Introduction and Historical. Overview: NASA’s International. Relations in Space

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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.