancing Scientific Openness and National Security published its findings on the risks posed by foreign interactions with the national weapons laboratories.28

None of the critics denied that the Cox Report had put its finger on a serious issue. But they objected that it had incorrectly elevated security leaks to a privi­leged position in its analysis of knowledge flows between the United States and China: there were many other ways for PRC scientists and engineers to access the cutting edge of the American research system. They felt that it had incor­rectly assessed China’s strategic goals, and the urgency with which it sought to update its obsolete nuclear and missile programs.29 Third, they contended that the combination of these two erroneous convictions had created a climate of crisis in which blanket restrictions on international exchange were being called for. This would be counterproductive and do the United States more harm than good. Tighter controls were thus not the answer to improved security: rather, what was needed was increased funding for R & D, which ensured that the United States always had the technological edge over its rivals. The Committee on Balancing Scientific Openness and National Security took a similar line, “The world is awash in scientific discoveries and technological innovations,” it wrote. “If the United States is to remain the world’s technological leader, it must remain deeply engaged in international dialogue, despite the possibility of the illicit loss of information.”30

This is the background against which the demand for a more rigorous appli­cation of export control regulations was specifically written into Public Law 106-391, NASA’s Authorization Act of2000 that was passed by both the House and the Senate. This act encouraged international cooperation in space explora­tion and scientific activities when it served American interests, and was “carried out in manner consistent with United States export control laws” (Sect 2.6 (B) (iii)). The point on regulation was picked up again later in a section of the act that twinned international cooperation with American competitiveness. After laying down specific recommendations as regards space cooperation with the PRC, the text went on to stipulate (Sect. 126 (3)) that NASA’s inspector general, in consultation with the appropriate agencies of the U. S. government,

shall conduct an annual audit of the policies and procedures of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration with respect to the export of technol­ogies and the transfer of scientific and technical information, to assess the extent to which [the NASA] is carrying out its activities in compliance with Federal export control laws and with paragraph (2) [relating to the PRC].31

NASA had already institutionalized more formalized and systematic procedures for the implementation of export controls in the mid-1990s. P. L. 106-391, however, sent a strong signal that Congress was keeping an eye on the agency to ensure that compliance with ITAR was enforced. The effects have been felt throughout the centers, by NASA contractors such as JPL and by the agency’s international partners.

To summarize. The combined effect of the Strom Thurmond Act, the Cox Report, and P. L.106-391 has been to move export controls in the space sec­tor to the very foreground of NASA and the State Department’s activities in the international domain. To be sure it was already evident in the mid-1990s that NASA’s management of export control needed to be tightened up. The ambiguity over whether or not ITAR or EAR applied to a space-related item was amplified by an internal organization that was fragmented, with different sections dealing more or less independently with the different regulatory sys­tems. A single export control office replaced these in 1994/95. Its importance was fueled by fears that the PRC was gaining ready access to sensitive American defense-related technology. These were generalized by Congress, and embodied in legislation that demanded that NASA and US entities take the restrictions imposed by the ITAR seriously not only in dealings with the PRC but also with traditional allies and partners (subject to some variation for NATO members, for example).

Over the next decade the effects of these restrictions were increasingly felt and resented by NASA’s partners, as well by its contractors and US business. For example, John Schumacher, an associate administrator for external relations at NASA who moved into the aerospace industry in the 1990s, stressed the diffi­culty of deciding if an innovative technology fell under the ITAR or not. Taking the hypothetical example of a nano-ceramic coating for engine blades he noted that neither the firm nor the regulatory authority was sure whether something like this it fell under the ITAR or not. This was particularly frustrating for smaller companies with international clients, like his own, and often led them to “walk back from the edge,” and withdraw from regulation-prone innovative research.

NASA contractors such as JPL are also subject to the ITAR, and have estab­lished their own in-house ITAR office to ensure compliance, and need to estab­lish Technical Assistance Agreements (TAA) before they can provide defense services to their partners. A TAA is a contract between the parties involved in the technology transfer. It references the ITAR, and defines items such as the roles of the contracting parties, what technology and services are covered, who can access the ITAR-controlled technology, restrictions or exemptions on how the technology can be used, and how long a foreign entity can have access to the technology. Even with these procedures in place there can be friction. Robert Mitchell, a project manager on the Cassini-Huygens mission (see chapter 2 ) , explains:

[T]he most common thing that comes up now is a problem with an instru­ment, a European-provided instrument. An example would be the magnetom­eter, which was provided by and still funded and operated by an organization in the U. K. The magnetometer will from time to time have issues in terms of how it interfaces with the onboard main central processor on the Cassini spacecraft, and there frequently are questions about whether the problem is in our computer, or a problem in the interface, or a problem in the instrument. And of those three things, we understand the first two far better than they do, and we understand the third probably not as well as they do, but we know it pretty well. . . Now, for us to give them technical assistance in resolving the problem is clearly prohibited except in the presence of a TAA, and even with that we’ve been cautioned to tread carefully. So when they have a problem— and about once a year they do—we work with them, we get it taken care of, but everybody is very conscious of this issue.32

Charles Elachi, the current director of JPL, sees the effect on interpersonal rela­tionships with colleagues abroad as one of the most distressing feature of the ITAR. It undermines the freewheeling climate of mutual trust and respect that is essential to the success of an international project. As he said in an interview in June 2009:

[T]he bigger impact, in my point of view, was more on the interaction between people, more than actually getting a piece of hardware, because now if we want to talk with the ESA, we have to be careful what we talk about and so on. It’s not an issue of do we send a transistor from the U. S. to Europe, even if that’s a factor. But it’s really the interaction, and, I’m guessing that’s where maybe people like us are unhappy, and that’s where I’m unhappy also about

this thing, because the strength was in building trust and good relationship and exchange of ideas, and that kind of put a limitation on doing that.33

David Southwood, ESA’s then director of science and robotic exploration, was blunter in an interview in 2009: “Those of us who want to cooperate with the United States are frustrated by the level of regulation and nonsense we’re put through, and indeed the problem we face of trying to explain to people that if we really are cooperating we have to have an understanding of what something does in the partner’s piece of equipment.”34

There can be no doubt that the current (August 2012) ITAR regime is trans­forming the dynamics of international collaboration with the United States. It is not doing so simply by placing tight constraints on the hardware that can be shared with partners: as this book has made evident, in the domain of satellites and launchers, the components that can be acquired by others has always been subject to close scrutiny. By reaching deep into the daily workings of even non­military cooperation involving scientists and engineers in academia, government laboratories and industry, the regime is making international collaboration more onerous bureaucratically and more risky institutionally, as well as undermining the trust and mutual respect between people that is so essential to the success of any joint project.

It must be stressed that NASA itself is not as tightly bound by ITAR as is a contractor like JPL. Like its contractors it requires a hardware license to export technology, but unlike them it does not require a TAA to supply defense services to foreign partners once an international agreement is in place (that agreement serves as the TAA).35 The agency has also been engaged for over a decade in discussions with the State Department on ways to improve the implementation of the ITAR, particularly as regards the need for TAAs by its contractors. At the time of writing extensive interagency discussions have also led to major propos­als for export control reform. They are guided by the philosophy that the United States must focus limited resources on the threats that matter most, and put in place streamlined procedures, combined with effective safeguards, to control sensitive items appropriately. It is proposed that commercial satellites be put back on the EAR and be regulated by the Department of Commerce. On one issue there is no reform foreseen: export control policies with respect to the PRC and embargoed countries, like Iran.36

ATS-6 was the most complex and advanced communication satellite in NASA’s Applications Technology Satellite series.29 In 1966 NASA began launching a series of six such satellites manufactured by Fairchild to test and improve satellite com­munications. They were designed to carry out technological, meteorological, scien­tific, and communications research. The last of the series, ATS-6 was the largest, most complicated, and powerful of them all. It was a geosynchronous satellite— the orbital period for the 1,402-kilogram satellite around the globe matched the Earth’s 24-hour rotation so that the ATS-6 remained over the same spot on the earth. It was designed in such a way that it could be moved along the equator using its onboard thrusters to conduct space-based experiments in any region of the globe. In general it served as a powerful rebroadcasting station in space, capable

of transmitting signals directly to many small ground stations over a large area (figure 12.3). The prime objectives of ATS-6 missions involved demonstrating a 30-foot deployable antenna in synchronous orbit, providing a three-axis stabi­lized spacecraft with 0.1 degree pointing capability in all three axes, and provid­ing an oriented platform at synchronous altitude for advanced technological and scientific experiments. The SITE was made possible when all of these objectives were achieved.30ATS-6 thus represented the kind of satellite system appropriate for communications within many developing countries, where most of the population lived dispersed in rural areas, rather than in large population centers.31 ATS-6 was launched on May 30, 1974, and it carried approximately 15 scientific experiments in the field of communication, meteorology, and spacecraft stabilization.

While ISAS was working on the K, L, and M series of solid booster rockets in the early 1960s, NSDC, the precursor of NASDA, worked on solid – and liquid – fuel rockets designated as the JCR (Jet Controlled Rocket) and the LS-C series. Both the JCR and LS-C rockets were two-stage rockets, the first using solid fuels only, the second a combination of solid and liquid fuels. Both were later built into a three-stage Q rocket, which was in turn overtaken by the more pow­erful N (Nippon) launcher built with American help. Work on Q was not entirely wasted, however. Flight-testing of the JCR helped develop the control system of N-1, while a liquid stage from the LSC was later adopted as the second stage of N-1, which made its maiden flight in 1975.

The successful N-1 launch vehicle built after the 1969 agreement comprised three stages. The liquid first stage was adopted from the Thor-Delta Vehicle produced by McDonnell Douglas. The liquid fuel used was LOX and RJ-1 propellants. The engine for this first stage was produced in Japan under license with technological assistance from Rocketdyne. To give added thrust it had three strap-on boosters, Thiokol’s Castor II-TX354-5, which were also produced under license in Japan. The second-stage engine was adopted from the Q rocket, as men­tioned a moment ago, with some American assistance. It used nitrogen tetroxide and Aerozine 50. NASDA wanted to build this stage in Japan indigenously so as to retain some Japanese component and as a platform for building its own stages in future. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) constructed the rocket engines for the second stage. The third-stage motor was imported from the United States.

During the 1970s N-1 launched six satellites into orbit including Kiku 2 (1977), Japan’s first geostationary satellite that was built indigenously based on American technology. It was upgraded for launching heavier satellites up to 350 kilograms and was designated N-2. Following the N series the logical step toward launching heavier application satellites led to the development of the H series of rockets. Preliminary studies on the H began in the mid-1970s and two test flights were conducted in August 1986 and August 1987. The first stage, strap-on boosters, and fairing were manufactured under license and the rest—cryogenic second-stage, inertial guidance system and the third-stage solid motor—were developed indigenously. Thereafter a fully indigenous more advanced rocket called H-II was developed in the mid-1980s with the first test flight on February 4, 1994. Though this was a technological triumph for Japan it was not a commercial success. The launch cost was around $190 million, which was twice the cost of a launch with the European Ariane or American Atlas.42

To overcome the cost problem Japan initiated the H-IIA development pro­gram, with the primary goal of cutting launch costs in half by increasing the launch rate. While Japanese technological independence was a primary purpose of the original H-II program, the overriding commitment to low cost in the H-IIA program led to contracts with ATK Thiokol in Utah, who supplied solid rocket booster technology. Boeing and Man technologies of Germany were also selected to produce core stage tank domes.43 Table 10.2 gives one some idea of the extensive presence of American firms in Japanese launcher development, and the gradual reliance on national industries to provide key components such as guidance and control.

ISRO was responsible for the installation and maintenance of the earth sta­tions and also the design, installation, and maintenance of the augmented com­munity receivers. The earth stations and the DRS formed the ground segment of the network. While NASA provided the satellite, the ground segment was indigenously manufactured by ISRO with little help from foreign countries. The earth stations helped transmit signals to the satellite, the satellite received these signals, amplified them, and transmitted them back to earth where they were received by custom-made television sets that were suitably tuned.

Four earth stations located in Ahmedabad, Delhi, Amritsar, and Nagpur were utilized for the SITE project. The central earth station that transmitted the bulk of the programs using the 15-meter parabolic antenna was located in Ahmedabad. The second earth station, a 10-meter parabolic antenna located in Delhi, helped in telecasting national programs—Republic Day, Independence Day, and addresses from the prime minister and president. It also served as a backup facility if the central station in Ahmedabad were to face any techni­cal glitches. The third earth station was located in central India in Nagpur. It housed the “monopulse beacon” instrument. The ATS-6 satellite had the capa­bility of “homing in” to a beacon station located to keep the satellite accurately oriented if its internal pointing systems failed. This was one of the important back up modes to ensure the ongoing functionality of the ATS-6 spacecraft.

In 1967 Japan’s National Space Development Center strongly recommended that the country launch its own comsat by 1970 to ensure that it had some weight in shaping the negotiations on the definitive arrangements for Intelsat that got under way in 1969 and that lasted more than two years (see chapter 5). The alternative, as one document put it, was to have Japanese skies “dominated by the U. S. which as a member of INTELSAT (International Telecommunications Satellite Consortium) now has practical control of space communications networks.”44 This concern doubtless catalyzed U. Alexis Johnson’s determined effort to accelerate American technological help for Japan’s domestic launcher in 1969. In the event, the slow progress made in the negotiations to upgrade the N-1 led the Japanese authorities to seek alternative routes to the geostationary orbit for both a meteorological satellite and two communications satellites.

NASA was willing to consider two options: it could provide a reimbursable launch on a Delta 2914 from American soil or it could sell a Delta 2914 to Japan for launch there. The latter option was soon shelved. The agency was concerned about the transfer of launch operations know-how to a foreign country. A National Security directive (NSDM187 ofAugust 30, 1972) specifically restricted the transfer of launch vehicles to other counties for communications satellites.45 Finally the high cost of launching a Delta 2914 from the Japanese site at Tangeashima persuaded the authorities in Tokyo that it was preferable to request reimbursable launches from the United States for their first generation of geosynchronous satellites.

A reimbursement agreement between NASA and NASDA was signed in 1972 for three satellites. Himawari (sunflower, 325 kilograms) was a meteorologi­cal satellite built by Hughes Aircraft for Japan’s NEC. Sakura (cherry flower, 350 kilograms) was a telecommunications satellite built by Ford Aerospace for MELCO. Yuri (lily, 350 kilograms) was a broadcast satellite built by the Space Division of General Electric for Toshiba. They were launched in quick succession between July 1977 and April 1978 from the Kennedy Space Center, though not before a major misunderstanding between the two partners had been resolved.

At the core of the dispute was the question of responsibility for the insertion of the satellite in the geostationary orbit. Early in 1974 NASA decided to offer geo­stationary orbit insertion services only for US government spacecraft launched on a reimbursable basis.46 For other clients, NASA’s responsibility extended only to the separation of the satellite from the launch vehicle at the point of insertion into geostationary transfer orbit. At that point an apogee kick motor integrated into the satellite, and provided along with it by the client, would move the satel­lite to its final desired position. Soon thereafter it emerged that the Japanese, for their part, were under the impression that the reimbursable launch contract with NASA included placing the satellite at the desired location on the geosta­tionary orbit. On learning otherwise they took NASA’s advice and asked for bids from five American firms that had provided software support and insertion into the geostationary orbit for foreign satellites (Hughes, Philco-Ford, General Electric, Systems Development Corp, and Comsat General). These came in at about $12-15 million per satellite, excluding hardware, a figure to be compared with the launch cost of $10 million per satellite.47

Early in September 1974, in the light of this information, and an imminent visit by NASA administrator Fletcher to Tokyo, the Japanese embassy asked NASA to reconsider its decision. It wanted the agency to provide a complete package after the spacecraft was delivered to the Kennedy Space Center, from checkout, installation in the launch vehicle, insertion into synchronous orbit, in-orbit check out, and, finally, movement of the spacecraft to its desired orbital position. It was only at that point that control over and responsibility for the spacecraft would be turned over to the Japanese.

NASA’s associate administrator for tracking and data acquisition, Gerald Truszynski, explained what this commitment would mean to NASA. The agency would have to extend its span of responsibility considerably, and far beyond the normal provision of tracking and data acquisition support from its existing track­ing stations. Providing a full range of services for three satellites launched in quick succession meant establishing a dedicated Spacecraft Project Office (prob­ably at Goddard Space Flight Centre (GSFC)) to carry out the activities involved.

Operation of the control center and the development of the project-unique soft­ware would be major undertakings. Its personnel would not only have to be thoroughly familiar with the spacecraft design and characteristics but would probably also have to have access to the technical specifications to assure overall compatibility with the ground control systems. They would have to conduct mis­sion analyses to determine optimum mission profiles. Also NASA would have to contract with the spacecraft manufacturers to provide the support at KSC before launch and in the control center during and after launch. In summary, the response from NASA clearly stated that to accept overall responsibility, it would have to divert significant civil service manpower for about 18 months or more. Further, it would result in a complex administrative structure since it was very probable that NASA would be essentially placed between the Japanese and their US spacecraft manufacturers. In sum Truszynski suggested that the best that NASA could do was to compute and supply definitive orbit data in real-time, and to track the spacecraft during transfer orbit. It could also lend a couple of people to each Japanese project to provide technical advice of various kinds, and could host some Japanese engineers to work in its mission control centers and other NASA locations to learn how the agency did the job.48

NASA’s reluctance to satisfy Japan’s demands was reinforced by input from US industry. Bud Wheelon of Hughes Corporation let NASA know that he would be happier if Fletcher did not strike a deal with Japan on orbit inser­tion during the administrator’s forthcoming visit to Tokyo. As George Low explained to the NASA administrator,

Apparently, each of the U. S. companies is in a major loss situation with respect to the satellite being built for the Japanese and had planned to use the orbit insertion business to “get well.” In Bud’s words, “if the government now steps into the orbit insertion business, we would in effect be subsidizing the Japanese at the expense of U. S. industry.”49

The Japanese fought back. Their Japanese scientific counselor at the embassy in Washington, Hisako Uchida, pushed the orbit insertion case further by citing the example of the Italian Sirio satellite, where NASA offered to insert the satellite into the geosynchronous orbit. In reply to the query by Uchida, NASA again detailed its general policy associated with orbit insertion services. NASA’s responsibility was limited to “insertion of the space craft into transfer orbit and all subsequent mission operations is lodged totally with the requesting agency or its contractors.” NASA categorically “denied providing such services for any non-U. S. govern­ment spacecraft launched on a reimbursable basis and does not contemplate doing so in the future.” NASA had to offer geosynchronous orbit injection support ser­vices for the Italians because of the formal commitment made to Italian National Research Council (CNR) in 1971. “In recognition of this commitment prior to adoption of the 1974 policy, NASA agreed in late December 1974 to honor its previous commitment and provide minimal geostationary injection support services for SIRIO only.” In all other reimbursable non-US government cases injection into geostationary orbit “has been and will continue to be conducted from facilities other than NASA’s.” For example, the geostationary orbit injection of the Franco-German Symphonie satellite launched by NASA in December 1974 was conducted from ESOC (European Space Operations Center) in Germany.50 With that the matter was apparently closed in NASA’s favor.

As we have seen Japan’s quest for launcher autonomy was intimately linked with its determination to gain access to the geostationary orbit for telecommu­nications satellites, both to enhance its influence in Intelsat and to strengthen its position in the global market for comsats. To secure the strength of national industry the Japanese authorities took a number of measures in the 1980s to close the home market to outside competition. NASDA channeled “all govern­ment satellite procurement to Japanese firms, prohibited the procurement of all kinds of satellites, and banned the procurements [abroad] of Japan’s telecom­munication giant, NTT, despite the lower price and superior quality of foreign satellites.”51 The result was that local content in comsats increased from 24 per­cent in 1977 to 80 percent in 1988, while local content in broadcast satellites grew from 14 to 83 percent in the same period.52

The US authorities, with widespread domestic support, objected strongly to the restrictions on foreign procurement by Japan in this sector. It not only excluded American firms from the Japanese market but also signaled Tokyo’s determination to secure a leading position in the global telecommunications satellite market. Section 301 of the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act, passed by Congress in August 1988, provided the United States with an instrument to lever open the Japanese market. The overall legislation had been in place for almost 15 years, and was a response to the change in the American balance of trade beginning in the late 1970s from a modest surplus to a massive deficit. Section 301 was tightened up in 1988 by introducing a so-called Super 301 amendment that was unusual in being “targeted against the behavior of governments in their home markets instead of focusing on the competition provided by imports in the United States” (e. g., by illegal dumping).53 The US trade representative subsequently charged Japan as being engaged in unfair trading practices in three sectors: supercomputers, wood products, and telecommunications satellites, and threatened to impose trade sanc­tions against the country if it did not open these markets to US exports.

The Japanese were outraged as the United States was basically telling them to rein in their ambitions to be major competitors in the world market for comsats. Tokyo caved in all the same, canceling plans for the development of the fourth series of its communication satellite program. US producers such as Loral Space Systems, Hughes Space and Communications Group, and GE successfully won bids to supply satellites to Japanese firms, so pushing them out of the local market. As one representative from Hughes Space put it, the 1990 agreement opened a few more opportunities for the American company but, more impor­tantly, prevented Japan from sheltering “an infant industry that might eventually become a world-class competitor.”54 By the 1990s Japan had its own launchers, and it had built up immense in-house capability in the manufacture of geosta­tionary satellites. Its aspirations of becoming a world leader in the development and sale of space technology had not, however, been realized.

The direct reception systems, DRS, completed the vast network that was put in place for the SITE project. The development of the DRS was started in 1972 at the Electronics Systems Division of the Space Applications Center in Ahmedabad. The system had three main components: the antenna to receive the signals transmitted by the satellite, the front end converter to transform the signals into a form compatible with a normal television receiver, and a television receiver.

The antennas measuring ten feet in diameter, the front end converter, the most complex one in the assembly, and the television sets were first designed in the Space Application Center (SAC) in Ahmedabad. The prototypes were given to a public sector company, the Electronics Corporation of India Limited (ECIL), located in Hyderabad, for mass production. The television monitor itself was basically a commercial model slightly modified for community viewing and rural use. “Seven hundred of the 2400 sets were ‘ruggedized’ by using higher quality components, as a part of an ‘experiment-within-an-experiment’ to inves­tigate the tradeoffs between initial cost and maintenance cost.”32 To facilitate transfer of ‘know-how’ and to expedite production, some ISRO engineers who had developed these units were posted to ECIL.33

The direct reception systems were deployed in selected villages and the dis­tricts of six states, namely, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, and Rajasthan. The villages were selected according to the criteria laid down by the Planning Commission of India. The criteria included availability of electricity, public buildings, low population, and so on. To carry out an orga­nized effort of deployment, operation, and maintenance of these television sets, maintenance subcenters and a central cluster headquarters were established in each state. These cluster headquarters acted as nodes for the distribution and maintenance of the community reception system.

Before the SITE mission in India, the satellite was used to perform a variety of health and education television experiments via satellite in the Appalachian area, the Rocky Mountain Region, and Northwest United States including Alaska.34 In July 1975, while it was being shifted eastward along the equator for the SITE mission, the ATS-6 tracked the docked Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft as they orbited the Earth in the Joint US/USSR manned space mission (see chapter 7). It also relayed live television from these spacecraft to the Earth, thus becoming the first satellite to perform such a feat.35 After this it was positioned at 35,900 kilometers over east Africa and controlled from the Goddard Space Flight Center through a ground station in Spain. Since the downlink SITE fre­quency of 860 megahertz could interfere with terrestrial services in Europe, its antenna was pointed eastward toward India and away from Europe, thus avoid­ing interference with European surface broadcasts.

^NaSA’s cooperation with India began with the establishment of satellite track­ing stations and space science. Cognizant of the contributions made by Indian scientists in the field of astronomy and meteorology, a scientific tradition that stretched back several decades, NASA outlined a cooperative program that focused on mutual exploration of the tropical space for scientific data. The cooperation started in the early 1960s with the loan of sounding rockets, launchers, and the training of Indian scientists and engineers at selected NASA facilities dedicated to astronomical and meteorological research. This initial collaboration gradually expanded and more advanced space application projects brought the two demo­cratic countries, in spite of some misgivings, closer together in the common cause of using space sciences and technologies for developing and modernizing India. In the process NASA ended up coproducing a space program that articulated the sentiments of the postcolonial scientific and political elite of India. Conversely, the experience with India imparted a new meaning and architecture of what a space program should be in developing countries in Asia and Latin America.

NASA’s relation with India is contextualized here in the framework of the United States’ relations with India beginning in the early 1950s. The global Cold War and the ambiguities, desires, and tensions of a postcolonial nation-state vying for leadership among the newly decolonized states in the Afro-Asian region forms the essential backdrop to understanding the origins and trajectory of NASA – India relations. Using theoretical underpinnings from postcolonial, diplomatic, and science and technology studies, complemented with oral histories, this chap­ter weaves a narrative describing the motivations, justifications, and the trajectory of NASA’s relations with India.

Two interconnected themes frame its organization. First, the history and dis­course of modernization and development will be used to situate US-India foreign relations in the postwar period. In the wake of the Bandung conference (1955) leaders of newly decolonized states hoped to construct a third, “nonaligned” force in the international arena that was independent of the competing ideolo­gies of progress that defined Cold War rivalry. Bandung also became a platform for developing nations to embrace the mantra of rapid modernization and self­reliance to leapfrog into modernity. This movement was not always welcomed by the United States, which remained at arm’s length from India until its defeat in a

border war with China (1962) and the Chinese nuclear test (1964). The Chinese threat was given a global dimension: the People’s Republic of China (PRC) would become the model for newly liberated countries in the “Third World.” To coun­ter this threat the United States hoped both to accelerate India’s emergence as a major regional power and to use its technological advantage to direct India’s nuclear and missile ambitions into civilian space projects. US-India cooperation in space-based technologies was seen as a prestigious and useful alternative for the development needs of the country. The Indian scientific and political elite, aware of the evolving nonproliferation regime defined by the United States and the Soviet Union, sought to “indigenously” develop their own space technologies both for civilian and military purposes by creating new institutions domestically, and through the transnational traffic of experts, systems, and software. These themes are explored in what follows by tracing NASA’s relations with India on four technological systems—tracking stations and sounding rockets, communi­cation satellites, remote sensing, and launch vehicles.1

The term “software” was generally used for the program content of the satel­lite broadcast. An enormous amount of programming had to be produced for SITE as the satellite was available to India for approximately 1,400 hours of transmission.36 All India Radio, later Doordarshan, took the overall responsibil­ity for producing these programs. The educational programs were produced in three base production centers: Cuttack, Hyderabad, and Delhi. The production of such a large number of programs, keeping in view the basic objectives and the specific audience requirements, was a challenging task. Most of the studio facilities available to SITE were small, underequipped, and understaffed. This fact, coupled with the time pressure for production, created a continuing pres­sure toward easy-to-produce “entertainment” programming, even when audi­ence feedback indicated a preference for the so-called hard core instructional programs.37 Since the software part demanded a lot of attention from the Indian side Frutkin made every attempt to ensure that it was done properly. “When he visited India in January 1975, seven months before the experiment started, he insisted on a physical examination of television studios and programs.”38

Doordarshan formed separate committees to assist program production relat­ing to agriculture, health, and family planning. These committees were helped by institutions like the agricultural universities, teachers training colleges, the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, and so on.39 Other departments and agencies like the Film Division, the National Center for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) under the Department of Education, along with inde­pendent producers, contributed to making film material for the software con­tent of the SITE project. SITE broadcasts regularly reached over 2,300 villages. Their size varied from 600 to 3,000 people, with an average of 1,200 inhabit­ants. Thus, about 2.8 million people had daily access to SITE programming.40 The programs were available for some four hours a day and were telecast twice, morning and evening.

SITE ended on July 31, 1976. Seeing the success of the project the Indian offi­cials and policymakers requested an extension of the program for one more year, but the request was not granted and ATS-6 was pulled back to the American region.

Frutkin, who orchestrated the SITE project for NASA, said that the one-year experiment proved the possibilities of the use of advanced satellites for mass communication. And he clearly knew that it would bring monetary benefits. “We took the satellite back. What was the consequence? India contracted with Ford Aerospace for a commercial satellite to continue their programs. . . the

BROADCAST SATELLITE BRINGS

EDUCATION TO INDIAN VILLAGE

Figure 12.4 ATS receiver and SITE watchers. Source: NASA.

point is, this program not only was an educational lift to India and demonstrated what such a satellite could do, but it brought money back into the U. S. com­mercial contracts for satellites for a number of years.”41 Years earlier in a House Committee report on the implications of satellite communications, he expressed the same view: “I’m quite confident that by virtue of our participation in this experiment, India will look to the U. S. first for the commercial and launching assistance it requires for future programs. And I think this is a very important product of our relationship.”42

SITE was regarded by many as a landmark experiment in the rapid upgrading of education in a developing country (figure 12.4). It became the most innova­tive and potentially the most far-reaching effort to apply advanced Western tech­nologies to the traditional problems of the developing world. For the first time NASA and ISRO cooperated very closely in an effort to determine the feasibility of using experimental communication satellite technology to contribute to the solution of some of India’s major education and development needs.43 For NASA the experiment provided a proof that advanced technology could play a major part in solving the problems of less-developed countries. It was seen as an impor­tant expression of US policy to make the benefits of its space technology directly available to other peoples and also a valuable test of the technology and social mechanisms of community broadcasting. Seeing Indian states to be linguisti­cally divided, the US State Department hoped that the experiment offered India an important and useful domestic tool in the interests of national cohesion. The experiment also stimulated a domestic television manufacturing enterprise in India with important managerial, economic, and technological implications. It provided information and experience of value for future application of educa­tional programs elsewhere in the world.44

Frutkin was emphatic about the value of SITE for other developing countries. “The Indian experiment is, of course, of prime significance for developing coun­tries, those which have not been able to reach large segments of their population, those which have overriding social problems which might be ameliorated through communication and education and particularly those where visual techniques could help to bypass prevalent illiteracy.”45 The SITE experiment played a cru­cial role for India too. The results of the year-long SITE project were evaluated carefully by the Indian government. The data played a major role in determin­ing whether India should continue to develop her own communication satellite program (INSAT) or fall back on the use of more traditional, terrestrial forms of mass communication in order to transmit educational programs to the popu­lace.46 Thanks to SITE the first-generation Indian National Satellite (INSAT-1) series, four in total, was built by Ford Aerospace in the United States.47

The SITE project represented an important experimental step in the develop­ment of a national communications system and of the underlying technological, managerial, and social supporting elements. Following the proposal made by India, Brazil too initiated a proposal for a quite different educational broad­cast experiment utilizing the ATS-6 spacecraft. The project was intended to serve as the development prototype of a system that would broadcast television and radio instructional material to the entire country through a government – owned geostationary satellite.48 Frutkin saw the Indian project and the Brazilian experiment to be a model for other developing countries. In 1976 Indonesia became the first country in the developing world to have its own satellite system, the Palapa satellite system, manufactured by engineers at NASA and at Hughes Aerospace.49

SITE showed India that a high technology could be used for socioeconomic development. It became one justification for building a space program in a poor country—the question became “not whether India could afford a space program but can it afford not to have one”?50 “Modernization” through science and tech­nology was not new to the Indian subcontinent. In more than two centuries of British occupation India witnessed a huge incursion of technologies—railways, telegraph, telephone, radio, plastics, printing presses for “development” and extraction.51 The geosynchronous satellite in postcolonial India can be seen as an extension of the terrestrial technologies that the British used to civilize/ modernize a traditional society. In this case the United States replaced the erst­while imperial power to bring order, control, and “modernization” to the newly decolonized states through digital images using satellite technologies that were far removed from the territorial sovereignty of nation-states.52

One cannot understand postindependent India without reference to the United States. Scholars who have studied the history of Indo-US relations over the last five decades have almost exhausted the English vocabulary to describe the ten­sions that prevailed between the two largest democracies.2 In the Cold War that ensued between the United States and the USSR soon after the independence of India and Pakistan from British rule in 1947, the United States favored an alli­ance with Pakistan owing to its strategic location, bordering the USSR, China, and the Middle Eastern countries. The ensuing partnership was intended to counter any communist expansion from China or the USSR into the South Asian region. While India espoused the policy of nonalignment, Pakistan sided with the United States, joined the Baghdad Pact and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), and received extensive military supplies. This close alli­ance between the United Sates and Pakistan resulted in increased alienation between the United States and India and in the words of Dennis Kux, there was “a failure to understand each other’s political, economic, and geo-strategic complexities,” which ultimately “deepened these asymmetries.”3

However, though the political relations between United States and India seemed “estranged” on the surface during most of the Cold War, it is rather intriguing to see, underneath this “cold peace,” the extensive role the United States played through different government institutions and agencies to modern­ize India and to establish it as an alternative to the communist model adopted by the Soviet Union and, above all, China. As decolonization gathered momentum, the United States felt that it was imperative to stabilize and develop the country along capitalist and democratic ideals so as to win the hearts and minds of mil­lions of people in the Afro-Asian region. This is evident through the massive economic aid India received from the United States during the first two decades of India’s independence and the constant traffic of experts—from science and technology to cultural, linguistic, and economic fields—between the “metropo­lis” and “periphery.”4 Early nuclear cooperation, the origin and development of the Indian space program through NASA, artificial rainmaking experiments, oceanography studies, hybrid seeds and green revolution experiments through the Rockefeller Foundation—all of these technological projects during the 1950s and 1960s can only be seen as part of a sustained attempt by the United States to pull the Indian elite into the Western sphere of influence.

India’s humiliating defeat in the border war with China in 1962 briefly brought the United States and India diplomatically together. The defeat by China was a “Sputnik shock” for the Indians that led to a rapid rise in defense budgets. Renewed importance was given to science and technology for defense purposes. John F. Kennedy‘s administration made use of this opportunity to promote India’s democratic credentials. Kennedy’s policy toward developing countries, India in particular, showed a striking difference compared to previous administrations. While Eisenhower’s secretary of state John Foster Dulles divided countries into pro- and anticommunists, Kennedy and his advisers were sensitive to the needs of new postcolonial states and gave room for the expression of independent for­eign polices by different countries in the developing world. They also believed that economic stability would bring prosperity and political stability that in turn would be a bulwark against expanding communism. However, ongoing distrust of India’s neutrality colored Kennedy’s perception of the country and restricted the scale of his innovative approaches to improved bilateral relations.

Viewed through this geopolitical contextual grid, NASA’s significant coop­erative endeavors were not uniform but ebbed and flowed and were constantly shaped by this larger bilateral foreign policy framework. Significant punctuation points that altered, for better or for worse, NASA’s relations with India were: India’s border war with China—1962; the Chinese nuclear test—1964; the Indo – Pakistan War—1971; India’s first Peaceful Nuclear Explosion (PNE)—1974; the start of the Integrated Guided Missile Development program, IGMDP, in India—1983, after the successful orbiting of India’s satellite Rohini through an indigenously built Satellite Launch Vehicle (SLV-3) in 1980; the impact of the Missile Technology Control Regime, MTCR—1987; the Pokhran II nuclear weapons tests—1998; and the closer diplomatic relations that ensued after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States.

This study of NASA-India relations is divided into two chapters. The first is a chronological narrative spanning five decades, beginning with space sci­ences initiated by NASA in the early 1960s and ending with a scientific moon mission called Chandrayaan I (Moon craft) in 2008. Built and orchestrated by India, Chandrayaan I, carried two NASA-built instruments on its maiden voy­age; it was a proud moment for both parties to see the maturation of a space program that NASA helped to found with the Indian scientific elite in the early 1960s. Chapter 12 describes a joint application satellite project called the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) in 1975-1976, often quoted by NASA officials as a prime example of the agency’s international collaboration. SITE led to a follow-on project in which US business corporations sold commu­nication satellites—the INSAT series—and launches to India.5