The original stimuli to international collaboration were two; both of them were referred to in the episode described at the start of this book and are illustrated in table 1.1 . First, there was the wish, inspired by major international initiatives such as the International Geophysical Year (IGY), and coherent with an abiding thread in American foreign policy, to engage other countries, especially friendly and neutral countries, in an exciting new scientific and technological adventure where they could benefit from American leadership and largesse.30 Second, there was the need for global coverage in some applications and for a worldwide tracking and data handling network to support NASA’s multiple space missions from planetary probes to human exploration. Sunny Tsiao has recently covered the latter dimension in depth.31 This book will concentrate on the scientific and technological aspects of international collaboration in scientific and applications satellites and in human spaceflight from the creation of NASA into the twenty-first century.
In 1965 Arnold Frutkin published an important book in which he identified a number of criteria for a successful international collaborative project.32 Twenty years later they were presented more or less unchanged as the basic guidelines for NASA’s relationship with its partners.33 In this summary form they read:
• Designation by each participating government of a government agency for the negotiation and supervision of joint efforts;
• conduct of projects and activities having scientific validity and mutual interest;
• agreement upon specific projects rather than generalized programs;
• acceptance of financial responsibility by each participating agency for its own contributions to joint projects;
• provision for the widest and most practicable dissemination of the results of cooperative projects.
This list requires some elaboration.
The first requirement was that NASA have just one interlocutor to deal with in the partner country, and an interlocutor that had official authority to engage the resources, human, financial, and industrial in the collaborative project. Frutkin was aware that, at the dawn of the space age, many individuals, pressure groups, and government departments would be jockeying for control of the civilian space program, as they had in the United States. He wanted to avoid NASA becoming enrolled in these domestic conflicts or, indeed, unwittingly being used to promote the interests of one party over the other. Hence his reluctance to negotiate with anyone but an official representative. This policy, coupled with NASA’s offer to fly foreign payloads in March 1959 (see chapter 2), not only stimulated the creation of space programs in foreign countries, but also encouraged the national authorities to designate one body as responsible for international collaboration, and in some cases led to the rapid establishment of a national or regional space agency. Whereas Frutkin originally left the door open for collaborating with “a central, civilian, and government sponsored, if not governmental authority,” by 1986 space agencies were so widespread internationally that NASA could simply designate them as its preferred partners.34
The second criterion was obviously meant to make scientific exploration, not political exploitation, the core of any collaborative space program. Frutkin was emphatic that each country “poll its scientific community for relevant ideas” and, in consultation with NASA, “develop full-fledged proposals for cooperative experiments having a character of their own.”35 This would also deflect charges that the United States was using its superior space capabilities to “dominate” its partners.
This concern also informed the criterion that all agreements should be on a project-by-project basis. An open-ended engagement to collaborate could lead to NASA committing itself to costly projects that were of no interest to US investigators. By evaluating each proposal on a case-by-case basis, it could be assessed for its novelty and compatibility with the general thrust of the American space effort, so contributing to the knowledge base of both partners. For that reason too, both would be willing to invest resources in their part of the project without seeking help from the other. This clause, summarized by the slogan “no exchange of funds,” was a cornerstone of NASA policy, and a touchstone for the willingness of its partners to take space collaboration seriously and to invest their (often scarce) resources in a project.
The demand for full disclosure in the fifth and last criterion listed above flows from this. It was also meant to ensure that the joint program did not touch directly on matters of national security at home or in the foreign country. Frutkin was well aware of the tight interconnection between the civil and the military in space matters. The requirement that the results of any joint effort be disseminated as widely as possible was at once a gesture to this commingling and an attempt to carve out a space for civil, peaceful activities that could be conducted internationally alongside military, and so predominantly national programs.
Frutkin’s principle of “clean technological and managerial interfaces” was an ingenious solution to resolving NASA’s two, potentially conflicting, missions as mandated by the Space Act: to collaborate without jeopardizing leadership. Leadership depended on the capacity to define the frontier of space science and technology. Scientific and technological collaboration, unless carefully managed, could undermine that leadership. By maintaining “clean” technological interfaces, and by regulating knowledge flows across them, NASA was able to protect its cutting-edge science and technology to secure American preeminence while sharing knowledge and skills that foreign partners still valued.
It is not surprising that of 38 international cooperative spacecraft projects undertaken or agreed on between 1958 and 1983, 33 were with Western Europe,
Table 1.2 Benefits of NASA’s international programs in Western Europe Scientific/ Technical Benefits
Attracts brainpower to work on challenging research problems
Shapes foreign programs to be compatible with US effort by encouraging others to “do it our way”
Limits foreign funds for space activities that are competitive or less compatible with US space interests
Obtains outstanding experiments from non-US investigators
Obtains coordinated or simultaneous observations from multiple investigators
Opens doors for US scientists to participate in foreign programs
Economic Benefits
Has contributed over $2 billion in cost savings and contributions to NASA’s space effort Improves the balance of trade by creating new markets for US aerospace products
Political Benefits
Creates a positive image of the United States among scientific, technical, and official elites Encourages European unity by working with multinational institutions Reinforces the image of US openness in contrast to the secrecy of the Soviet space program Uses space technology as a tool of diplomacy to serve broader foreign policy objectives
Source: Adapted from John Logsdon, “US-European Cooperation in Space Science: A 25-Year Perspective,” Science 223:4631 (January 6, 1984): 11-16.
given its relative wealth and industrial capacity. Of a total of 73 experiments with foreign principal investigators, 52 were with this region. Canada, Japan, and the Soviet Union, along with several developing countries made up the balance.36 This was quite unlike a program like Atoms for Peace that proliferated research and some power reactors throughout the developed and developing world in the late 1950s driven by foreign policy and commercial concerns that had little regard for indigenous capability. This difference was deliberate: Frutkin was emphatic that space collaboration should never become a form of foreign aid, so effectively restricting the scope of NASA’s activities to industrialized or rapidly industrializing countries with a strong science and engineering base.
This also explains the insistence that collaborative experiments should be of “mutual interest” (second criterion above). How could a foreign experiment that had “a character of its own” be of some value to NASA and to American investigators? For Frutkin, it had to dovetail with the broad interests of the American program, if only to justify the expenditure of US dollars. Thus, each cooperative project had to be “a constructive element of the total space program of the United States space agency, approved by the appropriate program officials and justifying the expenditure of funds for the US portion of the joint undertaking.”37
John Logsdon has put together some of the “constructive” contributions that international collaboration, notably with Western Europe, made between 1958 and 1983, not only to the US space effort as such, but also to the American economy and to the pursuit of American foreign policy. His findings are summarized in table 1.2. This table not only shows the concrete ways in which foreign experiments were to be of “mutual interest” scientifically, but also draws attention to the economic and political benefits of space collaboration, including channeling foreign resources down
avenues that would not undermine American scientific and technological leadership, creating markets, projecting a positive image of the United States abroad, and promoting foreign policy agendas, including the postwar integration of Europe.
These putative benefits were not always welcomed by those actually engaged in the practicalities of international collaboration. American scientists and engineers, flush with the enormous success of their own program, feared that their partners were less capable than they were, and might not fulfill their commitments. They balked at the additional layers of managerial complexity, and the assumed added cost of international projects. As resources for NASA’s space science program shrunk in the 1970s they sometimes resented the presence of foreign payloads on NASA satellites, suspecting that they had been chosen less on the basis of merit than because they were free to the agency. And they noted that by encouraging foreign powers to develop space capabilities NASA was undermining American leadership in high-technology industry: it was producing its own competitors.38 International collaboration was not uncontested at home, particularly as NASA’s partners gained in maturity, and were competitors as much as collaborators.
The weight of the several factors (scientific and technical/economic/politi – cal) that were brought into play in the first two decades of international collaboration varied depending on circumstances. A scientific experiment built with a foreign principal investigator and paid for by a national research council—like Geiss’s solar wind experiment on Apollo 11—raised few if any broader economic or political issues. Complex and expensive projects calling for major technological developments and managerial inputs were at the other end of the spectrum.
The 1975 Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) is an example of this (see chapter 7). Often reduced to simply a “handshake in space,” it involved docking an American Apollo and a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft with each other in orbit 120 miles above the earth. During the two days in which the hatch between Apollo and Soyuz was open, three American astronauts and two Soviet cosmonauts exchange pleasantries and gifts, and conducted a few scientific experiments together. This was above all a political statement, a concrete manifestation of the new climate of detente with the Soviet Union being pursued by President Nixon and his national security adviser and secretary of state Henry Kissinger.39
Political concerns also provided a trigger for two other major projects in the 1960s and 1970s. One was Helios, the $100-million venture to send two probes built in West Germany, and weighing over 200 kilograms each, to within 45 million kilometers of the sun (see chapter 2). Helios was the most ambitious joint project agreed to in the 1960s between NASA and a foreign partner. It was the result of an invitation for space collaboration made by President Lyndon Johnson to Chancellor Ludwig Erhard during a state banquet at the White House in December 1965. For Erhard a major civil space project was one way of reducing German obligations to buy military equipment from the United States as required by the offset agreements between the two countries. For Johnson it was a gesture of support for America’s most faithful ally in Europe at a time when the Vietnam War was increasingly unpopular, and the French were increasingly hostile to NATO. Of course, once the official offer had been made these political concerns receded into the background. Scientific and technical success, however, should not be decoupled from the political will that created the essential window of opportunity for scientists, engineers, and industry to embark on such an ambitious project so early in Germany’s postwar space history with NASA’s help.
The same can be said of the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE), another impressive international project that was agreed on with the Indian authorities in 1970 (see chapter 12). Here an advanced application satellite (ATS-6) broadcast television programs to village receivers directly, or via relay stations provided by the Indian authorities. For India the satellite was an ingenious way of bringing educational television, produced locally and dealing with local needs such as family planning, into otherwise inaccessible rural areas, while giving an important popular boost to the indigenous space program. For the United States it served a variety of political and economic needs. It promoted the modernization of India as an alternative model to China for developing countries. It was part of broader strategy to channel Indian resources down the path of civilian technologies. And, by withdrawing the satellite from service after a year, NASA successfully encouraged the Indian government to buy additional models from US business. SITE, while being of undoubted benefit to various constituencies in India, also served multiple geopolitical needs for the United States in the region.
In all three of the cases just described, while political (and economic) motives were part of the broader context inspiring the collaboration in question, they were essentially left behind or bracketed during the scientific and technical definition of the projects and their implementation. Once the programs got under way the fundamental maxims of clean interfaces and no exchanges of funds dominated development.
There was a notable exception to this: the major initiative, inspired by NASA administrator Tom Paine, to engage Europe at the technological core of the post – Apollo program between 1969 and 1973 (see chapters 4-6). In a nutshell, with NASA’s budget shrinking dramatically after the “golden years” of the Apollo lunar missions, Paine hoped to get Europe to contribute as much 10 percent (or $1 billion) of an ambitious program that initially included a space station and a shuttle to service it. Foreign participation would also help win the support of a reluctant Congress and president for NASA’s plans. And it would undermine those who insisted that Europe needed independent access to space—Europeans were told that they were wasting valuable resources by developing their own expendable launcher to compete with a reusable shuttle that, it was claimed, would reduce the cost per kilogram into orbit by as much as a factor of ten. For several years joint working groups invested hundreds of hours discussing a variety of projects. Some, like having European industry build parts of the orbiter wing, threw clean interfaces to the winds. Others, like the suggestion that Europe build a space tug to transfer payloads from the shuttle’s low-earth orbit to a geosynchronous orbit, a project of interest to the Air Force, touched directly on matters of national security. The entire process was reconfigured soon after President Nixon authorized the development of the shuttle in January 1972. Clean interfaces and no exchange of funds imposed their logic on the discussion (and were reinforced by anxieties about European capabilities to fulfill commitments and by fears that NASA was becoming entangled in unwieldy and costly joint management schemes). The European “contribution” was reevaluated, many existing projects were cancelled, and Germany decided to take the lead in building Spacelab, a shirt-sleeve scientific laboratory that fitted into the shuttle’s cargo bay and that satisfied all the standard criteria of international collaboration. So too did Canada’s construction of the Remote Manipulator System (RMS), a robotic arm that grabbed satellites in space, or lifted them from the shuttle’s payload bay prior to deployment. Once built both Spacelab and the RMS were handed over entirely to NASA to operate.
The willingness to share technology in the post-Apollo program (and also in support of the European Launcher Development Organization in the mid- 1960s—see chapter 3) was part of a general sentiment in Washington that something had to be done to close the technological gap that had opened up between the two sides of the Atlantic at the time. Space technology was seen as a crucial sector for closing this gap.40 Technological sharing would undermine European criticisms of American dominance in high-tech areas, while helping to build a European aerospace industry that could eventually serve as a reliable partner sharing costs in civil and military areas: Europe would assume some of the burden for its own defense.