The Locus and Scope of International Collaboration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Type of Arrangement	A	B	Type of Arrangement	A	B
Cooperative arrangements			Reimbursable launchings
Cooperative spacecraft projects	8	38	• Launching of non-US spacecraft	15	95
Experiments on NASA missions			• Foreign launchings of NASA spacecraft	1	4
• Experiments with foreign principal investigators	14	73	Tracking and data acquisition
• US experiments with foreign coinvestigators or team	11	56	NASA overseas tracking stations/facilities	20	48
members
• US experiments on foreign spacecraft	3	14	NASA-funded SAO optical and laser tracking facilities	16	21
Cooperative sounding rocket projects	22	1774a	Reimbursable tracking arrangements
Joint development projects	5	9	• Support provided by NASA	5	48
Cooperative ground-based projects			• Support received by NASA	3	12
• Remote sensing	53	163	Personnel exchanges
• Communication satellite	51b	19	Resident research associateships	43	1417
• Meteorological satellite	44c	11	International fellowships		358
• Geodynamics	43	20	Technical training	5	985
• Space plasma	38	10	Foreign visitors	131	85,177
• Atmospheric study	14	11
• Support of manned space flights	21	2
• Solar system exploration	8	10
• Solar terrestrial and astrophysics	25	11

continued

Type of Arrangement A B Type of Arrangement A B

Cooperative balloons and airborne projects

• Balloon flights	9	14
• Airborne observations	12	17
International solar energy projects	24	9
Cooperative aeronautical projects	5	40
US/USSR coordinated space projects	1	9
US/China space projects	1	5
Scientific and technical information exchanges	70	3

Notes: A: Number of countries/international organizations

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

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

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

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

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