The Organization of This Book

Much of this book concentrates on the first 30-40 years of NASA’s interna­tional collaboration, concluding with brief overviews of the International Space Station and of ITAR today. The aim has been to throw light on the general policies that informed the agency’s actions in select regions of the globe, and to illustrate their application in practice in specific and important cases. The vast scope of NASA’s international activities demanded that choices be made. Those choices, in turn, were constrained by the usual factors: the availability of sources, the capacities and interests of the authors, and the time foreseen to complete the work, which competed with many other responsibilities.

The book is divided into three major sections, and a conclusion. It deals suc­cessively with NASA’s relations with Western Europe, with the Soviet Union and Russia, and with two countries in Asia—Japan and India.

John Krige’s section on Western Europe distinguishes collaboration in space science (chapter 2) from technological collaboration (chapters 3-6). This distinc­tion reflects the very different issues that arise in the two domains. Clean inter­faces and no exchange of funds are relatively easy to respect in space science; the management of knowledge and dollar flows is far more contentious in advanced technological collaboration. Here working with foreign partners engages mul­tiple arms of the administration in NASA’s programmatic affairs—the State Department, the Department of Defense, the Department of Commerce, most obviously. It can also raise eyebrows in Congress. For a leading space power like the United States, the desire of some to promote international collaboration by sharing technology is in a state of dynamic equilibrium with the determination of others to deny technology in the interests of national security, economic com­petitiveness, and American global leadership.

Chapter 2 complements national studies of four major Western European coun­tries, Britain, France, Italy, and West Germany, with two more detailed case stud­ies from the ESA period: the International Solar Polar Mission (ISPM) and the Cassini-Huygens planetary probe. The core theme of the national studies, readily and warmly acknowledged by many actors of the day, is NASA’s generosity in catalyzing programs in countries in which the space community was small, indus­trial capacity was minimal, and political will was diffuse or nonexistent. The ISPM project, in which NASA withdrew its satellite from a joint venture with ESA, is important if only because of the shock that the agency’s move caused in Europe. Cassini-Huygens, by contrast, was not only a superb scientific achievement: its sur­vival in Goldin’s NASA, which was committed to “faster, better, cheaper” projects, was a tribute to the ability of international collaboration to protect a mission.

The exchange of sensitive technology is at the core of the next four chapters. The first treats NASA and the State Department’s attempts to save the European Launcher Development Organization (ELDO) from collapse in the mid-1960s, describing their efforts to cope with restrictions on collaboration in this sensitive domain that had been imposed by various national security directives from the White House. The next three chapters are a detailed examination of the lengthy negotiations, initiated by NASA administrator Tom Paine in 1969, to engage Western Europe (and others, notably, Australia and Japan) in the post-Apollo program. This event is important for the light it throws on the perennial conflict between technological sharing and technological denial. It explores the crucial role that the parallel negotiations over the definitive Intelsat agreements played in the discussions between the United States and Europe over launcher avail­ability, and it studies the effects of the eventual decision to limit technological exchange to the barest minimum.

The two chapters by Angelina Long Callahan on the Soviet Union, its collapse, and the emergence of Russia as a major space player span a collaborative regime that might appear to have moved from one extreme to another. Collaboration in the 1960s was, in some respects, arm’s length; the 1990s did indeed bring about increasing dependence on Russia for construction, design, and access to the ISS. However, the notion of a wholesale shift between two extremes of criticality is to some extent artificial, an artifact of Cold War thinking. Historiography has often eclipsed parallel efforts made to maintain dialog and some measure of trust. What we learn from this section is that, embedded in the upheavals that have marked the history of the Soviet empire in the past 50 years, and the tension that has so marked its relationships with the rest of the free world, there lies a slow, cumulative attempt to build durable relationships in space. NASA policymakers often initiated these efforts; the Soviet Union typically made critical technological contributions. Low-key initiatives—meteorology, the Bion satellites, atmospheric sciences—and the odd space spectacular like the ASTP (chapter 7) were a forerunner of the full­blown effort in technological collaboration in the 1990s when Russia’s experience in human spaceflight in the Shuttle-Mir and ISS program led to its integration into the core of the space station (chapter 8). It is emphasized that that process was one element in the sweeping measures embarked on by the US administration to rebuild and to reintegrate a transformed group of nations into the capitalist world economy, dismantling their military infrastructure and sealing their allegiance to international agreements concerning the proliferation of military technology.

The third section of the book, written by Ashok Maharaj, looks at NASA’s rela­tionships with Japan and India. A longitudinal overview of each (chapters 9 and 11) is supplemented with case studies of particularly important joint ventures. The first is the controversial decision, spearheaded by the State Department, that the United States should share Thor-Delta launcher technology with Japan (chapter 10). The second case study is the marvelous SITE project that was so near and dear to Frutkin’s heart: the use of an ATS-6 communications technology satellite to beam educational and other programs to about 2,200 villages in rural India (chapter 12).

As I have said, there is an inherent contradiction in NASA’s twin missions to maintain leadership and to foster international collaboration. By helping others acquire space capabilities NASA at once enhances the capacity, visibility, and reach of the US space program, and contributes to the efforts of those who may eventually compete with it. The dilemma is particularly acute when collabora­tion involves managing dual-use technologies that are of both commercial and military significance. Chapters 13 and 14 discuss the contradictory forces now at work on international collaboration in the civilian aerospace sector. The new interdependence between partners embodied in the International Space Station (ISS) is contrasted with the stricter implementation of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) in the rest of the civilian space sector. It is impossi­ble to know which of the two models—closer interdependence or retreat behind high technological walls—will prevail. The recent tectonic shifts in the global world order, the emergence of new space powers, many of them perceived as a threat to the United States, the increasing pressure for the commercialization of space, and the growing importance of space technologies as force-multipliers in war define the contours of a transition whose future it is difficult to predict.