NASA and ELDO: The Early Initiatives

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.