France

I have always claimed with gratitude that CNES is the child of NASA, and I would add, the loving child of NASA. There has always been a great friendship and mutual understanding between the two agencies. . .

Jacques Blamont17

Nazi missiles raining down on their country stimulated the French military’s interest in rocketry.18 About 100 V-1s fell between June and September 1944; almost 80 V-2s struck in four weeks from September to October that year. Henri Moreau, the director of a Parisian laboratory, was so impressed with the weapons that he made several trips to Germany to study them more closely, including a visit to the infamous production facility at Nordhausen. Moreau brought back nine wagon loads of missile parts and signed an agreement with the American authorities to receive ten complete V-2s. These were never delivered, presumably because of the presence of communist ministers in the postwar French govern­ment and in important scientific organizations.

A ballistic missile research laboratory was established at Vernon in May 1946 to exploit the spoils of war, a test range was built at Colomb-Bechar in the Sahara Desert, and 123 German engineers and technicians who had been involved in Von Braun’s program at Peenemunde were employed under contract to work on missiles for the French military. One of them, Karl-Heinz Bringer, was to stay in France and play a crucial role in developing the pro­pulsion systems for the French sounding rocket Veronique as well as its first missile-derived satellite launcher, Diamant, and the immensely successful European rocket, Ariane.19

France was ill-prepared for the opportunities provided by the IGY. Contrary to Britain, it had no space policy, no institutions to promote it, no technologi­cal or industrial capability in the space sector, and no space science community. This was partly because of the weakness of science in France after the war, and its inability to organize groups having a critical mass, partly due to interser­vice rivalry between the technical branches of the three arms of the military, and partly due to the huge investment, undertaken in 1956, to test a French atomic bomb within four years. In summer 1958 the Ministry of Foreign Affairs lamented the country’s marginal influence on the international scene. The dis­persal of already limited resources between different administrative organs made it impossible for France to speak with one voice. The essentially military charac­ter of its rocket program excluded it from playing a role in COSPAR.

The arrival of President General de Gaulle to power in June 1958 was trans­formative. De Gaulle was determined to strengthen the country’s scientific and technological capability, believing that it was essential to reestablishing “la grandeur de la France” and to its strategic independence. A major missile pro­gram was established to provide an independent nuclear deterrent. A new civil Committee for Space Research was set up in January 1959 at the request of the minister of foreign affairs. Its brief was to take stock of the resources already at hand, to draw up a plan for the future, and to advise the prime minister on national and international space policy.

With space assuming a new significance, considerable resources were released for a campaign using an enhanced Veronique-IGY sounding rocket. The first launches that got under way in March 1959 were a spectacular success. The payloads were provided by a newly minted PhD, Jacques Blamont, who had worked at the University of Wisconsin in 1957. Blamont visited the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories near Boston on his way home, where he was given the blueprint of the mechanism for ejecting sodium vapor into the atmo­sphere that was being used with the American Aerobee sounding rocket. It was perfectly adapted to the limitations of the French situation at the time: cheap, solid, simple, of proven success, and it did not require any electronic equipment. Three German engineers prepared the rockets for launch at Colomb Bechar. Though the first launch did not attain the expected height the next two achieved their objectives. The ejector released a huge orange sodium cloud over Algeria between 90 and 130 kilometers, and then between 90 and 180 kilometers.

On Blamont’s telling, in addition to its scientific achievements, this campaign had two major consequences. First, there was renewed interest in having a French space program. The rocket-borne sodium clouds that could be seen hundreds of kilometers away for over an hour were given wide media coverage. The public was so enthralled that hundreds of newborn girls were named Veronique.20 Second, it brought him together with Robert Aubiniere, “a brilliant army colonel whose ambitions were inspired by technology and the future.”21 Strong bonds were quickly established between the two men and with Aubiniere’s support previ­ously unimaginable resources were made available for Blamont and for French space science. What is more, the authorities were persuaded that France now had the means to move beyond sounding rockets to ballistic missiles and satel­lite launchers. In March 1962 the French national space agency, CNES (Centre national d’etudes spatiales) came into being to replace the Committee for Space Research. Over the years the agency developed launchers, built a national sat­ellite industry, a tracking network, and a dedicated equatorial launch pad in Kourou, French Guyana, as well as being responsible for international affairs.

Relationships with the United States were an important source of train­ing and of legitimacy for the young community of French space scientists and engineers. Bell labs helped engineers from the national center for telecommu­nications research (CNET—Centre nationale d’etudes de telecommunications) to build a ground station at Pleumeur-Boudou to receive signals from Telstar 1.22 Blamont’s sodium vapor experiment was followed by an invitation to the Goddard Space Flight Center in October 1959. NASA encouraged Blamont to extend the range of his investigations to higher altitudes and in 1960 and 1961 he launched his payload with Javelin sounding rockets from Wallops Island, reach­ing an altitude of 600 kilometers (compared to 200 meters for Veronique). In March 1961 a formal agreement was signed in Washington for launching French payloads on American rockets and for hosting French engineers in NASA centers in the framework of the COSPAR offer. A French group took over a major bal­loon project that had lost support in the United States, and which they baptized Eole. In 1963 CNES and NASA signed a protocol defining a two-phase FR1 program: sounding-rocket studies of the upper atmosphere between 75 and 100 kilometers followed by the launch of a scientific satellite using a Scout.

The origins of Eole can be traced back to a project called GHOST (Global Horizontal Sounding Technique) promoted by Vincent Lally at the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories. Lally suggested floating 2,000 mylar bal­loons in low earth orbit along with a system of satellites that would localize them and relay meteorological measurements made at different heights back to earth.23 This corresponded with a surge of interest in mathematical models of the atmosphere that needed an input of fresh data points at least once a day. Blamont realized that a project of this kind was one that was both prestigious and politically visible and NASA agreed that France pursue it. Eole was led by Pierre Morel using mylar balloons imported from the United States. About 500 balloons were launched from stations constructed in Argentina for the project. The lifetime of each was about 103 days, and each took some 8 days to go around the world. The project was haunted by the fear of a collision with high­flying aircraft and was gradually wound down. Morel’s conclusion is uncompro­mising. Eole, he says, was a courageous and risky choice but it was not a scientific success. His team launched less balloons than they had hoped. The project was premature given the state of knowledge at the time, and it was undertaken in a hemisphere about which the French scientists knew very little.

NASA’s help was unstinting in the FR1 program. Arnold Frutkin and Jack Townsend arranged for 12 young, enthusiastic French engineers to spend six months at the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). Each worked in a separate technical domain and was instructed to establish bonds of mutual respect and friendship with their American colleagues. Whenever possible, contracts for the hardware were placed with French firms; otherwise NASA helped arrange for orders to be given to American companies that were visited regularly by CNES engineers to improve their own skills. To facilitate communications with NASA’s tracking network the French used the already crowded VHF bands that NASA used, 136 MHz for telemetry, 148 MHz for tele-command. Relationships were warm, and with the help of NASA the French were able to proceed far more rapidly, and with a reduced risk, than if they had worked alone. Sam Stevens, the project leader at NASA was particularly effective. Jean Pierre Causse, the first director of the satellite division at CNES, affectionately remembers him as a kind of elder brother who freely gave of his advice without ever imposing his solutions. In fact this support meant so much to him that at a recent conference Causse exclaimed, “Thank you Sam! Bravo NASA and the United States!”24

The construction of FR1 also established close ties between Thompson Ramo Wooldridge (TRW) and Matra.25 TRW sought international partners to strengthen its bid for communications satellites being built by Comsat on behalf of Intelsat (see chapter 5), while the French firm sought an American partner to build its credibility as a prime contractor for projects being developed by CNES and by ESRO (the European Space Research Organization). In 1965 a “Technical Assistance and License Agreement” was signed between Matra and TRW’s Space Technology Laboratories division (STL) that allowed Matra to have access to the patents and know-how of STL through visits and internships of French engineers and technicians at its headquarters in California. The inter­penetration of practices between the two firms was so great that one senior ESA official reputedly remarked that “[w]hen one spoke with people from Matra one had the impression that one was speaking to American industrialists.”26

In 1964 NASA established an office in Paris that gave the agency a permanent representative in Europe. The first to arrive was Gilbert Ousley, who left GSFC in 1964 to take up his new post. He has described his role at the time as primar­ily being “to find cooperative programs which would benefit NASA and which in our judgment could be done with a partner that would live up to their side of the agreement.” The training offered at GSFC was not simply intended to bring young French scientists and engineers up to speed, however. It was also intended to export NASA’s way of running projects abroad. As Ousley puts it, it

was a great excuse for us to really share technology and training but we also had a selfish purpose. It was to get young engineers that were experienced to participate in our program and later come back to France speaking the same terminology that NASA uses, that understood our review process and did not feel insulted by peers looking at what was being done and making constructive criticism.27

Jean Pierre Causse amplified this by stressing how important the NASA man­agement principles of “no exchange of funds,” memoranda of understanding, a single project manager, design reviews, systematic testing by engineers in the project and in industry, and so on were to the success of the French teams sent to Goddard.28 This flow of management practices across the Atlantic from TRW and from GSFC was a characteristic feature of NASA’s relationship with European projects in the 1960s and 1970s, as Stephen Johnson has shown, and played a major role in helping Europeans acquire the skills needed to bring com­plex space projects to fruition.29

Close collaboration with France also had an important political and ideologi­cal role. Many French scientists were left-wing. Working with NASA sharpened their perception of the differences between the two world systems. Roger Bonnet, for example, who grew up in a communist family was first attracted to space by Soviet achievements. And even if he would have liked to work closely with Soviet colleagues, he found that, by adopting an “open policy of information which we could not always get from the Russians,” NASA “could attract and involve the best foreign scientists in their programs, directly or indirectly [. . .] So, ultimately there was a greater appeal to cooperate with the Americans.”30

From NASA’s point of view, collaboration with France did not simply kick – start the national space program, and build a community that adopted NASA’s management practices, so facilitating the day-to-day technical cooperation between people on both sides of the Atlantic. It was also an instrument of “soft power” that provided a counterweight to the attraction that some French scien­tists felt for working with the highly successful Soviet program.31