Category NASA in the World

The following interviews were conducted in the framework of this project and have been transcribed and lodged in the NASA Historical Reference Collection, NASA HQ, Washington, DC.

Richard Barnes, with John Krige, Washington, DC, March 27, 2007

Richard Barnes, with Ashok Maharaj, Washington, DC, April 28, 2008

Karin Barbance, with John Krige, Paris, June 22, 2007

Jacques Blamont, with John Krige, CNES, Paris, July 4, 2007

John Casani, with John Krige, Pasadena, May 18, 2009

Lynn Cline, with John Krige, NASA HQ, Washington, DC, March 30, 2009

Peter Creola, with John Krige, Berne, May 25, 2007

Charles Elachi, with John Krige, Pasadena, June 10, 2009

Margaret Finarelli, with John Krige, Washington, DC, April 20, 2010

Arnold Frutkin with John Krige, accompanied by Angelina Long and Ashok

Maharaj, Virginia, August 19, 2007

Roy Gibson, with John Krige, Montpelier, June 15, 2007

Andre Lebeau, with John Krige, Paris, June 4, 2007

Reinhardt Loosch, with John Krige, Bonn, June 29, 2007

Fernando de Mendon^a, with Ashok Maharaj, Washington, DC,

April 28, 2008

Robert Mitchell, with John Krige, Pasadena, June 19, 2009 Michael O’Brien, with John Krige, NASA HQ, Washington, DC,

March 30, 2009

Karl Reuter, with John Krige, Munich, June 17, 2007 John Schumacher, with John Krige, Washington, DC, April 19, 2010 David Southwood, with John Krige, ESA, Paris, July 16, 2007 Substantial informal exchanges were also had with the following persons:

With John Krige Wolfgang Finke, Bonn

Doug Millar, NASA HQ, Washington, DC With Ashok Maharaj

Binod C. Agrawal, Anthropologist, ISRO, SITE Project

Prof. Asnani, Senior Scientist, ISRO, Remote Sensing, based in Pune,

near Bombay

Dr. Bhatia, Retired Scientist, ISRO, based in Ahmedabad Prof. Bhavsar, Retired Scientist, ISRO, based in Ahmedabad Jacques Blamont, CNES, Paris

Chandrasekhar, Former Scientist, ISRO, based in Bangalore E. V. Chitnis, Former Director of Space Application Center, ISRO, based in Pune

Padmanabh Joshi, Retired Scientist, ISRO, based in Ahmedabad Abdul Kalam, Former Director of ISRO, Former President of India, based in Delhi

Pramod Kale, Former Director of Space Application Center, ISRO, based in Pune

K. Kasturirangan, Former Director of ISRO, currently Member of the Parliament (MP, upper house), based in New Delhi Yash Pal, Retired Scientist, ISRO, based in Delhi N. Pant, Retired Scientist, ISRO

Radhakrishnan, Retired Scientist/Payload Specialist, ISRO

Gopal Raj, Senior Science Correspondent, The Hindu, Trivandrum, Kerala

Manoranjan Rao, Retired Scientist, ISRO, Official Historian of ISRO

U. R. Rao, Former Chairman of ISRO

Prof. Vasagam, Project Leader for Apple Satellite, ISRO

In 1959 the British government of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan decided to cancel an expensive program to build an already obsolete Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile called Blue Streak.29 Rather than waste the money already spent, and disband the expert teams that had been assembled to work on the missile, the government decided to strip it of its military characteristics (which had been devel­oped in conjunction with the United States) and to offer it to European partners across the Channel as the first stage of a multistage satellite launcher. This gesture not only enabled Macmillan to save face at home: it was intended as an expression of goodwill to the emerging European Common Market, which the British had opposed in the late 1950s. After lengthy negotiations it was eventually agreed to establish an intergovernmental organization called ELDO to develop a three – stage launcher for civilian purposes. Blue Streak would comprise the first stage. The second stage, called Coralie, would be built in France. The third stage, which promised to be the most advanced technologically, would be built in Germany. Italy would provide experimental payloads to measure the environment during launching and in orbital flight. The rocket, called Europa, would be launched from Woomera in South Australia.30 The convention establishing ELDO was signed in March 1962. It was ratified by the governments of the seven member states (the five already mentioned plus Belgium and The Netherlands) in 1964.

NASA was quick to react to these developments. In December 1962 Arnold Frutkin, along with a few other representatives, visited Britain, France, and Germany for two weeks to get a closer look at the various installations involved in the project. They told the Europeans that “cooperation in the launch vehicle area was possible to a limited extent.”31 Those limits were set by several condi­tions. The European programs had to be directed to peaceful civilian appli­cations, and be of mutual technological interest to NASA and ELDO. Most important of all, the agreements had to be multilateral and not bilateral. NASA would only collaborate through ELDO and not with individual national author­ities in the domain of rocketry.32 This was supposed to avoid the exploitation of American technology in national military programs. It would also promote European integration. As State Department official Robert F. Packard put it, this change in US policy had to be viewed “as part of the entire spectrum of our national interests in Europe, among which a major U. S. interest is to encourage those developments which promote the interdependence and integration of the European countries such as Euratom and the Common Market.”33

It was not easy to translate these good intentions into practical action. The enormous lead that the United States had over the ELDO member states severely limited the areas of technological collaboration that could be of mutual inter­est. In addition, the structural weakness in ELDO that had been evident to many from the start, namely, the lack of a strong centralized system of project management and control, was of increasing concern in Washington.34 There is a porous barrier between many civil and military technologies used in rockets/ missiles. The ELDO Secretariat had little authority over the people and firms developing the separate stages in Britain, France, and Germany. Thus, contrary to what NASA and the State Department had originally hoped, routing sensitive knowledge and technology through ELDO was no guarantee that it would not eventually emerge in national military projects, notably that in France. A report prepared by the CIA in May 1964 confirmed the danger: “[T]he organization has no enforcement machinery to police compliance, and the possibility is raised that ELDO might contribute to the spread of ballistic missile technology.” This was just what NSAM294, promulgated in April 1964, wanted to stop. Indeed, notwithstanding requests from Europe for “propellants, guidance components and other launch-vehicle hardware and technology,” the CIA analysis found that export licenses had only been granted for a few select items.35

In 1965 the member states of ELDO decided that their launcher should be upgraded to have a geostationary capability (the Europa II program). This required constructing a more powerful third stage than previously planned for. In May of that year a senior engineer in the European organization, Bill Stephens, wrote NASA asking that ELDO and NASA staff discuss together “the more fundamental problems which have been encountered by NASA in designing, testing and launching liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen upper stages, the development philosophy followed,” and the possibility of establishing links between European and American firms in the Europa II project. Frutkin saw this request “as a valuable opportunity to advance our relationship with ELDO as a multilateral institution, to establish a ground for limiting or delaying assis­tance in the missile field to competing interests in Europe, and to establish a counterweight to National missile programs.”36 In other words, Frutkin was persuaded that the risks of technological leakage into the French military pro­gram could be averted and that a way could be found both to assist ELDO and to respect the constraints imposed by NSAM294.

Another impediment emerged even as NASA and the State Department were considering Stephens’s request: the restrictions on technology transfer in the telecommunications sector. This issue was given new urgency by the demon­strative success of Early Bird launched in April 1965. NASA was particularly disturbed by a restrictive clause inserted in the draft policy statement being cir­culated at the time by J. D. O’Connell, the special assistant to the president for telecommunications. That clause suggested that, to impede the development of foreign communications satellite services outside the global Intelsat framework, the United States should deny help with launch vehicles and launching services to foreign governments (unless the necessary guarantees were forthcoming). This was so controversial that NASA administrator James Webb took it upon himself to write O’Connell and ask that the extension of the restrictions to cover not only launch services but also launch vehicles be removed. As Webb put it, “In effect, although perhaps not intended, this [extension] places in a policy paper otherwise exclusively addressed to communications satellites, a blanket prohibi­tion on transfer of technology concerning launch vehicles.”37

NASA’s alternative suggestion was, as Webb put it, to make “detailed and fine distinctions” between the kinds of technology that could be shared and those that could not.38 An example was that between solid propellants and nonstor­able liquid propellants such as liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. As Frutkin put it, the latter technology “has not been deemed to accelerate the more advanced solid propellant program which France is developing in connection with strategic delivery objectives.”39 Thus whereas blanket policies made no attempt to distin­guish between various types of rocket fuel, and their implications for national security, NASA was at pains to distinguish between the military potential of solid (high security risk) and nonstorable (low security risk) propellants. Their sugges­tion fell on deaf ears. The broad restriction remained in place in the final policy statement that accompanied NSAM338, promulgated in September 1965.

It took much longer than anticipated to prepare the reports called for by Kissinger at the end of April. Both were eventually available in June, and evolved further as the meeting with Kissinger was postponed time and again: it was eventually held on or around August 9.

NASA’s report on “Alternatives to Post-Apollo Participation” identified various areas where collaboration might be possible, and discussed the costs and benefits of each: flying a foreign astronaut to Skylab, a joint Air Traffic Control preoperational system, a joint experimental applications technology sat­ellite (ATS). However it effectively dismissed these as significant alternatives to post-Apollo.41 Indeed the original report was so one-sided that Herman Pollack summarily rejected it as “essentially a contentious paper reciting the dire con­sequences that would follow from backing out of the post-Apollo proposals. It denied that there are any suitable alternatives.”42 A revised version took a slightly more balanced approach but drew very similar conclusions. In short, as far as NASA was concerned, there was no way the United States could now deny the Europeans participation in post-Apollo, no alternative that could compensate for the drastic foreign policy setbacks of such action

The paper on “Technology Transfer in the Post-Apollo Program” expanded on the text produced the year before. It also went through two versions, a detailed one in anticipation of a meeting with Kissinger on June 8, and a punchier alterna­tive prepared when the meeting was postponed to the end of the month, before being postponed again.43 The core of the argument was developed at a meet­ing on May 5 with senior personnel in the Office of Science and Technology, including Ed David, and with input again from representatives of the American aerospace industry, notably MacDonnell Douglas, North American Rockwell, Grumman Aerospace, and General Electric.44

As we saw in chapter 4, NASA’s case against its critics was intended to turn on its head the charge that the agency was ready to give away American aerospace technology at ten cents on the dollar. Thus

The thrust of foreign participation in such a post-Apollo program will be to con­tribute to the US effort rather than set up a flow from us. Such a direction of flow

will be further supported by our practice of a policy already fully communicated to potential European participants, namely, our commitment to select projects for European development only where the capacity is already substantial in Europe.

That capacity was described by US firms already collaborating abroad. Grumman Aerospace wrote that the French firm Marcel Dassault was “one of the most capable manufacturers of high performance aircraft in Europe,” and “should be able to con­tribute any portion of the Shuttle prime structure that France might undertake,” except perhaps the main cryogenic tankage. Their work with Grumman on metallic and polyimide thermal protection materials and design should put them in a posi­tion to be able to manufacture some portion of the Thermal Protection Subsystem (TPS) that was “so crucial to the shuttle’s cross-range capacity.” Grumman also claimed that the German firm Dornier was “well capable of handling structural sub-assemblies” for the shuttle, and had excellent research and test facilities that could be used during the development of the shuttle.45 North American Rockwell was contracting with the British Aircraft Corporation for shuttle phase B participa­tion in “structural elements, aerodynamics, flight test instrumentation, and data handling.”46 The McDonnell Douglas Aircraft Corporation, for its part, was actively pursuing international collaboration with ERNO in Germany, Hawker Siddeley in Britain, and SNIAS (Societe nationale industrielle aerospatiale) in France.47

It was noted that Europe could also make major contributions to the tug and the RAM. In summer 1971 Messerschmitt – Bolkow-Blohm gave a final presentation to ELDO and NASA of its pre-Phase A study of the tug, as did Hawker Siddeley Dynamics leading a group of ten European companies.48 The Convair Division of the General Dynamics Corporation, which had been selected to perform a Phase B RAM study, was subcontracting parts of the work out to MATRA in France (sys­tems design and analysis, guidance, and control), ERNO in Germany (material sci­ence and manufacturing in space), SAAB in Sweden (phased array, data processing, image compensation), and Selenia in Italy (bulk data handling, millimeter wave communication system, etc.).49 In sum, even if Europe’s ability still had to be tested in practice, its capacity to make major contributions to significant parts of the post – Apollo program was not in doubt, at least not to US aerospace corporations.

On the basis of their experience US aerospace firms were convinced of the quality of the work done in European industry, and were not particularly con­cerned that significant technology would be leaked to them. On the contrary since Europe’s contribution was limited to 10 percent, they repeated that “the US should come out further ahead of Europe than when we started.” In fact, the industrialists’ experience suggested that what Europeans lacked above all was not technology but “general management and systems engineering know­how.” Though they would acquire some insight into this through post-Apollo collaboration, “the American companies consider that such know-how would be directly applicable in Europe in only very limited ways.” The risks were more than outweighed by the benefits of a European presence, which, the companies argued, would “stabilize” the American program, and “avoid a stimulation of independent and competing programs in Europe.”

NASA backed these claims with a more detailed analysis of the nature and scope of technology transfer in the four areas it had identified. It again took the vertical tail of the shuttle to be typical of an area where Europe might be included in the orbiter program, to the advantage of both partners (e. g., by the provision of test data for the supersonic plane, Concorde). Special materials were the most advanced technologies here: titanium for the main structure, carbon/carbon for the Thermal Protection System on the leading edge of the orbiter, which could reach tempera­tures as high as 20000F. NASA’s study indicated that only the latter posed any risks of advanced technology transfer. Accordingly the agency suggested that this part could be separated out from the rest of the tail and manufactured entirely in the United States before being integrated into the tail on either side of the Atlantic

As before, the tug, which would be constructed by a European prime con­tractor, was broken down into two major elements, the propulsion module and the avionics module.50 This chapter stressed again that much of the propulsion system—the main engine, cryogenic propellant insulation to permit long-term storage, and so on—posed novel challenges to the Europeans and would undoubt­edly advance their technological base, though not with NASA’s direct help. By contrast, the avionics module called for a different approach. The Europeans only had limited experience and know-how in areas such as navigation and guidance (see chapter 4). This was not seen as a major impediment, however. It could be argued that it was in NASA’s interest to provide certain elements to make possible a larger foreign participation, and the flow of technology could be controlled if US firms could provide the subsystem components the Europeans needed as integrated technological units. In particularly sensitive cases they could simply supply a “black-box” for integration by the European prime.51

At the end of July NASA prepared an extensive presentation summing up its findings on the nature of technology transfer in the post-Apollo program.52 Some of the 50-odd viewgraphs, for the shuttle orbiter tail and wing, and the space tug, are presented in figures 5.2-5.4. NASA stressed the depth of technological capacity in the European aerospace industry, much of it due to the development of military aircraft and Concorde. It also drew attention to the positive attitude of US industry to collaboration (figures 5.2 and 5.3). The overall conclusions bring together in one image NASA’s and US industry’s arguments intended to allay fears that post-Apollo collaboration with Europe would lead to significant technology transfer (figure 5.4).

Frutkin’s (and US industry’s) efforts to reassure the higher echelons of the administration that there was no serious danger of significant technological leak­age to Europe were to little avail. The State Department was not persuaded. Hermann Pollack was delighted that NASA’s report did “not substantiate those who in the February 22 meeting with the President argued against the post – Apollo cooperation program on the grounds of unwarranted or uncompensated technological transfer.” All the same he felt that the technology transfer issue was still not definitively settled.53

NASA’s arguments did not satisfy Ed David either. Writing to Kissinger in late July, the president’s science adviser remarked that even though “the NASA study (concurred in by Jim Fletcher) suggests that the technology transfer ques­tion as well as management complications are not of significant proportions, my personal concerns on these points have not yet been answered to my full satisfaction, nor can they be answered until there is a better understanding of the potential European contribution.”5 4 He agreed to continue technical discussions with the Europeans but only to define more clearly “without any

Source: Technology Transfer in the Post Apollo Program. NASA HQ MF71-6399, 7-27-71, Record Group NASA 255, Box 14 Folder II. H, WNRC. Permission: NASA.

• EUROPEAN AEROSPACE TECHNOLOGY IS GOOD

• U. S. FIRMS WOULD NOT BE DISADVANTAGED BY POST-APOLLO TECHNOLOGY FLOW

• EUROPEANS NEED AND DESIRE SYSTEMS ENGINEERING AND MANAGEMENT EXPERIENCE

• U. S. FIRMS BELIEVE SUCH TRANSFER HAS LIMITED APPLICABILITY

• EUROPEAN PARTICIPATION WOULD REQUIRE SIGNIFICANT U. S. MANAGEMENT SUPERVISION

• THIS COULD REDUCE THE MONETARY VALUE OF EUROPEAN CONTRIBUTION

• MAJOR EUROPEAN GAIN WOULD COME FROM PERFORMANCE OF TASKS

• U. S. WILL GAIN PROPORTIONALLY MORE

• EUROPEAN PARTICIPATION WILL HELP STABILIZE THE POST-APOLLO PROGRAM

Figure 5.3 US industry views on post-Apollo cooperation.

Source: Technology Transfer in the Post Apollo Program. NASA HQ MF71-6399, 7-27-71, Record Group NASA 255, Box 14 Folder II. H, WNRC. Permission: NASA.

precommitment, the potential interests and contributions of both sides.” They should be undertaken recognizing that “we are not committed to agree to for­eign participation [but only] to give positive consideration to foreign interest in participation,” be it from Europe or from Japan.55

Figure 5.4 Summary evaluation of European participation in post-Apollo.

Source: Technology Transfer in the Post Apollo Program. NASA HQ MF71-6399, 7-27-71, Record Group NASA 255, Box 14 Folder II. H, WNRC. Permission: NASA.

One strong argument remained to tilt the balance: foreign policy. NASA administrator Jim Fletcher told U. Alexis Johnson in May that, in his view, “the decision as to whether to engage the Europeans in the Post Apollo pro­gram rests essentially on foreign policy considerations.”56 Pollock rehearsed the argument again for Johnson two days later.57 The program would strengthen ties with Europe, which were still “the cornerstone of our efforts to build a peaceful world.” The region’s industrial, economic, and technological strength were critical to the existing balance of power and closer ties in advanced indus­try and technology would consolidate the Atlantic Alliance. Space programs in particular were ripe for “meaningful cooperation,” and would “offer highly visible and dramatic symbols of the fruits of partnership.” On the other hand, without post-Apollo cooperation, “Europe’s program will be organized around France, and we would have little input and little influence on such a program.” Failure to work together in space might also impact Western European decisions in other high-tech sectors—such as the development of “breeder” reactors and uranium enrichment facilities. In short for Pollack, as he put it to Undersecretary Johnson, the decisions now being taken on both sides of the Atlantic as regards the future framework for advances in high technology would “have a profound, long-term effect on Europe and on its relations with the USA,” and “successful multi-national cooperation in post-Apollo [would] improve our ability to influ­ence Europe’s decisions in these other fields.”

Early in August 1971, then, there was general agreement between Fletcher, Johnson, David, and Flanigan that the United States should continue the technical discussions with Europe, making it absolutely clear that this did not commit either party to participation of any kind in the post-Apollo program. Kissinger accepted this position. On August 18, 1971, he wrote to Secretary
of State Rogers to tell him that Nixon had confirmed “his support for contin­ued pursuit of opportunities for international space cooperation in general, and specifically with the Europeans.”58 He asked the State Department to prepare a reply to Lefevre that suggested that technical discussions be continued with a view to defining “possible cooperative relationships between Europe and the U. S. in the program of STS development.” He was emphatic that no commit­ment of any kind should be made that might later impede “an independent deci­sion by the U. S. on the desirability or schedule of STS development.” With the future of the STS and of Europe’s participation in it thus left open, Kissinger asked that the scope of the discussions be extended to include “an exchange of views with the Europeans regarding the content of space activities” in the post – Apollo era, as well as to consider “other potential areas for cooperation in space exploration, operations and launches.” This also meant, of course, that from now on “U. S. launch assurances for European payload will not be contingent upon European participation in a joint STS program, but will be treated sepa­rately to the degree possible.” The results of these technical discussions were to be made available to the president by January 15, 1972.

As it happens, the week before Kissinger wrote this memo to Secretary of State Rogers the president had seemingly taken a major step forward as regards the content of the post-Apollo program. In a famous memorandum to Nixon dated August 12, 1971, the deputy director of the OMB, Caspar Weinberger, had proposed that NASA’s annual budget be stabilized at $3.3-3.4 billion, and that it should make provision for a shuttle. The American people and the world needed to be reassured, Weinberger wrote, that the United States was not “giv­ing up our super-power status, and our desire to maintain our world superior­ity.” Jobs also had to be protected in an aerospace industry made vulnerable by the wind-down of the Vietnam War. Nixon scrawled “I agree with Cap” on this memo.59 But this position was not yet formal, and in any event was not com­municated to the Europeans.

In the summer of 1972, President Nixon and Soviet Premier Kosygin signed the Summit Agreement Concerning Cooperation in Outer Space for Peaceful Purposes, in which, among other fields, they agreed to engage in a joint training exercise and experimental docking of their spacecraft: the Soyuz and Apollo cap­sules.51 This, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP), for a few years functioned as what Administrator Fletcher described as a “major visible space accomplish­ment,” the likes of earlier Apollo missions and Skylab, or the upcoming Viking and Shuttle projects.52

With their administration a mere 14 years old, NASA staff had the foresight to consider documenting the history of ASTP even as Nixon and Kosygin were still in summit.53 In April 1974, Edward Clinton Ezell and Linda Neuman Ezell went to work. Stalking the halls of joint meetings, sharing coffee with NASA staff, and chatting over photocopiers, the two wove personal interviews, “desk archives,” technical data, and a flood of NASA’s internal correspondence into a rich account of ASTP. With this monograph, Ezell and Ezell explain the opera­tion of the joint working groups and the day-to-day engineering, the reflections of NASA and Russian engineers, as well as the activities of astronauts and cos­monauts in space.54 They illustrated the complexity not only of executing the project, but explaining its programmatic justifications.

In the summer of 1973 the chairman of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics, Olin Teague, contacted NASA administrator James Fletcher regarding Apollo-Soyuz. Teague, well aware of NASA’s difficulty in getting sus­tained support from their Soviet partners, wondered if it might be possible to add more scientific experiments to the payload, “making a justifiable, independent, scientific and technological contribution,” even without the Soviet Academy of Sciences.55 Recognizing that the Apollo-Soyuz mission was impossible without a Soyuz and its docking module, Teague went on in subsequent letters to explain that the “American public” must be well served by a productive US-only mission in the event of a Soviet pull-out. Teague offered his advice: “I believe that many of the alternate experiments identified by NASA are of sufficient importance to fully utilize the payload capacity of the vehicle.” If not more science, Teague determined that an additional trip to Skylab, “would also seem prudent.”56

With a budget of $10 million for experiments, and limits on both weight and volume, Fletcher agreed that the existing Apollo payloads may not fully justify a US-only flight. With an eye on the already tight budget, NASA was investigat­ing “several possibilities” for increasing payload weight and volume.57 Fletcher anticipated that his staff would complete the study in June and offered to brief Teague then.

Fletcher’s notes indicate that this correspondence resulted in an October 2, 1973, Congressional hearing. Within two weeks, Teague wrote Fletcher, stating that the hearing had been “most productive,” but reiterated concerns that NASA might do more to assure that alternative experiments or a visit to Skylab be used to justify the expense if the Soviets backed out.58 Over the coming months, the two, with occasional interjections from (intended) Command Module pilot Jack Swigert discussed the possibility of adding a number of elements to the mis­sion.59 They considered earth observation experiments (in the fields of geology, hydrology, oceanography, weather, global tectonics, and atmospheric sciences) and even the possibility of including another camera, intended to help petro­leum geologists who were at that time dealing with the oil crisis.60

Ezell and Ezell indicate that “George Low looked at the entire project from a political perspective” and, therefore, considered that a mission without Soviet participation was not practicable. However in the fall of 1973, Low explained that the $10 million budgeted for experiments was already enough to justify launch. In the October 2 testimony, Low had stated, “That is how the $10 mil­lion were arrived at. You asked the question, what would we do if the Russians for some reason were unable to fly with us, political, technical, or otherwise, and would the mission in itself with the $10 million worth of experiments. . . be worth flying.” Low responded with candor, saying that that depended on how early NASA might be notified of a Soviet cancellation and more important, how much of the full $250-million budget had been spent.61

Furthermore, Low reasoned that if the Soviets and/or the American public heard too much of alternative missions without the Soviets they might begin to question the viability of the scheme altogether. “I think,” Low stated, “that would be something that could be very easily misunderstood from the point of view of the other side if you started to plan what you are going to do if this mission doesn’t happen.”62 In a booklet titled “Notes for Meeting Congressmen Teague and Dr. Fletcher,” NASA staff explained (presumably to Teague) that ASTP was unlike previous Apollo missions that were based more upon scientific payloads. Contrasting Apollo 15 and ASTP, the booklet states,

ASTP is primarily devoted to proving out the docking system. ASTP is carrying a good complement of scientific experiments but of more significance, I believe, ASTP is conducting experiments in space that could be the precursor of derivative applica­tions in future manned spaceflight. Consequently, although the ASTP experiment payload is not exclusively devoted to science. . . it is a good viable package that has a potential of increasing the value of the use of space.63

Returning to Ezell and Ezell, “None of the alternatives seemed as desirable as the basic idea of a joint mission. . . It was a gamble, but the risk seemed to be a reasonable one.”64

And it was a gamble. The Soviet partners tended to operate “shrouded in mys­tery,” in Ezell and Ezell’s own words. Paperwork moved slowly, but Fletcher, like Low, remained optimistic. A Senate Briefing Book dating from 1973 contrasted Soviet performance in the space sciences with ASTP, human spaceflight versus robotic, stating that Soviet performance had improved. Indeed, past experiences in the sciences did “not match the positive, businesslike approach Soviets have taken to ASTP nor the detailed information exchange in ASTP.”65 When rep­resentatives of the American press contacted Fletcher, disputing their exclusion from Soviet centers, Fletcher responded, pointing out that with the exception of “independent activities,” the US press was welcomed to all ASTP proceedings. Additionally, news coverage of ASTP was by far the most liberal access ever to the Soviet space program. Never before had the Soviet public viewed such activi­ties live. Fletcher added that this openness had been extended to the American news media as the “most comprehensive release ever” of real-time information related to a Soviet space mission.”66

By the same token, historian Asif Sidiqi notes that with ASTP (or as it was called in the USSR, the Soviet-American Apollo-Soyuz Experimental Flight) an increasing number of key space complex officials became public figures. These disclosures, however, came alongside the standard fare of propaganda. Stakes were higher in the 1970s for the Soviets. In the public sphere, criticism mounted and due to a significant decline in the communist economy, citizens were less likely to be “vocally in favor” of the space program.67

A broad spectrum of criticisms and concerns accompanied Russian inclusion on the ISS. Some voiced dismay over the move from a 28-degree orbit inclination to one of 51.6 degrees, questioning the expense of a Shuttle retrofit for an Advanced Solid Rocket Motor (ASRM). Others voiced concerns that the Americans might make themselves dependent upon another nation for ISS access or assembly, still others insisted on maintaining a leading edge in aerospace technologies above all else.

Congressman Sensenbrenner worried that NASA might use these changes to eke more money from appropriations, stating: “[N]ow, I think that increasing the inclination of the orbit. . . is going to cost money, and perhaps lots of money, because the higher the orbit, the more thrust is necessary with the rockets.” He continued asking, “Does this money come out of the existing NASA bud­get? And if so which programs will be cut? Or does the Administration plan to request a supplemental appropriation so that the lift capacity of the shuttle and the other Western rockets would be able to comport with sending a space station into a significantly higher orbit?”69 Sensenbrenner noted the fact that not only was NASA placing Russia on the critical path, they were paying the RSA directly for services—“something never considered with long-time allies.”70

Noting that the House of Representatives had already voted down the ASRM, Sensenbrenner voiced his concern over the flow of American dollars to Russia: “As the Cold War ends, a chilling irony remains. Even though some say America won the Cold War, it is clear from looking at space policy that the spoils of vic­tory are going to Russia.”71

Dana Rohrabacher, another member of the House, disagreed with Sensenbrenner over his concerns with the new ISS orbit. He pressed for total dependence on Russian launch vehicles. The real problem, he observed, was people who were overcommitted to the Space Shuttle (which he described as the most overpriced transport system in the history of man). Rohrabacher sug­gested that the use of the Energia Rocket system would “actually bring down the cost to the taxpayers.” Cooperation with the Russians, he predicted, “will not cost American jobs and [it] will not cost taxpayers for us to work with these new friends and to help cement democracy in what was the Soviet Union.” He cautioned instead against spending “hundreds of millions of dollars more on an antiquated space shuttle system.”72

Congressman Bacchus, on the other hand, supported cooperation in concept as good economic, foreign, and domestic policy. He added that, all the same, “my very strong view is that we must continue to focus on protecting American jobs, American technology, and an independent American space program even as we strive for cooperation with the Russians in space.” The United States must remain the senior partner with the Soviets, he cautioned, and it should not place the Russian Federation on the critical path. He suggested instead that coopera­tion with Russia be based on the same approach as that invoked with the other foreign partners: “I would like to see us design something in which we could plug in the Russians if they are around to be plugged in.”73

Under the auspices of the 1994-1998 Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission talks, NASA broke historic precedent, doing business with Russia in a substan­tially different manner. By taking on the Russian Space Agency as a subcontrac­tor for the International Space Station, officials made a notable exception to the “no exchange of funds” tenet of NASA’s international cooperation. In the August 1993 Economic and Technological Agreement on US-Russian Space Station Cooperation, NASA promised to compensate the Russian Space Agency $305 million in exchange for US astronauts’ training and time aboard the Russian Mir space station. This money was disbursed to the RSA in FY1995-1997—a cru­cial time for the Russians, who by then were not only maintaining and improving the aging Mir, but also developing their contributions to the ISS. US officials pre­sumed that much of the $305 million would be plowed back in Mir hardware for safety improvements, general maintenance, and retrofitting for Shuttle docking.

In June 1994, NASA released a joint statement on space station cooperation. It explained that “[a] definitized Contract Agreement was signed between the NASA and RSA for up to $400m of goods and services to be provided during Shuttle-Mir operations and during the early international Space Station assembly phase.”74 Thus, between 1993 and 1994 both US and Russian representatives realized that funds dispersed in and through Shuttle-Mir were intended to ease the financial burden of delivering space station equipment and services. While the $305 million was intended to support Mir systems upgrades, to help fund the docking module for Shuttle-Mir, and to help cover the added expenses of training and expanded management, the additional $95 million was considered a direct contribution toward the expense of “Phase II” activities, in particular, early development of ISS components. These included but were not limited to design costs for the joint airlock, service module, FGB Energy blok, power mast, Soyuz/ACRV.75 (See table 8.2 for a detailed listing of Shuttle-Mir, ISS, and other collaborative projects covered by this contract.)

“rp

That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” These “eternally famous words,” as James Hansen calls them in his biography of Neil Armstrong, expressed both a NASA and an American triumph.1 They also reached out to the millions watching the spectacle on television screens all over the world, allow­ing them to make it their own. About 30 minutes into the mission, and shortly after having been joined by Buzz Aldrin, Armstrong read the words on a plaque attached to one of the ladder legs of the lunar module. The Eagle—a name delib­erately chosen by the astronauts as the symbol of America—had no territorial ambitions: as Armstrong said, “We came in peace for all mankind.”2 “For one priceless moment in the history of man,” President Nixon told the astronauts as they explored the lunar surface, “all the people on this earth are truly one. . . ”3

The spectacles of the moon landing and the moonwalk are suffused with quintessentially American tropes: white, athletic males burst the grip of gravity to conquer a new frontier.4 All the same, we should not be overwhelmed by the political and ideological staging of Apollo 11 as an American-led achievement in the context of Cold War competition. For the mission also had genuine inter­national components. Beginning with Apollo 11, NASA astronauts collected over 840 pounds of moon rock, and distributed hundreds of samples for public viewing and scientific research all over the world.5 The first video images of Armstrong’s and Aldrin’s steps on the moon were picked up, not in the United States, but by antennae at Honeysuckle Creek and the Parkes Observatory near Canberra in Australia, a tribute to the vast global data and tracking network that supports NASA’s missions.6 And one of the few scientific experiments conducted on the lunar surface during Armstrong and Aldrin’s 160-odd minutes of surface activity on the night of July 20, 1969, had a foreign principal investigator.

During their brief sojourn on the moon the astronauts engaged in six scientific experiments, all chosen by a NASA scientific panel for their interest and excellence. Five of these were part of the Early Apollo Scientific Experiment Package. They included a passive seismometer to analyze lunar structure and detect moonquakes, and a device to measure precisely the distance between the moon and the earth. The sixth was an independent Solar Wind Composition Experiment submitted from

abroad. To perform this experiment the astronauts had to unroll a banner of thin aluminum metal foil about 12 inches wide by 55 inches long, and orient one side of it toward the sun. The foil trapped the ions of rare gases emitted from the fireball. It was brought back to earth in a teflon bag, sent to Europe, cleaned ultrasonically, and melted in an ultra-high vacuum, releasing the gases that were analyzed in a mass spectrometer.7 The results provided insights into the dynamics of the solar wind, the origin of the solar system, and the history of planetary atmospheres.

Johannes Geiss, a leading Swiss scientist, was responsible for this experiment. The payload was manufactured at Geiss’s University of Bern and was paid for by the Swiss National Science Foundation.8 What is more, apart from Armstrong’s contingency collection of lunar samples immediately on emerging from the lunar module, this was the first experiment deployed by the astronauts. Indeed, to ensure that the foil was exposed to the sun for as long as possible, it was even deployed before Armstrong and Aldrin planted the American flag in the lunar surface and spoke to the president. Scientific need trumped political and ideological statement. NASA’s commitment to international cooperation could not be expressed by hav­ing the flags of many countries, or perhaps just the flag of the United Nations, left on the moon. Congress decided that this was an American project and that the astronauts would plant the US flag.9 Instead NASA’s international agenda fused seamlessly with the “universalism” of science to create a niche for flying an experi­ment built by a university group in a small, neutral European country.

It is striking that even though the Solar Wind Experiment is routinely men­tioned in writings on the Apollo 11 mission, the European source of the experi­ment is not.10 This is partly because of the iron grip human space flight has on the imagination, a mindset constructed by enthusiasts whose shrill voices and skillful marketing have capitalized on the frontier myth that is deeply ingrained in America’s sense of itself and its destiny, so playing down alternative, less glamorous visions of spaceflight using benign technologies.11 It is the challenges faced by the astronauts as they conquer new domains, not the scientific content of the Apollo missions, that resonate culturally, that entertain and inspire, that showcase American technological success and project American power abroad.

The foreign contribution to Apollo 11 is also ignored because so much space history in the United States—as in all space-faring nations—is nationalistic and celebratory, a symptom of the high value placed on technological achievement as a marker of national prowess. Today historians are increasingly aware of the need to situate national narratives in transnational or global frameworks, in rec­ognition of the interdependence and interconnectivity of the modern state. This focus is all the more important in the case of NASA since the Space Act of 1958 both mandated the new agency to secure American space leadership and to pursue an active program of international cooperation. An emphasis on purely national narratives occludes one of the agency’s core activities.

There have been many scholarly studies of various aspects of NASA’s inter­national relations. They have two dominant features. First, they concentrate on a single project or program (Germany’s Helios probe to the sun,12 the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment SITE developed with India, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, the International Space Station13), like so much of space history itself. Second, they mostly treat the political and diplomatic context in which NASA engages in international collaboration as a taken-for-granted backdrop. NASA’s international activities are seen as subsidiary to its prime mission of building US space leadership. Its history is defined as a history of the agency’s ability to secure resources for that mission from Congress and the American people, and to bring its scientific and technological ambitions to fruition (or not, as the case may be).

This book takes a different approach. It covers 50 years of NASA’s interna­tional relations, and although it is necessarily mission-oriented—for it is around missions that NASA organizes collaboration—it selects from the vast panorama of these missions those that reveal the different scientific and technological but also political, industrial, and ideological rationales for embarking on particular space ventures with foreign partners (including the Soviet Union). This book treats NASA as an organization dedicated to the exploration of space that acts in a complex foreign policy context whose definition is itself fluid and contested both at home and abroad. The authors are not only interested in NASA as a national space agency, then, but in NASA as an actor in the world, in NASA as the bearer and defender of American interests on the world stage. They explore the articulation between the pursuit of scientific, technological, and industrial preeminence in space and the consolidation of American global leadership, the intersection between space science and technology and international relations.

One dominant thread runs through the analysis, and shapes some of the key questions we address. Simply put it is this: how did NASA reconcile America’s conquest of space with its collaborative activities? How did it harmonize the pur­suit of space leadership, premised on scientific and technological leadership, with the increasingly insistent demands of foreign partners to have meaningful access to American scientific, technological, and industrial know-how? Almost since its inception, the exploration and exploitation of space has not been a level playing field: the United States, despite some spectacular Soviet firsts, has always been the leading spacefaring nation on the globe. This means that NASA has had to devise policies to protect US industrial competitiveness and national security while, at the same time, engaging in suitably advanced levels of scientific, technological, and industrial cooperation to satisfy its partners. It had to strengthen the pro­grams of the free world, and sustain civil relationships with its communist rivals, without seriously undermining its position as the world’s leading space agency.

Harmonizing leadership with collaboration was an ongoing process: though certain general principles were quickly laid down by NASA to shape the engage­ment, their implementation in practice varied depending on the nature of the mission (science, applications, technology, especially launcher technology), the space strengths of the other (a threat but also a resource to draw on to enhance US capabilities), and the political and ideological stakes involved. American global leadership in any domain is not a given. It requires ongoing work, and an ability to adjust to the changing balance of power between the United States and its partners in all of the domains in which NASA was engaged.

Knowledge is the key site around which international collaboration is organized in much of this study. Knowledge, for our purposes, is not restricted to proposi­tional knowledge, of course, but is also embedded in multiple material substrates, including technology, and is embodied in diverse human skills, including project management. International collaboration involves the management of such flows across the interface between US entities and their partners. It also called for the transfer of knowledge embedded in environmental, capitalistic, and trade regimes that were deployed to restructure the ex-Soviet space system in the 1990s. The policies that NASA put in place to manage cross-border flows of knowledge of all kinds define the dynamic equilibrium between scientific and technological denial, on the one hand, and controlled assistance and collaboration on the other. They constitute the sinews of international collaboration in a domain as tightly bound up with national competitiveness and national security as is space, and they often provide the main leitmotif for the case studies explored in this book.

The intellectual orientation provided in this chapter extends beyond the frame­work of analysis just sketched to provide a quick survey of 50 years of NASA’s international activities in space. This overview gives one some idea of the extensive scope of NASA’s international activities, and of how its dynamic has changed over time. It is also a pocket guide to what follows in the rest of the book: the chapter introduces readers briefly to the collaborative missions and countries or regions that are described in more detail in the body of the work, and provides a rationale for focusing on them. Since 1960 NASA has embarked on something like four thousand international projects. It is extraordinary that so few people realize this or understand its place in the panorama of NASA’s, and the US government’s, activities. The authors hope that this book will fill a yawning gap in the under­standing of NASA, and transform it from being seen as a purely national agency into a global actor that embodies the highest ideals, and the internal contradic­tions, of American foreign policy at the “new frontier” that is space.

In February 1966 the British government circulated an aide-memoire to its part­ners in ELDO.40 It remarked that the organization was unlikely to produce any worthwhile result and that Her Majesty’s government saw little interest in continu­ing as a member of the organization and contributing financially to its program. Development costs of Europa had more than doubled from the initial estimate of about $200 million to over $400 million. The time to completion had slipped from five to seven-and-a-half years. The British first stage, Blue Streak, had been successfully commissioned in June 1965, while the French and German stages were still under development. The British were therefore effectively subsidizing continental industries to produce a launcher that, in fact, would be obsolete tech­nologically and commercially uncompetitive with American heavy launchers.41

The timing of this move was deemed most unfortunate in Washington. First, the European integration process was in a very brittle state at the time and even NATO seemed to be on the brink of fragmentation.42 The French had precipitated a crisis in the European Economic Community (EEC) by boycotting the EEC’s decision-making machinery so as to liberate the country from its “subordination” to community institutions and the dilution of sovereignty that that entailed.43 In this inauspicious climate, everything possible had to be done to sustain the momentum for European unity. As Undersecretary of State George Ball emphasized, European integration “is the most realistic means of achieving European political unity with all that that implies for our relations with Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. . . and is the precondition for a Europe able to carry its proper share of responsibility for our common defense.”44 ELDO was not central to European integration. But just when France was challenging the momentum of European unity, the significance of the United Kingdom’s threat to leave ELDO risked being amplified by those who were increasingly hostile to supranational ventures on the continent.

The British challenge to ELDO also came at the very moment when her part­ners were becoming increasingly vocal about the putative “technological gap” that had opened up between the two sides of the Atlantic.45 President Johnson took this matter so seriously that in November 1966 he personally signed NSAM357, instructing his science adviser, Donald Hornig, to set up an interdepartmental committee to look into “the increasing concern in Western Europe over possible disparities in advanced technology between the United States and Europe.”46 In its preliminary report, the committee concluded that “the Technological Gap [was] mainly a political and psychological problem” but that it did have “some basis in actual disparities.” These included “the demonstrated American superiority in sophisticated electronics, military technology and space systems.” Particularly important were “the ‘very high technology industries’ (particularly computers, space communications, and aircraft) which provide a much greater military capability, are nationally prestigious, and are believed to be far-reaching in their economic, political and social implications.”47 For the Johnson admin­istration, then, the technological gap, even if inflated in Europe, was a prob­lem that had to be addressed, and the mutual development of space technology through an organization like ELDO was one way of doing so.

Finally, NASA again emphasized that enhanced international collaboration in space would aid nonproliferation. Quoting James Webb this time, it would be “a means whereby foreign nations might be increasingly involved in space technology and diverted from the technology of nuclear weapons delivery.”48 The United States could use the carrot of technological sharing with ELDO to redirect limited human and material resources away from national programs that were more difficult to con­trol and which might encourage the proliferation of weapons delivery systems.

The continued and spectacular success of the French space program gave this argument for saving ELDO an added urgency. On November 26, 1965, France had become the third space power by launching its own satellite with its own launcher, Diamant-A, from Hammaguir in Algeria. The feat was repeated in February 1966. This three-stage launcher combined “militarily significant solid and storable liq­uid fueled systems”—just the kind of technology the United States did not want it to develop—in a highly successful vehicle derived from the national missile pro­gram.49 In the light of these achievements and de Gaulle’s growing determination to affirm his independence of the EEC and the Atlantic alliance, “[t]he US is concerned that, if ELDO were to be dissolved, France might devote more of its resources to a national, military-related program or that it might establish undesir­able bilateral relationships [with the Soviet Union] for the construction of satellite launch vehicles.”50 The United States had to contain this threat and ensure that European institutions emerged “from the present crisis with their prestige, power and potential for building a united Europe as little impaired as possible.”51

The Johnson administration took two steps to address this situation. First, they let Britain know that they were deeply concerned about the implications of its pos­sible withdrawal from ELDO. In addition, the administration formally undertook to provide technological support to ELDO. On July 29, 1966, Walt W. Rostow, one of LBJ’s two national security advisers, signed off on National Security Action Memorandum 354.52 NSAM354 was a response to a request from the Department of State that the United States “clarify and define” its policy concerning collabora­tion with the “present and future programs” of ELDO. The document affirmed that it was “in the U. S. interest to encourage the continued development of ELDO through U. S. cooperation.” It referred to the results of an ad hoc working group, established by the State Department and chaired by Herman Pollack, that had pre­pared a statement “defining the nature and extent of U. S. cooperation with ELDO which the U. S. government is now prepared to extend.” This statement was to be “continually reviewed by the responsible agencies,” above all, the Department of Defense and the State Department, along with NASA, “to ensure that it is current and responsive in terms of developing strategies.”

The help that Pollack’s working group proposed was extensive. It was divided into three categories: general, and short-range and long-range assistance.53 The first contained some standard items—training in technical management, facilitat­ing export licenses, use of NASA test facilities—but also suggested that a tech­nical office be established within NASA “specifically to serve in an expediting and assisting role for ELDO.” Short-range help included “technical advice and assistance” in items such as vehicle integration, stage separation, and synchronous orbit injection techniques, as well as the provision of unclassified flight hard­ware, notably the strapped-down “guidance” package used on the Scout that had already been exported to Japan. Long-range assistance was focused on helping with a high-energy cryogenic upper stage of the rocket, as had been requested by Stephens on behalf of ELDO the year before. It was proposed that Europeans be given access to technological documentation and experience available in the Atlas-Centaur systems, that ELDO technical personnel “have intimate touch with the problems of systems design, integration, and program management of a high-energy upper [sic] such as the Centaur,” and even that the United States consider “joint use of a high-energy upper stage developed in Europe.”54 In short, in mid-1966, the United States was considering making a substantial effort to help ELDO develop a powerful launcher with geosynchronous orbit capability by sharing state-of-the-art knowledge and experience and by facilitating the export of hardware. This support—it should be added—would not normally be available on a bilateral basis to European national launcher programs.

None of this would have been thinkable as long as NSAM294 (denying tech­nology that might help the French military program) and NSAM338 (denying technology that might subvert a single global comsat system) were not revised. Indeed in spring 1966 it was evident that NSAM294 was due for review. European booster technology was advancing rapidly without external help. A blanket denial of export licenses now would unnecessarily harm both US business and foreign policy interests. Even worse, it might encourage a request to a non-US supplier, most obviously the Soviet Union with whom de Gaulle was fostering technological collaboration as an expression of French autonomy. Reiterating NASA’s demand that policy for technology transfer should make “detailed and fine distinctions,” Richard Barnes, the director of Frutkin’s Cooperative Projects Division, insisted (and Webb concurred) that the interpretation of restrictions on technology trans­fer determined by NASM294 had to be more specific. The guidelines, he wrote the chairman of the NSAM 294 Review Group in the State Department, should deny to a foreign power “only those few critical items which are clearly intended for use in a national program, would significantly and directly benefit that pro­gram in terms of time and quality or cost, and are unavailable in comparable sub­stitute form elsewhere than the US” (emphasis in the original).55 Correlatively, it should share items that were “of only marginal benefit to the national program” or “were available elsewhere than the US without undue difficulty or delay.” This was happening already in sensitive areas. The release of inertial guidance technol­ogy to Germany had been officially sanctioned in July 1964 on condition that it was not employed “for ballistic missile use or development.”56 A strapped-down “guidance” package had been offered to Japan. By contrast, and foolishly in Barnes’s view,57 an American company had recently been refused a license to assist France with the development of gyro technology even though gyros of comparable weight and performance were already available in France. In short US policy should take into account the kind of technology at issue, its likely uses in practice, the global state of the market for the technology, and the importance of collaboration from a foreign policy perspective.

While Barnes was putting NASA’s case to the State Department, Webb was doing what he could to get the Department of Defense to support NASA’s approach. Writing to Defense Secretary McNamara in April 1966, Webb pointed out that although high-energy, cryogenic, or “non-storable” upper stages might conceivably be employed for military purposes, in practice they would probably not be deployed in that way. He argued that anyway the risks of technological leakage into the military program were outweighed by the benefits of promot­ing a civilian rocket. As he put it, “Even in the case of France it seems likely that encouragement to proceed with upper stage hydrogen/oxygen systems now under development might divert money and people from a nuclear delivery pro­gram rather than contribute to that which is already under way using quite dif­ferent technology.” Here, and in general, wrote Webb to McNamara, rather than a blanket restriction, “we might be better off were we to concentrate on a few very essential restrictions, such as advanced guidance and reentry systems” (my emphasis). In a supportive reply McNamara reassured the NASA administra­tor that he strongly favored international cooperation in space and that he had directed the DoD staff “to be as liberal as possible regarding the release of space technology for payloads and other support items.”58

It was fairly easy to revise the restrictions embodied in NSAM294 to accom­modate the changing balance of technological power between the United States and France, particularly once the French had shown that they had mastered launcher technology sufficiently to place their own satellite in orbit. The con­straints imposed on sharing booster technology in NSAM 338 were less easily dislodged, and were a serious irritant to US-European relations. Frutkin wrote with some exasperation that the Europeans were persuaded that the United States was “seeking by all means, fair or foul, to maintain political and technical control of Intelsat.”59 Barnes was equally frustrated by “European fixation on comsats and launch vehicles.”60 Of course people in France and Germany may have been exaggerating the situation, but the administration itself recognized that they had some cause to complain. Charles Johnson admitted in an exchange with Walt Rostow that the odds were so heavily stacked in the United States’ favor in the (interim) Intelsat agreements that it was “difficult to maintain international cooperation on this basis.”61 Barnes agreed. There had been a “deterioration of ‘climate for cooperation’ caused by (1) US policies and actions within the Intelsat, and (2) US export policies in support of the ‘single global system.’”62

NASA’s view was that, unless they acted fast, and softened the restrictions in NASM338, the United States would lose all control over the direction of the European communications satellite system, as well as support for American poli­cies in Intelsat. Frutkin was convinced that the United States had to be prepared to provide launch services on a reimbursable basis for (experimental) foreign communication satellites. This would “extend the market for American vehicles, remove some incentive for independent foreign development of boosters, and assure that we could continue to exercise critical leverage in foreign comsat activities rather than lose such leverage.” An (anonymous) internal memoran­dum argued, along similar lines, that technological sharing was the best way to enroll foreign firms and their governments in American comsat policy. By allowing “United States firms to enter cooperative arrangements with the com­munications and electronics manufacturing industry in other countries,” notably in Western Europe, industries in these countries would develop the technical know-how needed for them “to compete effectively for contracts for the space segment of the global communications system.” This would “remove a current irritant, primarily expressed by the French but also shared by the British, Italians and Germans, about their inability to supply hardware for the Intelsat space seg­ment.” And even if such technological sharing did not irreversibly lock these European countries into the single global system favored by the United States, one could expect them to have a “greater incentive” to collaborate with America in developing that global system. They were also likely to be more cooperative and sympathetic to the US position during the renegotiation of the interim Intelsat agreements scheduled for 1969. Anyway, if the United States did nothing to help these nations, they would eventually develop the technology on their own, with­out American help, and would be quite capable of establishing separate, regional communications satellite systems in due course.63 As Frutkin explained,

(a) We do need to improve our situation in Intelsat with specific reference to the 1969 negotiations. (b) We already have a strong technical lead in the comsat field.

(c) We already have an adequate voting majority in Intelsat. (d) We can rely upon our technical, moral and financial strength to assure continuing leadership—with­out seeking to deny technology to our partners in Intelsat.64

The proposal from Pollack’s working group to help ELDO develop or acquire the kick-stage and propulsion technology needed to place a communications satellite in geosynchronous orbit was entirely coherent with this attitude.

On September 1, 1971, Undersecretary of State U. Alexis Johnson replied to the letter that he had received six months earlier from Theo Lefevre.60 He plunged directly into the launcher issue. The United States, said Johnson, had reviewed its position in an attempt to meet European concerns. He noted at once that that new position was “not conditioned on European participation in post – Apollo programs,” and he hoped that it would provide “a basis for confidence in Europe in the availability of U. S. launch assistance.” Johnson reaffirmed that, of course, American launch assistance would still only be for satellites that were for peaceful purposes and consistent with its obligations under relevant international agreements and arrangements. However, it would be available both from American territory, and “from foreign launch sites (by purchase of an appropriate U. S. launch vehicle).” As regards the interpretation of the thorny Article XIV(d) of the Intelsat agreements that had been signed on May 21, 1971, Johnson proposed three possible scenarios, presented in table 5.2.

Johnson went on to say that to avoid Europe investing heavily in a satellite system only to find that the United States would not launch it, the American

authorities would consult with the European Space Conference in advance of it embarking on any major program to evaluate its consistency with the Intelsat agreements. A concrete example of such a system had been suggested by the Europeans earlier in the year (the Eurosat system, see earlier). The United States judged that this system would do measurable, but not significant economic harm to Intelsat. If it were officially presented to the organization, “we would expect to support it in Intelsat.”

It is clear that the State Department had been persuaded that it should be as flexible as possible over the launcher question now that the definitive Intelsat agreements had been signed. Certainly, the cornerstone of US policy remained the same: that it would launch a separate communications satellite system if two-thirds of those voting in Intelsat agreed that that system did not do significant economic harm to the global system (and this whether or not the United States had been one of those voting in favor). What was new, however, was that now Johnson was prepared to take the Intelsat vote as a “finding” or “recommendation,” and not as a legally binding directive. In other words, if the requisite two-thirds majority was not obtained he was willing to consider launching a separate system. Such will­ingness was further nuanced depending on whether the United States had been in favor of the system or not. By accepting to launch absent a two-thirds positive finding on a system that the United States favored, Johnson was effectively willing to risk criticism of the American position in Intelsat to placate European fears. He was suggesting that the US authorities would take upon themselves the responsi­bility of demanding changes which, in the view of their their experts, would make the separate system acceptable, without having recourse again to Intelsat. This was a major reorientation indeed. It was also no longer conditional on European space agencies making a major commitment to post-Apollo participation: launcher policy was now completely distinct from whatever framework for US-European space collaboration was jointly adopted for the 1970s.

James Fletcher, too, was coping with a weakened national economy and like­wise anticipated that the ASTP might function as a public relations windfall. In the years of ASTP planning, Fletcher’s personal papers reveal a time of intense reflection on the operation and direction of NASA in the long run. ASTP held a crucial role in Fletcher’s NASA and his vision for a long-term balanced space pro­gram. Communicating with President Nixon in 1973, Fletcher identified ASTP as one of several long-lead time “major visible space accomplishments” such as Skylab, Viking, and the Space Shuttle.68 He suggested the programmatic comple­ment to this would be a collection of short-lead time projects with “earlier practi­cal return” such as remote sensing for earth resources, agricultural yield, forest preserves, hydrology, and minerals. Weather satellites, which “must be an inter­national endeavor,” may “in the long run have the biggest impact of any direct application satellite,” he postulated. Regarding the environment and pollution studies, Fletcher observed a “growing interest both in this country and abroad for a move” in the direction of a global environmental monitoring system.69

Due to what Fletcher perceived as temporary budget shortages, he trusted that remote sensing and robotic exploration would sustain NASA (and the public’s need for “a morale boost and an increased confidence in themselves”) until the long – lead time Shuttle was operational and the federal budget had recovered. ASTP, the Shuttle, and Europe’s Spacelab (see chapter 6) were crucial investments in the future of human exploration and Fletcher opined that “we should leave open the option of returning to the moon to establish permanent bases or to pursue further scientific investigations” or even a manned exploration of Mars.70

Thus, 1973 was something of a crossroads. Writing Roy Ash, director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Fletcher indicated an understanding of the logic behind the mid-1960s budget cuts that accompanied the phasedown of heavy Apollo requirements. Yet, the trends that concerned Fletcher were tem­porary spending cuts turned permanent. NASA had made “major programmatic reductions” for FY1973 and 1974, but OMB and NASA were both aware that these cuts were made on the assumption that they were “temporary and that future budgets would again approach the ‘constant budget’ level” set in 1971 as $3.4 billion.71 FY1975 “will become decisive,” Fletcher predicted, explaining that at that point, it would be in NASA’s best interest to forego the Shuttle, sci­ence, exploration, applications, or aeronautics, since cuts across the board were no longer tenable. At one point, using the term “balanced program” five times on one page, Fletcher asserted that there was a great deal of support for the cur­rent balanced program, but that “without this balance we would lose support for the remaining program in Congress, by the public, and by the scientific and user communities.”72

In an economic climate that had cut the post-Apollo program short and post­poned Shuttle development, ASTP functioned to help preserve the engineering know-how and managerial expertise of the Apollo program into the dawning Shuttle years. ASTP and Skylab might be taken as evidence of Apollo’s sustained “vitality” in the US space program, a notion supported by Ezell and Ezell who asserted that in the closing days of ASTP, most staff transferred directly to the Shuttle program.73

The shared resources and expenditures implicit to international cooperation rendered it both diplomatically and fiscally attractive. NASA was entering a “new generation of space activity when we are called upon to do much more with considerably less money.”74 Whereas the Apollo program had cost $25 billion, the Shuttle was a mere $5.5 billion. “We are going to have to do more for less,”

Fletcher observed and again, ASTP was an important factor in years to come. To Fletcher, ASTP was

an important step toward long-term, large-scale cooperation with the Soviet Union and other countries, such cooperation is, in my opinion, the only likely hope in this cen­tury for large future steps in space, such as establishing a base on the Moon or landing men on Mars. If we had to go it alone, my guess is that we would have to wait until the 21st century.75

However history and hindsight render a very different—and oftentimes far more critical—narrative of what ASTP has wrought. Through the course of ASTP, George Low and Soviet Academy of Sciences’ academician Keldysh consulted one another on possible expansion of cooperation. They wrote of a joint Shuttle – Salyut mission (which used the last Apollo and last Soyuz craft that orbited the earth, and therefore posed no great risk of technology transfer) that would offer a much more meaningful and possibly sustained collaboration. They dis­cussed a joint robotic mission to the Moon, retrieving soil samples from the far side. In 1977, the two nations signed an agreement for cooperation in human spaceflight, designating 1981 as a target year for a Shuttle-Salyut mission and establishing a joint task force studying the possibility of a joint space station.76 Neither of these ever happened, only augmenting the accusations of some that the joint ASTP mission was, from an engineering and diplomatic standpoint, a dead end.

Even Walter McDougall, otherwise relentlessly pragmatic and eloquent in his assessment of the respective space programs, takes pause to observe of ASTP and contemporary manifestations of detente: “None of this did much to hobble Soviet technocracy,” he groused. Rather, he asserts, the program “gave Soviet technicians the chance to traipse through US space facilities and study the hard­ware and flight operations first hand” (paralleling the visits of US engineers to Moscow and Star City). In conclusion, for McDougall, cooperation such as ASTP was nothing more than a “double boon” to the Soviets, appearing to restore their space program to an equal of the United States and “also provided access to American technology.”77

In light of these plans that came to naught, a critic with an eye on human spaceflight alone (and not biosatellites or the rich field of remote sensing) might otherwise look to the years following ASTP as a “lapse” in cooperation alto­gether. While ASTP had debatable long-term positive influence on the American end (from the perspective of funding, follow-on projects, or perhaps even public relations) it does to some degree function as a foreshadowing of a warming and loosening of relations at personal and middle-managerial levels. These notions are explored in the pages that follow, under the 1982-1984 “lapse” in cooperation.

The first half of 1994 proved a rocky period in which both the RSA and NPO Energia tested the authority of NASA over the Russian space program. Through the course of negotiations—and renegotiations—NASA used the SSF structures dictating US leadership to legitimate authority over the ISS.

NASA reported that in this period the RSA (1) attempted to coerce NASA into fully funding all Phase II contributions, in spite of agreements to the con­trary (outlined earlier in the $305 million/$95 million split); (2) expected to command and control their FGB cargo module and then, after the arrival of other segments, enjoy “joint control”; (3) wanted to be recognized as coequals with the United States: the Russians refused to sign an interim agreement on the ISS hinting that the Space Station Freedom power relations were inapplicable to them; (4) refused to sign up to the barter system, which tried to minimize the exchange of funds among partners; (5) denied the notion of a unified interna­tional crew, expecting to pilot “their” modules as they saw fit and be compen­sated for the transport of all crew to and from the station on their vehicles.76

In the ensuing negotiations, NASA officials were emphatic the Russians had been invited to participate in a preexisting managerial structure in which “NASA has always taken the lead role in the Space Station program and had final authority to resolve conflict.” As had been the case in the original Space Station Freedom plans and Space Station Alpha, the facility would operate as a single integrated vehicle, commanded and controlled by the United States, which had by far invested the most energy and resources into the venture.77

As a result, by electing to join the former Space Station Freedom partners, Russian officials not only committed to providing specific modules to the station, heavy lift capability, and auxiliary command and control centers, they also placed their technologies and workforce within preexisting structures of authority, designating NASA the “lead partner” on the International Space Station. Yet Russian Space Agency officials demonstrated obvious reluctance in submitting to American authority.

At a meeting on June 16, 1994, NASA and the RSA addressed a number of con­cerns centering on interpretations of what constituted “Russian territory” and the jurisdiction of Russian law over Americans. Initially, the RSA had intended to oper­ate its ISS modules independent of the rest of the craft, staffed by cosmonauts using Russian as the operating language. It took considerable work for the Americans to convince their partners that enlistment in ISS presumed that it would function as a unified and integrated craft as SSF plans had dictated. Communication regarding safety and critical operations would be in English. This included labels, displays, placards, onboard flowcharts, schematics, and printed procedures.

Policymakers were equally concerned with legal jurisdiction back on earth.

US officials took a keen interest in the allocation and use of American dollars, since funding for space cooperation was intended to aid the recovery of research and manufacturing (read: “nonprogrammatic concerns”). The fact that Russian contributions to the space station were being bankrolled increasingly by NASA led to a situation in which Americans sought a degree of authority over relations between the Russian government and industry. Initially, this was troublesome.

In 1994 NASA officials expressed concern over the awarding of American dollars to Russian subcontractors. Expressing a desire to preserve/contain the Russian R&D infrastructure, one official reported that the RSA had refused to farm out work to institutions that NASA had deemed “key subcontractors” in the Russian research community. Instead, the RSA maintained that they held absolute authority over subcontract allocation.78 Moreover, the RSA refused to report back to NASA on subcontracting procedures. What NASA requested were characterized as “minimal information on research subcontractors” and even those reports were in a simplified and reduced format of “just a few pages.”

This situation was troubling to NASA representatives, considering the fact that such information was needed to ensure that the Russian research commu­nity was being “properly supported by NASA funds” at a particularly precarious point in time. According to a 1994 briefing book, the Russian Space Agency was “generously paid” for such line items as subcontractor reports. Some officials went so far as to speculate that this evasion of responsibility was an expression of NPO Energia’s influence over the RSA.79 Whereas it was acceptable for NASA to provide advance notice of inspection prior to arriving at manufacturing facili­ties, the RSA’s notion that “Russian law will apply to all aspects of the con­tract performance within Russia” was simply untenable. What resulted appears to have been a three-way competition for authority among NASA, the RSA, and NPO Energia. If the RSA insisted on being an equal to NASA, complete with final decision-making authority over its own subcontractors, then NPO Energia might exercise a higher degree of authority over itself and subcontrac­tors. Administrator Goldin’s briefing book explained:

Since the signing of the 15 Dec Accord we have experienced a consistent effort by the Russians to alter the principles of the 1 Nov Addendum. The Russians consider themselves an equal partner and they wish to alter the IGA, MOU and JMP to reflect this concept. They expect to be paid for any services that are not needed for their ‘core segment’ which is basically the MIR II. They do not accept the concept of [the ISS being] a single integrated vehicle orchestrated by NASA.80

This tension among NASA, the RSA, and Energia was exacerbated by change orders to contracts, demanding extra funds from NASA for goods and services NASA believed were already settled. Internally, NASA officials characterized this as an “unacceptable” move on the part of NPO Energia that was “trying to control dollars” over which the space agencies ought to have had jurisdiction. NASA suspected that the Russian Space Agency had more or less been put up to requesting redundant contracts for research program support. Similarly, the two were charging “exorbitant” fees for cosmonaut time on American projects, even charging “multiple times in and out of the central contract.”81 Table 8.3 reflects what the Russian space program attempted to charge, not necessarily what the United States agreed to pay.82

Perhaps, too, high expectations for autonomy stemmed from conditions in the (still unfolding) Shuttle-Mir agreements. As guests of the Russian-built and operated Mir space station, astronauts and NASA officials reported that they could agree to RSA authority on the operation of the Mir. Indeed, “no one in NASA would want to challenge that RSA authority.” However, ISS agreements

dictated that the Russian modules on the ISS were a very different matter and there “we cannot accept that Russian law will apply co-equal to US law on the ISS.”83 In spite of these agreements, Russian Space Agency officials viewed their autonomy on Mir as a precedent for Russian-built modules on the ISS.

Indeed, ISS planners still operated under a number of uncertainties through the mid – and late 1990s. Between 1993 and 1997, Russian capabilities of meet­ing deliverables and deadlines slipped steadily. In 1994 NASA decided to pur­chase the FGB module outright in order to assure the RSA’s receipt of funds as well as timely completion of the project. In 1995 the United States agreed to extend Shuttle-Mir operations in order to funnel more funds into the ailing aerospace infrastructure to help cover expenses in logistics support.84 In 1996 the Russians acknowledged that the Service module would be eight months late, due to funding shortages suffered by the RSA, leading NASA to pur­sue backup plans, such as funding the Naval Research Laboratory’s Interim Control Module (a 1980s project designed by the NRL’s Naval Center for Space Technology).85

This spectrum of projects entailed a number of challenging obligations for Russians. Though a much-welcomed windfall, the money was not by any means to be seen as foreign “aid.” NASA and the White House officials agreed that funds being sent overseas would help preserve Russia’s aerospace infrastructure, but US law demanded concrete products and definable services in exchange—a docking mechanism, metallurgical data, technical training, and the like. During negotiations in November 1993, the Russians stated explicitly that they were prepared to adopt the expense of responsibilities beyond the $95 million “as a matter of national pride.”86 However, as time passed, missed deadlines, shortage of funds, and general noncompliance on the part of Russia began to complicate matters. To the consternation of many, the United States began to shoulder an increasing share of the financial burden.