Category NASA in the World

The Locus and Scope of International Collaboration

NASA’s collaborative effort was originally located institutionally in the Office of International Programs. The first director, Henry E. Billingsley, was quickly replaced by Arnold W. Frutkin in September 1959. Frutkin joined NASA from the National Academy of Sciences. There he had been the deputy director of the US National Committee for the International Geophysical Year and had also served as an adviser to the academy’s delegate to the first and second meetings of COSPAR.

Frutkin had a long and distinguished career at NASA. In 1978 NASA adminis­trator Robert Frosch appointed him deputy associate administrator, then associate administrator for external relation. The post was not to his liking, and Frutkin left government service shortly thereafter, in June 1979.21 Some have suggested that his resistance to collaborating with Japan, which was emerging as major global power (see chapters 9 and 10), led to his relocation and his eventual decision to resign. His activities were taken over by Norman Terrell for a couple of years, before Kenneth Pedersen joined the agency as director of the International Affairs Division of the Office of External Relations. Pedersen had been an assistant pro­fessor of political science at San Diego State University from 1968 to 1971, before taking on various policy analysis activities in the federal government.

Frutkin laid down the basic principles that guided NASA’s international collab­orative projects for two decades in which the United States was the leading space power in the free world. Pedersen frequently remarked that he was dealing with a different geopolitical situation in which the United States’ historical rival for space superiority, the Soviet Union, was showing a greater willingness to open out to international partners and in which the space programs in other regions and coun­tries, notably Western Europe and Japan, had matured significantly. In September 1985 Pedersen was named deputy associate administrator for external relations and was replaced by Richard Barnes, who was Frutkin’s right-hand man during the 1960s and 1970s.22 In 1991 Pedersen returned to academia and was replaced as associate administrator for external relations by Margaret (Peggy) Finarelli.23 Finarelli joined NASA in 1981 after serving in various government agencies. She was NASA’s chief negotiator for the international agreements with Canada, Europe, and Japan regarding cooperation in the Space Station Freedom program.24

Over the past two decades the management of NASA’s external relations has been reorganized several times reflecting the increasing scope and com­plexity of the agency’s international activities. In 2010 they were handled by the Office of International and Interagency Relations. Associate Administrator Michael O’Brien and his deputy Al Condes watched over a variety of activities that include, for example, distinct divisions for “international efforts to pio­neer approaches in aeronautics research and the exploration of the Moon and Mars and beyond,” for “international and interagency policy issues” for science, and for the administration of NASA’s export control program. NASA had field offices, not only in Europe, but in Japan and Russia too.25

The scope of NASA’s international collaboration is truly vast. In 1970, when many countries only had embryonic programs of their own, Arnold Frutkin reported that NASA had already collaborated with scientists in 70 different countries, and had established 225 interagency or executive agreements with 35 countries.26 Addressing a congressional subcommittee in 1981, Ken Pederson remarked that NASA’s international activities had grown to over 1,000 agree­ments with 100 countries, and that these programs had resulted in more than $2 billion of economic benefits for the country. Michael O’Brien has recently counted over 4,000 international agreements of all kinds.27

Looking only at scientific collaboration with Europe, we find that this has increased rapidly in recent times. John Logsdon counted just 33 projects between 1958 and 198 3.28 Roger Launius later reported that there were 139 cooperative agreements with European nations between 1962 and 1997, that is, about 100 agreements were signed between 1984 and 1997.29

Numbers alone cannot capture this immense enterprise. Table 1.1 surveys the range of international activities that NASA was engaged in for the first 26 years of its existence. These include infrastructural components like tracking and data acquisition, and launch provision. They cover collaboration in science using bal-

Type of Arrangement

A

B

Type of Arrangement

A

B

Cooperative arrangements

Reimbursable launchings

Cooperative spacecraft projects

8

38

• Launching of non-US spacecraft

15

95

Experiments on NASA missions

• Foreign launchings of NASA spacecraft

1

4

• Experiments with foreign principal investigators

14

73

Tracking and data acquisition

• US experiments with foreign coinvestigators or team

11

56

NASA overseas tracking stations/facilities

20

48

members

• US experiments on foreign spacecraft

3

14

NASA-funded SAO optical and laser tracking facilities

16

21

Cooperative sounding rocket projects

22

1774a

Reimbursable tracking arrangements

Joint development projects

5

9

• Support provided by NASA

5

48

Cooperative ground-based projects

• Support received by NASA

3

12

• Remote sensing

53

163

Personnel exchanges

• Communication satellite

51b

19

Resident research associateships

43

1417

• Meteorological satellite

44c

11

International fellowships

358

• Geodynamics

43

20

Technical training

5

985

• Space plasma

38

10

Foreign visitors

131

85,177

• Atmospheric study

14

11

• Support of manned space flights

21

2

• Solar system exploration

8

10

• Solar terrestrial and astrophysics

25

11

continued

Type of Arrangement A B Type of Arrangement A B

Cooperative balloons and airborne projects

• Balloon flights

9

14

• Airborne observations

12

17

International solar energy projects

24

9

Cooperative aeronautical projects

5

40

US/USSR coordinated space projects

1

9

US/China space projects

1

5

Scientific and technical information exchanges

70

3

Notes: A: Number of countries/international organizations

B: Number of projects/investigations/actions completed or in progress as of January 1, 1984 a Number of actual launches

b AID-sponsored international applications demonstration c Automatic picture transmission stations.

Source: Anon., 26 Years of NASA International Programs (Washington, DC: NASA, n. d.). Thanks to Dick Barnes for providing a copy of this booklet.

loons, sounding rockets and satellites and applications in areas like remote sens­ing, communications and meteorology.

In addition NASA has sponsored an education and training program through fellowships, research associateships, and by hosting foreign visitors. There is no doubt that the agency has played a fundamental role in encouraging and strengthening the exploration and exploitation of space throughout the world, or at least among friendly nations. NASA has helped many countries kick-start their space programs and has enriched them once they had found their own feet. More than that, it has helped give thousands of people in over one hundred nations some stake in space, some sense of contributing, albeit in perhaps a small way, to the challenges and opportunities, the excitement and the dangers that the conquest of space inspires.

European Participation in the Post-Apollo. Program, 1969-1970: The Paine Years

The negotiations over European contributions to the post-Apollo program concerned the biggest single attempt to integrate a foreign nation or region into the technological core of the American space program during the first decades of NASA’s existence.1 These discussions were carried on for about three years, and engaged several NASA administrators: Thomas Paine, from October 1969 until he left NASA in September 1970; George Low, who temporarily led the organization while a successor was found; and then James C. Fletcher. They also engaged multiple arms of the administration: NASA of course, as the lead agency, but also the State Department, the Department of Defense, the Office of Telecommunications Policy, the National Security Council, and, hovering in the wings, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which assumed extensive powers in the Nixon administration.2 They were of deep concern to industry. And they were dominated by issues of technology transfer and launcher policy, here embedded in a framework that touched on matters of international diplo­macy, national security, and American technological, commercial, and political leadership of the free world.

In a speech to the United Nations in September 1969 President Nixon called for the “internationalization of man’s epic venture in space.” Feeling himself mandated to broaden the base of the post-Apollo program, Paine made a con­certed effort to seek international partners, and made his case with passion to the Australians, the Canadians, the Japanese, and the West Europeans. It was the last who were best positioned to take advantage of it. European engineers, managers, and policymakers, who had learnt so much from NASA in the early 1960s, were deeply impressed by the Apollo missions: the United States, it seemed, could do anything it wanted in space. The gap in technological, engineering, and mana­gerial capacity that had opened up between the two sides of the Atlantic in the space sector had now become a chasm—and yet here they were being invited to join in NASA’s next major program. Their reactions combined awe at American achievements, with pride that they were deemed worthy of inclusion in the next leap forward, and with fear born of uncertainty. Given their limited resources, if they made a major commitment to NASA’s post-Apollo program they risked sacrificing an indigenous space program of their own devising, above all an

autonomous launch capability. If they rejected the American offer they would be doomed to an inferior position, always collaborating from a position of weakness with the world’s space leaders. NSAM 294 and NSAM 398 were suggestive of what that could entail: a vulnerability to the constraints on international col­laboration imposed by US commercial, political, and security concerns, which could mean launchers denied, technology and managerial skills withheld, and prime contractors always based on US soil.

The account that follows will flesh out these more general considerations in greater detail. It is divided into three chapters. The first covers the period from the end of 1969 to early 1971, when the budget appropriations for FY1972 were finalized—and much to NASA’s distress, post-Apollo did not figure largely in them.3 The second chapter covers 1971. While some progress was made on defin­ing the parameters of US-European collaboration, the year was dominated by a separate if related concern: the implications of the definitive Intelsat agreements (accepted in principle by 73 governments on May 21, 1971) on the availability of US launchers for European telecommunications satellites. Finally, there is the period inaugurated by President’s Nixon’s statement on January 5, 1972, that the space shuttle (more precisely the STS, Space Transport System) would be the centerpiece of NASA’s post-Apollo program. Poised to move quickly, NASA rap­idly took advantage of the new situation. Plans for a major technological collab­orative project were refined in a series of meetings with experts from both sides of the Atlantic. A variety of possible platforms for a European contribution were explored, including the construction, under the guidance of an American prime contractor, of parts of the orbiter itself. Alternatives included the European- led construction of a “space tug,” an orbit-to-orbit vehicle intended to ferry hardware and people from the shuttle’s low-earth orbit to the moon, the geo­stationary orbit, and so on, and a Sortie Can or a RAM (Research Applications Module), a capsule or a palette for doing space science that would be lodged in the shuttle’s cargo bay.

The managerial, industrial, and technological complexities of direct par­ticipation in the orbiter soon overwhelmed NASA’s wish to have any partners directly engaged in building its new space transport system. The agency also started having grave doubts about the wisdom of developing the tug, which had emerged as Europe’s preferred contribution to the program. Taking the bull by the horns, in June 1972 it was announced, to the distress not to say anger of many of its partners, that the United States could only support a European effort to build a “sortie can” for space science experiments, while encouraging international participation in the use of the shuttle system. Germany decided to take advantage of this offer, and took the lead in developing what later became known as Spacelab. The French, by contrast, were now even more emphatic that meaningful technological collaboration with the United States was impossible. The withdrawal of the tug, and the conditions under which the United States would launch foreign communication satellites, played into the hands of those who were seeking political justification for an independent European launcher program. The French authorities, yielding to pressures from engineers in their national space agency and the Gaullist wings of the political elite, took prime responsibility for developing a European heavy launcher called Ariane, which made its first successful maiden flight on Christmas eve, 1979.

An Alternative Collaborative Project: Aerosat

Kissinger’s insistence that NASA should not restrict its options for collaborat­ing with Europe to the post-Apollo program brought the ongoing negotiations over a jointly developed aeronautical satellite system into focus at the end of 1971. The idea of a NASA/ESRO suite of satellites to handle air traffic over the Atlantic was one of the collaborative ventures promoted by NASA administrator Tom Paine in his early enthusiasm for international projects in the post-Apollo period.78 By August 1971, and notwithstanding the multiple stakeholders and conflicting interests involved, it was agreed in Madrid (to cite the European report of the meeting) that a preoperational aeronautical satellite system would be “jointly developed, funded, managed, implemented and evaluated” by Europe through ESRO and by the United States through the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration), along with other interested governments.79 Europe was pre­pared to assume 50 percent of the full program cost, and although the prime contractor would be chosen by open competitive bidding (and might well not be European), it was stipulated that European partners be included in the scheme and would obtain a “fair and reasonable” share of the contracts. Liberal provi­sion was made for technology sharing. “For the first time,” wrote the science correspondent of the prestigious French daily Le Monde, “co-operation with the United States in the field of application satellites seems to be getting under way under conditions of equality.”80

The assault on this project was again spearheaded by the OMB, along with Whitehead and Flanigan.81 They wanted American industry to drive space activities, and they were hostile to the idea that the FAA and ESRO would be co-owners of the system. They wanted it to be owned privately and leased to governments. In line with the associated concern to restrict technology transfer, they would have no truck with the idea that if the Europeans paid half the pro­gram costs they should be entitled to their fair share of industrial work. There was to be no constraint on US industry’s competitive advantage and no transfer of technology from the United States to Europe, as would be inevitable in a joint program. They also objected to the idea that the satellite should be restricted to aircraft, citing economic efficiency: the Office of Telecommunications Policy wanted a single system for both maritime and aviation services. Thus armed, Whitehead and his allies demanded an in-depth policy review before ratifica­tion of the FAA-ESRO memorandum of understanding (MoU) that had been drafted in Washington on August 20, 1971. As Frutkin noted in his diary in October, “European confidence in cooperative projects has been dented by the long delay in our responding to the Lefevre letter, by the obvious uncertainty of the shuttle’s future and by US behavior on an aeronautical satellite.”82 In November Johnson warned Kissinger that if the United States withdrew from Aerosat at this stage it would have serious repercussions “not only our future co-operation in post-Apollo and other space related activities, but on overall US-European relations.”83

In 1971 the enthusiasm for post-Apollo cooperation that Tom Paine had injected into US-European relations began to wane. The gap widened between the considerable progress made at the technical level between joint groups of experts spearheaded by NASA and the increasing doubts raised at the level of high policy. Whitehead and Flanigan, with the support of David and Fletcher, became increasingly and effectively vocal in their opposition to close collabora­tion. Their fear that the United States would sacrifice its technological lead, and that US industry would be harmed, was mingled with the White House staffers’ distrust of NASA. In their eyes NASA wanted Europe in the shuttle program to protect it from domestic political cuts, even cancellation, and was accord­ingly willing to give away American technology at ten cents on the dollar, as Whitehead put it. Their pressure on NASA was amplified by Charyk’s demand on behalf of Comsat that Johnson tighten up the conditions under which the United States would launch foreign telecommunication satellites before the definitive Intelsat agreements were signed in May.

The European position was summed up by Secretary of State Rogers in a memo to the president in January 1972. As he put it, “[T]he prospects for sub­stantial European contributions to the post-Apollo program are clouded [. . .] by residual European doubts about whether our offer of launch assistance is suf­ficiently adequate to permit Europe to forgo the development of its own large and expensive rockets.” Delays in reaching agreement on the Aerosat project were also being read “as an ominous sign concerning our future intentions on space cooperation.”84 In fact the Europeans had now realized that they would not be treated as privileged partners under the Intelsat framework. The State Department would be flexible, but it would not give them a formal cast-iron guarantee to launch a separate European comsat system. European space policy for the next decade was further complicated by the disastrous failure of the Europa rocket in November. Divisions were emerging between those who felt it was important to work with the United States in an advanced technological proj­ect come what may (led by Germany) and those who saw little or no advantage in it (like Britain and France, for different reasons). An important policy initiative was needed to energize the decision-making process. The official authorization of the shuttle program in 1972 by President Nixon did just that.

Robotic and Human Spaceflight

Staff at Ames crafted several Cosmos biosatellite experiments specifically to complement projects on US human-rated spacecraft, beginning with the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. James Connolly, chief of the Payload and Facilities Engineering Branch of the Life Sciences Division, functioned as ARC’s project manager on Bion satellite experiments from 1986 through 1993. When inter­viewed, Connolly recalled some of the pros and cons of flying instruments on human or robotic craft. For one thing, “you have a lot more paperwork on a Shuttle mission,” he explained, due to the safety considerations for astronauts. Bion satellites also had a quick turnaround: whereas the 3-4 year lead time on a Shuttle mission afforded advantages for more complex instrument and experi­ment development, the average Bion satellite permitted only 12-18 months preparation time (allowing for quicker turnover or faster revisions to studies). In the end, ARC staff found that they could use Soviet biosatellites as something of a test bed for Shuttle instruments. Connolly elaborated: “One advantage that we saw in the Cosmos program, as compared to the Shuttle, was that we could acquire technology components, do proof-of-concept development of a system, fly it, and then transition it into a Shuttle mission if the opportunity presented itself.”83 Looking to the future of biomedical cooperation, Connolly predicted that transferring experiments to the International Space Station would pose an entirely new set of demands on ARC equipment, having to function in space for long-duration flights of roughly 90 days (as opposed to the two – or three-week runs on Bion or the Shuttle). “On the Shuttle, we don’t even consider changing out a filter. We have done some inflight refurbishment of water supplies and, of course, there were animal food change-outs that we dealt with in shorter flights.” Perhaps these considerations contributed to his preference for robotic craft: “I’m in favor of as much automation as you can get,” Connolly explained. Automated experiments allowed for greater consistency in operations and when sent on manned missions, require less attention from crews. Although auto­mated missions accelerated the rate of experimentation and eliminated a consid­erable amount of red tape, biosatellites did have their costs.

For the most part, materials and organisms could only be viewed on Bions, not manipulated. This meant that in the event of a malfunction, it was nearly impossible for investigators to repair equipment. In spite of the scrupulous quality control and the necessity for high-reliability hardware to overcome such risks, the flight of nonhuman spaceflight experiments placed a significantly smaller burden on NASA budgets than did manned.84 This relatively low-bud­get ceiling (paired with an equally low profile in the public eye) might well have made it possible for Bion cooperation to continue, even after NASA/Soviet Academy of Sciences 1977 Bilateral Agreement in the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space lapsed in 1982.85

Carter, China, and "Inducing Soviet Flexibility"

NASA and the Soviet Academy of Sciences signed the 1977 Bilateral Agreement in the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space as diplomatic relations were unraveling rapidly at the state level. In the late 1970s, President Jimmy Carter observed Soviet human rights violations against the Polish Solidarity movement with increasing frustration. This, coupled with involvement in conflicts in Ethiopia, Angola, Shaba, Yemen, Cambodia, Cuba, and Iran all reached a climax with the December 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. Cold War historian Odd Arne Westad characterizes Carter’s response as that of “an activist president who was deter­mined to make the Soviets pay a high price for their invasion of Afghanistan.”86 The Carter administration retaliated on a number of diplomatic fronts: recalling their ambassador, boycotting the Moscow Olympics, suspending the Senate con­sideration of SALT II, discontinuing various cultural and economic exchanges, restricting fishing rights in US waters, effecting an embargo on high-tech exports to the Soviet Union, and, most alarmingly, cancelling a 17-million-ton shipment of grain.87

At this time, President Carter flirted with capitalizing on Nixon’s advance­ments in China to isolate and embarrass the Soviet Union as much as possible. Pondering cooperation across a broad spectrum of activities including space and nuclear energy, the Carter administration sought to reinforce diplomatic rela­tions with the People’s Republic of China. American technologies, together with scientific cooperation, were intended to “serve as a positive and constructive force in deepening US relations with the People’s Republic, exerting influence on the PRC’s future domestic and international orientation and, perhaps, mod­erating Soviet foreign policy conduct.” In particular, scientific and technological exchanges stood to “place the USSR on notice that provocative Soviet behavior could stimulate increasingly intimate Sino-US ties with security overtones.”88

In the fall of 1978, the president’s Policy Review Committee met regarding science and technology programs with China. Acting on the president’s instruc­tions that they “move ahead” with student exchanges, technical aid in the field of energy, and space, the committee communicated a few suggestions. In particular, they noted that the Departments of State and Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency, and NASA each agreed that the United States could consider “allowing the PRC to procure” two 12-transponder C-band Westar Class satellites “from US industry under carefully designed controls that would limit undesirable tech­nology transfer and unfavorable domestic and international reactions.”89 The satellite would be purchased and delivered in “turnkey” condition—that is to say, in geosynchronous orbit. Though no satellite hardware would enter the PRC, the committee did allow that US tracking-telemetry-control ground sys­tem technologies would have to be exported. As of negotiations in 1978, the Chinese would “pay all costs associated with activities which benefit them,” and the United States would do likewise.

Up-to-date geosynchronous telecommunications satellites were, in Science Advisor Frank Press’s opinion, the “definitive test of future US-PRC scientific and technological relationships.” Carter also considered PRC interest in acquiring a Landsat ground station, capable of receiving multispectral data from the 1981 Landsat-D thematic mapper.90 At the same time, the Department of Commerce began meeting with counterparts in the PRC discussing possible fields of sci­entific collaboration including metrology, meteorology, oceanography, fish­ery research and management, data center management and data interchange, and patents.91 The committee acknowledged that these actions were calculated specifically to “help induce Soviet flexibility.” Regarding the so-called Soviet – American Factor in Sino-American cooperation, the Committee reported:

In [Soviet] propaganda they condemned the Frank Press visit and they can be expected to cast specific projects in the worst possible light. Yet, the prospects of expanded S&T contact may have helped induce Soviet flexibility. Clearly, they will be especially sensitive to any Sino-US collaboration which they see as enhancing the PRC’s military capabilities vis-a-vis the Soviet Union.92

While this “turnkey” export of satellites to China never came to be, it does illus­trate the lengths the Carter administration would consider.

Industry and International Relations

US and Russian cooperation in the Space Station entails not only government to government cooperation but also industry to industry agreements. The bottom line is that while government agreements will formalize cooperation, the actual building of the station will be accomplished primarily by private industry.

—NASA administrator Dan Goldin95

The case of Ukraine is instructive. Trade restrictions might function as one of many American bureaucratic mechanisms channeling the flows of US resources or they might lessen the negative impact of foreign competition on American firms. However, the advantages of American protectionism diminished with the increase in joint ventures between Russia and the United States. At the same time, US aerospace firms began to vertically integrate: launch providers merged with satellite builders. Initially, as of 1992 one policy analyst noted the division of the aerospace industry into two powerful blocs: General Dynamics, Martin Marietta, McDonnell Douglas, and Rockwell international demanded strong protectionist policies against Chinese and Russian boosters. Hughes, Loral, and General Electric Aerospace, however, lobbied for access to the less-expensive foreign launchers.96

The years 1993 through 1995 brought the merger/acquisition of sev­eral key firms: Martin-Marietta acquired General Electric Aerospace, then General Dynamics. In 1995 Lockheed (which in turn had been collaborating with Energia and Khrunichev) merged with the Martin consortium forming International Launch Services. Thus, the Lockheed-Martin group pressed for the total elimination of Proton launch quotas while Boeing (and its new subsid­iaries McDonnell Douglas and Rockwell) entered into business arrangements with Ukraine’s Sea Launch, marketing the Zenit.97

Globalization is by no means a new phenomenon for the aerospace indus­try, which for decades has seen joint ventures in aviation research, development, and production.98 However the trade liberalization of the 1990s brought US and former Soviet complexes together for the first time. Hughes, Lockheed, Martin Marietta, and General Electric had been key figures in Cold War era reconnaissance, military communications, and early warnings satellites.99 With Europe’s market share rising steadily and defense spending dropping precipi­tously, the industrial lobby, proponents of defense preparedness, and congressmen became increasingly concerned. As of 1969, US firms held an astounding 91 per­cent of the world market share. In 1993 this figure had dropped to 67 percent.100 What follows gives nuance to the significance of US-Russian partnerships.

In 1993, the United States permitted Russian firms for the first time to launch American telecommunications satellites into geosynchronous orbit, providing they sold their launch services at a cost comparable to Western prices. In 1998, Ukraine and Russia entered into Technical Safeguard Agreements designed to protect American satellite and missile technology and allow US industry to launch satellites from foreign locations. Between 1997 and 2006, Proton launchers captured a market share equal to the Atlas (11-12 percent and 10-12 percent, respectively), but it must be recalled that the Proton was by way of joint ventures, now also an American product.

It is indisputable that Russia’s rise on the world market is due, at least in part, to Russian-American joint ventures that brought about a convergence of Western management, marketing, and perhaps most important, customers. These factors were evident in the logic and execution of the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission for Economic and Technical Cooperation. However the American aerospace industry stood to gain as well—not so much by opening new markets, as finding new business partners. These included the commercial space launch ventures of Lockheed-Khrunichev-Energia (ILS) and the Energia-Boeing-Yuzhnoe venture, Sea Launch.101 Additionally, Pratt-Whitney, Rockwell, and Aerojet initiated busi­ness deals with the former Soviet Space complex, while the Russian manufactur­ers of the Cosmos, Cyclone, and Rokot launch vehicles each found international partners to launch their vehicles. Analysts speculated that Europe’s market share would drop from roughly 50 percent in 1996 to 25 percent in 2006.102

Thus, the United States helped shape the formation of a privatized aero­space industry in the former Soviet Union. The US government opened itself and American firms to Russian space industries, but—as mentioned earlier—in exchange, the United States demanded the formation of a civil space agency as well as agreements concerning compliance in the demilitarization of former weapons facilities. It is at best doubtful that their optimistic wishes for weapons control were successful. Nonetheless, the United States attempted to woo the remnants of the Soviet Union into military and economic compliance by offering a combination of trade and fiscal incentives. With it came more than $760 mil­lion (as detailed in table 8.2) to buttress their faltering aerospace infrastructure

In the long run, these government dollars were but a drop in the bucket—or more aptly a foot in the door—compared with the profit intake of private indus­try.103 As of 1998, Western customers were paying more than $880 million a year for space services. This accounted for roughly 70-80 percent of the Russian space program’s operating costs.104 In 1997 alone, Energia Corporation claimed over $350 million in commercial earnings, roughly half the total foreign sales for the entire space industry. While cooperative space work did not release the largest sum of money to the Russian space program, it did provide a politically palatable environment for reforming state infrastructures to favor trade on the global market.

Frutkin’s Guidelines for International Collaboration

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.

The Post-Apollo Program

Soon after taking the oath of office in January 1969 President Nixon estab­lished a Space Task Group (STG) chaired by Vice President Spiro Agnew. Its three other members were NASA administrator Tom Paine, Lee A DuBridge, the president’s science adviser, and Robert C. Seamans, the secretary of the Air Force and former deputy administrator of NASA. The STG’s aim was to find ways of making cuts in the space program, and to come up with a “coordinated program and budget proposal” that factored in “international implications and cooperation.”4 It submitted its report to the president on September 15, 1969, and met the press two days later.5

The STG proposed three alternatives programs having different budgetary levels. All shared the same goal, “and I emphasize the word ‘goal,’” said Agnew, “and not a commitment—a manned landing on Mars before the end of the cen­tury.” Each offered a different path to that goal depending on how quickly it was achieved.6 At the core of the STG’s program lay an orbiting space station and a space transportation system. The station, envisaged for the mid-1970s, would be initially designed to house 6-12 astronauts. It could be expanded by the subse­quent addition of modules to accommodate 50-100 people. Paine emphasized that since “a substantial reduction in the cost of space transportation [was] essen­tial. . . a new and truly low-cost space transportation system [was] an integral part of the space station concept.”7 Three components were foreseen for this system: a reusable space shuttle that could access low-earth orbit from a terrestrial launch pad, reusable space tugs to move people and equipment from the shuttle’s cargo bay to various other orbits as well as onto the moon, and, third, a reusable nuclear engine, derived from the Nerva project then well under way.8

The original shuttle concept made maximum use of existing aeronautical technology.9 As described by Paine, the shuttle, which would hopefully make its maiden flight in about 1976 or 1977, would “look like one of these giant new 747 intercontinental jets, but instead of being on the airstrip horizontally for a takeoff it will take off vertically, so it will be racked up sitting on its tail. Instead of having jet engines slung under its wings,” the NASA administra­tor went on, “it will have rocket engines, of the type that power our Saturn 5 rockets, clustered in the tail.” The second “orbiter stage,” mounted on the nose of this “booster stage,” would also be a spacecraft with wings “about the size, weight and appearance of a big transcontinental Boeing 707.” Both were fully reusable, had a crew of two (plus passengers in the orbiter), and would be piloted back to earth at the end of their missions, where they would land horizontally, like airliners. It was hoped that the reusability of the space transport system could reduce the cost of injecting one pound of payload into orbit by at least an order of magnitude, from some $500 with a Saturn launch vehicle in the 1960s, to something below $50 per pound of payload in orbit in the 1970s. Seamans was quick to emphasize that the Department of Defense (DoD) was particularly attracted by this feature.10

While DoD support was obviously an asset in Congress it had important tech­nological implications. Apart from requiring a large payload bay and extremely powerful motors, the DoD insisted on a high cross-range capability (on the order of 1,250 nautical miles) for the orbiter.11 The Air Force wanted the shuttle to be able to recover an orbiting payload and return to the Vandenberg Air Force Base in Southern California after a single 110-minute shuttle orbit. The landing strip would have moved about 1,250 miles east as the earth rotated during this time. The operational flexibility required by these kinds of missions required sacrificing payload weight for the added weight of the Thermal Protection System (TPS) that would be needed to protect the orbiter in the hypersonic maneuvers called for. It also required NASA to replace a straight-wing configuration with a delta-wing.12

What of international collaboration? The STG identified it as one of the five principal program objectives of the post-Apollo program. During the month prior to the release of its report the Nixon administration issued two National Security Study Memoranda, NSSM 71 and NSSM 72, signed by the national security adviser, Henry Kissinger. NSSM 71, dated August 14, 1969, established an interagency committee to review policies “governing the access by foreign countries to certain advanced technologies vital to our national security.” It had to “give full consideration” to the administration’s commitment “to international cooperation in the peaceful application of nuclear and space technologies and to the necessity for the free exchange of scientific knowledge when national security is not impaired.”13 NSSM 72, dated September 4, 1969, called for the creation of a small ad hoc group on International Space Cooperation to report on possibili­ties for cooperation “with friendly countries as well as the Soviet Union.”14

In a letter to the president in August 1969 Paine welcomed the policy review authorized by NSSM 71, which he hoped would “clear away unnecessary restric­tions which could seriously obstruct the increased international activity” Nixon had called for.15 He saw possibilities for collaborating in planetary exploration with the Soviet Union, and for closer collaboration with Japan, Australia, and Canada. But it was Western Europe that particularly interested him. The possible scope of cooperation reflected NASA’s judgment of where European scientific and technological strengths lay, and what they could afford. The emphasis was placed on applications satellites, planetary missions (along with the Soviets), and the inclusion of foreign astronauts in post-Apollo manned flight programs.16 The State Department echoed these sentiments.17 Indeed, at this stage of planning, no one saw much scope for Europe doing more than being involved in science and applications, and in using the space station and the space transportation system. Participation in hardware development as such was not seriously considered.

European Participation in the. Post-Apollo Program, 1972: Disentangling. the Alliance—The Victory of Clean. Technological Interfaces

The Shuttle Is Authorized. . . and the Options Shrink

On January 5, 1972, President Nixon announced that the United States should proceed at once to develop “an entirely new type of space transportation system designed to transform the space frontier of the 1970s’s into familiar ter­ritory,” readily accessible to humans in the decades to come. The space shuttle would “revolutionize transportation into outer space.” It would “take the astro­nomical costs out of astronautics.” It promised to become “the workhorse of our whole space effort, taking the place of all present launch vehicles except the very smallest and the very largest” (the Scout and the Titan-III rockets) soon after it became operational at the end of the 1970s. The economic benefits of reusabil­ity, which promised to “bring operating costs down as low as one-tenth of those for present launch vehicles,” would allow the shuttle to transport humans safely, routinely, and relatively cheaply. The shuttle would take America “out from our present beach-head in the sky to achieve a real working presence in space.” It would also secure the “pre-eminence of America and American industry in the aerospace field” by engaging the talents of thousands of highly skilled workers and hundreds of industrial contractors who would ensure that the United States maintained its leadership in “man’s epic voyage into space.”1

Nixon did not refer to the military use of the shuttle in his public statement. He authorized NASA administrator James Fletcher, and his deputy George Low, to mention military applications, however. And indeed this aspect was one of several emphasized by the two NASA officials at the San Clemente White House immediately afterward.2 In the press conference Fletcher claimed that the low cost and the ability to launch “on a moment’s notice, when something strange happens,” to be in space within “24 to 48 hours,” would certainly interest the Department of Defense. The NASA administrator said that he was “sure the military will be using the shuttle routinely for most of their payloads,” though he did not specify that this would involve the development of the space tug.

The president only made passing reference to international collaboration in his official January announcement. In conversation just beforehand, however, he told Fletcher and Low how important international collaboration was to him, particularly the flying of astronauts from all nations, East and West.3 He affirmed that it would also be valuable to encourage “meaningful participation” in experiments “and even in space hardware development.”4 Foreign participa­tion, he said, could reduce the development cost of the shuttle, now estimated to be $5.5 billion, by some 10-15 percent.

The group of NASA/ELDO/ESRO experts were scheduled to meet again early in February to narrow down the options for collaboration discussed at the end of 1971. Now that the shuttle was authorized, there was a flurry of activ­ity inside the administration intended to adjust the US position, and the scope it allowed for transatlantic collaboration to the new, more stable political and budgetary situation. A subcommittee of the International Space Cooperation Committee met four times in the latter half of January. The meetings in January 1972 were chaired by John Walsh, a senior staff member of the National Security Council. They dealt with various technological, managerial, and foreign pol­icy aspects of post-Apollo collaboration with Europe that had the shuttle at its core.5 One meeting was devoted to presentations from senior businessmen from the Aerospace Corporation, Hughes Aircraft Company, Lockheed of Georgia, and McDonnell Douglas, all of which had experience in working with European firms. A summary report of the findings of the Walsh subcommittee was sub­mitted to Herman Pollack in the State Department on February 18, 1972, and received in NASA on February 23.6

The European delegation to the joint experts meeting, held in Washington from February 8 to 10, 1972, was again led by Causse and Dinkespiler.7 The US delegation was led this time by Philip E. Culbertson, the director of advanced missions in the Office of Manned Space Flight. The first striking development since the previous expert meeting a little over two months before was the reduc­tion in candidate work packages on the shuttle (see table 5.3). There had been fourteen such packages in all in December. Now there were just five which had a “high probability of being suitable for development in Europe”: the tail assem­bly, elevon, cargo bay door, nose cap, and the landing gear and door. Europe’s potential financial contribution to the shuttle program had also dropped sharply, from about $400 million for the original fourteen packages to $100-115 mil­lion for the five items on offer (see table 6.1).

Several technology-related concerns drove this reduced offer. Culbertson and Frutkin assured John Walsh’s ad hoc committee that the five work packages offered to the Europeans were limited to “subsystems which require least trans­fer of technology,”8 and to tasks that their firms could carry out “substantially on their own, thus minimizing European need for US technical assistance.”9 NASA also stipulated that anything Europe built should not have a significant impact on critical US schedules. If the Europeans failed to deliver as expected, there had to be “reasonable recovery options” on the US side. It was also impor­tant to choose elements whose design was more or less frozen, and not likely to change. National security concerns provided an added twist. Indeed the entire propulsion package was withdrawn at the second experts meeting, probably to reduce the risk of proliferating missile-related technology. The net result was a

Table 6.1 Change between late 1971 and early 1972 in work packages offered by NASA for European collaboration

Orbiter Work Packages Suggested for Collaboration in November 1971

Orbiter Work Packages Suggested for Collaboration in February 1972

1. Tail assembly

1. Tail assembly

2. Main wing

2. —

3. Elevon

3. Elevon

4. Central fuselage

4. —

5. Cargo bay door

5. Cargo bay door

6. Radiator

6. —

7. Landing gear and door

7. Landing gear and door

8. Nose section

8. Nose section

9. Ejection seat

9. —

10-13. Propulsion (without engines)

10-13. —

14. Instrumentation (difficult to integrate)

14. —

TOTAL COST ~ $400 million

TOTAL COST: $100—115 million

package that was relatively simple and “exclude[d] the most interesting tasks” (Frutkin). Indeed, he added, “they have already been termed uninteresting by Europeans involved.”10

Two other major difficulties beset a joint effort on the shuttle even with the work packages simplified to reduce technological transfer to the minimum. One was the problem of project management. As we saw earlier, everybody agreed that the prime contractor on the shuttle would be an American firm. The sub­contractors would be European, and they would be paid for their work by the appropriate European funding authorities. While this mechanism respected the principle of “no exchange of funds,” it raised problems of its own. Among the more serious management problems identified by the joint expert group were “source selection, the negotiations of out-of-scope changes, limitations on the control by the prime contractor over the subcontractor and the relations between subcontractor and its own government authority.”11 In an international project such strains could rapidly escalate to the government level since the American prime would have to negotiate their resolution with the European funding agen­cies that were supporting the subcontractors. As one document put it, “There is a high probability that the contention and acrimony of the subcontracting rela­tionships will degrade, rather than improve, our relations with Europe.”12

The different rhythms of the decision-making process on both sides of the Atlantic complicated technological collaboration on the shuttle even more. NASA was calling for bids for the orbiter in mid-March and expected phase C/D development to begin by July 1, 1972. The expert meeting agreed that if European subcontractors were to be included in the bids by the American prime contractor, a draft government-to-government agreement had to be settled, at least “in principle,” by this date. Frutkin rejected this timeline outright two weeks later. “A working level draft is not adequate for the confidence level we need to defer US subcontractor negotiations and to authorize instead exten­sive interplay between US primes and foreign subs,” he wrote.” The American authorities negotiating with Lefevre and the ESC should insist upon a “commit­ment in principle or letter(s) of intent signed at the ministerial level in interested countries” by July 1 (emphases throughout in the original). It was necessary, wrote Frutkin, “to shock senior European officials into a recognition of the magnitude of the commitments they would have to undertake and the very inad­equate time for negotiating them.”13

The 1982-1984 "Lapse": Navigation and Rescue, Bion, and Atmospheric Science

The 1977 Bilateral Agreement on the Peaceful Sharing of Outer Space lapsed in 1982, not to be renewed until President Reagan signed a 1984 Joint Resolution of Congress, Public Law 98-562.93 However, the end of detente did not dictate that the world’s two leading space powers would resort to unilateral or bifur­cated multilateral space policy in toto. In some respects, the two nations con­tinued their tacit competition, such as maintaining leadership roles within their respective blocs of communications satellites. For the biosciences, atmospheric sciences, and navigation and rescue satellites, this period was more a time of “business as usual.” Often the execution of these programs depended on the tenacity of a few key individuals.

It was at this time that the international search and rescue programs COSPAS (including the Soviet Union and several allies) and SARSAT (including the United States, Canada, and France) united. In addition to continuing research in space biology and medicine, NASA continued with planetary data exchanges on programs such as the exploration of Venus, solar-terrestrial physics, and the exchange of lunar samples and cartographic data.94 In the meantime, researchers at the Fermi Institute sent their Dust Counting and Mass Analyzer (DUCMA) to Halley’s Comet in 1983-1984.

A few nongovernmental initiatives took place among research institutions based in the United States and USSR. These included the execution of an agreement between the California Institute of Technology and Moscow State University. Dating back to the late 1970s, this agreement carried out joint work in gravitational physics—roughly 30-40 percent of which dealt with space-re­lated fields such as the design of a gravitational wave detector.

In 1985 and 1995, the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) released its reports US-Soviet and US-Russian Cooperation in Space. Therein the assistant director of the OTA, OTA’s director of international security and the space program, and NASA’s director of international relations labored to make sense of the rapidly changing field of international collaboration in space. Among a broad spectrum of policy concerns, the OTA took some time to reflect on the anomalous nature of collaboration following the 1982 lapse in bilateral coopera­tion. Rather than indicate a “lapse,” the OTA reported a sort of premature glas – nost setting in among researchers and policymakers. Life science in particular encountered an improvement in institutional relations. Before 1982,

[t]here were significant difficulties in acquiring information on mission plans, and in obtaining accurate and complete scientific data. These problems varied in sever­ity through time and across different fields. But workshop scientists believed that the situation was improving noticeably, with regard to both openness and data quality, when the intergovernmental agreement expired. . . At that time, US scien­tists were for the first time being taken into Soviet laboratories and shown instru­ments, performance data, etc.95

The authors continued, distinguishing between individuals and bureaucracy, “While recognizing more openness on the Soviet side,” “scientists stress the still essen­tially closed nature of Soviet scientific and technical programs, and the difficulties Soviet scientists may have working through their own political bureaucracies.”96 The OTA report of 1995 supplies an intriguing list of cooperative activities over the so-called Soviet-American hiatus. Indeed, researchers in both nations exhibited an unmistakable determination to cooperate—with or without a state mandate.

Human relations played a significant role in the sustainability of biosatel­lites. In her history of the Cosmos Biosatellite Program, Kristin Edwards details how the low level of personnel turnover—in the NASA ARC as well as Soviet Institute for Biomedical Problems—fostered a level of personal trust and respect that spanned decades. In Moscow, Dr. Yevgeni A. Ilyin managed each Cosmos mission from its beginning in 1973 to its end. At Ames, internal promotions constituted the only major changes to personnel.97

NASA commenced with negotiations for two Bion missions over the course of 1982-1984. In 1983, Moscow’s Institute for Biomedical Problems, partnered with space programs in the United States, Czechoslovakia, France, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the German Democratic Republic, launched Cosmos 1514. Researchers held the 1983 Cosmos mission in especially high esteem since this would be the first such satellite to carry primates—two rhesus monkeys.

Immediately thereafter, negotiations commenced on the next mission, Cosmos 1667, which was slated to carry on biomedical research and experi­ments regarding extraterrestrial radiation. By the time the Soviets had launched 1667 in July of 1985, US-Soviet relations had not only warmed, but the Reagan administration had even advanced the idea of simulated space rescue mission between the Shuttle and the Salyut-7 Space Station.

Multinational Cosmos Biosatellite programs continued, essentially in the same vein through 1992’s Bion 2229. This, the eighth consecutive mission to carry US instruments, was regarded as the most integrated set up for tech­nical collaboration to date. Notes ARC’s history of bioscience: “Russian and American scientists and engineers worked together more closely on Cosmos 2229 than on any previous space mission. NASA developed several flight hard­ware units for the mission, trained Russian engineers and technicians to operate the hardware, and in collaboration. . . developed postflight procedures.”98 These measurements included body temperature, electrical activity of the heart, and electrical currents generated in active muscles during space flight.99 With princi­pal investigators hailing from Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, University of Texas Medical Branch, ARC, University of California at Los Angeles, University of Louisville, University of California, and Davis, this mission still exhibited a drop in participation from the last satellite, which had more than 85 NASA-sponsored researchers from 19 states and 3 foreign countries.100

In practice, there were few marked differences between Cosmos 2229 and its successor, the Bion 11. Most notable is the fact that flight hardware on the satellite was the “most highly integrated combination of NASA and Russian sys­tems. These supported research in musculoskeletal, neurovestibular, and regula­tory experiments and necessitated a great deal of joint engineering in post-flight ground-based hardware.”101 However these two missions bridge an historically significant shift in NASA-Soviet principles and guidelines for cooperation.

Even before the launch of Cosmos 2229, Americans realized that they would be paying half the expenses of flight on the next satellite. These funds (roughly $16 million), in one respect, covered a portion of the operating expenses neces­sary for Bion satellites, but also functioned to infuse much-needed capital into the collapsing Soviet space infrastructure. A variety of factors led to the Institute of Biomedical Problems’ request that NASA fund half the Bion 11 and 12 mis­sions. In order to explore the circumstances that precipitated this transition in the principles of collaboration, we must first understand Soviet state infrastruc­tural changes that took place in the preceding decade.102

Concluding Remarks

We know that right now your options at home are limited and outlaw regimes and terrorists may try to exploit your situation and influence you to build new weapons of war. [the physicists and engineers scribbled in tiny notebooks] But I think we should talk about a brain gain solution, and that is a solution of putting you to the work of peace, to accelerate reform and build democracy here, to help your people live better lives for decades to come.

—James A. Baker III,

US secretary of state to Soviet Nuclear Weapons Lab employees,

February 1992105

This chapter, by illustrating the broad scope of technical cooperation in trade, environmental regulation, scientific research, and space policy has demonstrated how the new conditions of cooperation placed both the Russian and American space programs in new positions of accountability (and vulnerability) to one another. Americans invested capital and credibility in exchange for regimes of sur­veillance of the aerospace industry, weapons trade, and the environment. At the same time, Russians agreed to become liable to American inspections, answerable to American contracts, and subject in limited degrees to American prescriptions for trade and business organization. Compliance was another matter.

In the 1990s, several (at times conflicting) post-Cold War objectives shaped the discourses and intercourses of space work. These included pressures for reduced budget expenditures, a new elan for streamlined budgets, desires to reduce nuclear arsenals, as well as a new science policy that often encouraged private industry to invest in its own R&D. The waning of the Cold War did not render space coopera­tion inevitable, neither did it necessitate amicable relations. Instead, Russian design philosophies of adaptability, variability, and compatibility combined with the abun­dance of Soviet era defense spending, providing NASA and American firms with a number of prospective bargains. The globalizing aerospace industry and 1990s trade liberalization both facilitated these transactions and benefited from them.

While Soviet-American competition in space no longer operated as quite the same driver to funding and political consensus as was characteristic of the 1960s, the people and artifacts of the Cold War continued to shape policy. Thus, for the Russians, idle productive capacity and surplus launch vehicles took on a new meaning in a new geopolitical environment.

For Americans, international scientific and technological collaboration in space were used in an attempt to promote American interests abroad with Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) regulations and later the Iran Nonproliferation Act (INA). Clinton officials anticipated that ISS contributions and US leadership would facilitate the emergence of a consensus for a new US-led Western Alliance— one that co-opted the former Soviet republics against a new block of adversaries: Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Afghanistan, and other “rogue states.”

Between 1994 and 1998, the United States paid out approximately $800 mil­lion through ISS-related activities. The Congressional Reporting Service states that in 1996 “reports surfaced of Russian entities providing ballistic missile assis­tance to Iran, including training; testing and laser equipment; materials; guidance, rocket engine, and fuel technology; machine tools; and maintenance manuals (see CRS Report RL30551).” In 1998, George Tenet, director of Central Intelligence, testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee that Russian aid had, “brought Iran further along in ballistic missile development than previously estimated.”106

These revelations set Congress at odds with the White House, kicking Section 6 of the INA into action, threatening to cut off funding associated with the ISS, and leaving NASA’s largest program potentially dead in the water. Controversy ensued regarding what elements of ISS collaboration applied to the “crew safety” excep­tion of the INA, allowing for a minimum continuation of funds to the program in the interest of US astronaut safety. These discussions became all the more heated following the orbiter Columbia’s tragic accident in 2003, when NASA became completely dependent upon Soviet transport and again when President George H. W. Bush’s Vision for Space Exploration cancelled US plans for a Crew Return Vehicle, again, increasing dependence on the Soviets for access to the ISS.

Critics of the INA (including the CIA) questioned whether or not it was realis­tic to presume that the Russian Space Agency could be held accountable for prolif­eration activities that could take place among any number of firms, the Ministry of Defense, or the Ministry of Atomic Energy (which for all appearances had indeed committed proliferation “crimes” associated with Iran). INA compliance rested upon the apparently naive presumption that a carrot offered to the Russian Space Agency might (influence) behavior of the Russian government writ large. The Russian citizens responded with a range of improvisations including acquiescence and alignment as well as extortion, illusion, and outright noncompliance.

Foreign policy and national security considerations have always played lead­ing roles in the principles and guidelines of Soviet-American space projects. Yet from 1992 onward they were executed in very different manners. Before then, high-profile collaboration in space followed nonproliferation regimes such as the 1963 Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty (which made a joint lunar mission offer plausible) and the 1969 Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (which made the ASTP plausible). In both instances, abstinence from bilateral security regimes could thwart collaboration, but by no means was collaboration offered as an explicit incentive for enlistment in nonproliferation regimes.

Specifically because collaboration in space was linked to a multitude of other cultural, bureaucratic, and capitalistic linkages, enrollment in the ISS became a plausible reward ex post facto. Thus, into the 1990s, cooperation in space con­tinued to function (to varying degrees) as one of America’s tools for legitimating power, spreading democratic ideologies, reproducing cultures of regulation, and teaching the mores of liberalized trade. How successfully?

Given the near incomprehensibility and near catastrophic disorder of the for­mer Soviet military industrial complex, is it surprising that weapons technolo­gies did in fact leak out? Instead we might ask, parallel to the much-debated “achievements” of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, to what degree did ISS and its associated attempts at post-Soviet order prompt at least a minority of Soviet representatives to “show their hand”—delineating industrial capabilities, iden­tifying the critical state of their R&D institutions, and ultimately, reappraising their own bureaucratic potency if only to increase their legibility to the West? While the entire exercise was a categorically unsuccessful replication of Western structures and ideals, it did present at least an extension of Western capitalist order into the post-Soviet world and, therefore, a useful glimpse into the logic of American international leadership as well.