A Missed Opportunity

In September 1966 NASA administrator Webb traveled to Europe to discuss space collaboration with Germany and other potential partners. Frutkin briefed him shortly before his departure. While the “general atmosphere for space coop­eration with the United States may have improved slightly,” wrote Frutkin, the steps taken to date had done little more than “clear the air somewhat.” The Europeans, he told Webb, “know of no progress in easing US restrictions upon communications satellite technology,” and “it may be sometime” before the progress that had been made in Washington could be divulged to them. Webb was therefore to repeat the standard answer to the usual request for comsat launch assistance: “that we could certainly give consideration to such a proposi­tion on the assumption that the European countries take their Intelsat commit­ment to a single global system as seriously as we do.”65

The damage caused by this reticence was amplified by President’s Johnson official offer of support to Germany just before Christmas in 1965. It will be

remembered (see previous chapter) that in an exchange of toasts with Chancellor Ludwig Erhard at a state banquet, LBJ suggested that existing scientific coop­eration should be extended to embrace “an even more ambitious plan to permit us to do together what we cannot do alone.” The president gave two examples of “demanding” and “quite complex” collaborative projects, which would “con­tribute vastly to our mutual knowledge and to our mutual skills”: a solar probe and a Jupiter probe.66

This gesture was driven by political concerns: collaboration in space science was being instrumentalized by the State Department not only to recognize Erhard’s support for the United States in Vietnam, but to drive a wedge between French and German policies in Europe. Indeed, Erhard was forced to relinquish his post in November 1966, accused of mismanaging the economy and of being too pro-American and anti-French. In addition, LBJ’s offer was interpreted by some as a strategy to divert scarce European resources into science and away from applications, notably telecommunications, that is, as a clumsy effort to secure American preponderance in Intelsat. “All in all,” wrote Frutkin to Webb in August 1966, “we must say the President’s proposal got off to a poor start due to misunderstandings which are inevitable when a proposition of this sort is made in the headlines without preparation of the ground.”67 Barnes put it pithily: because of European “suspicion and distrust,” aggravated by President Johnson’s spectacular overtures to Chancellor Erhard, there was “no prospect for escalating cooperation with Europe unless (1) US is willing to modify its present export control policies, and (2) we could offer other possibilities for cooperation in areas of interest to them (i. e., comsats and vehicles).”68

The opportunity for the United States to shape the European program was, however, slipping away. By September 1966 ELDO had temporarily resolved its crisis: the British had agreed not to withdraw in return for their contribution to the budget being reduced from 38 percent to 27 percent.69 The organization had also reoriented its program unambiguously in favor of developing Europa II that achieved geostationary capability by adding a fourth, French-built solid-fuel stage to the previous rocket. In parallel, France and Germany decided to fuse their national comsat projects in a joint experimental telecommunications satel­lite called Symphonie. Symphonie would be launched by Europa II from a new base near the equator in Kourou, French Guiana.70 ELDO had moved from an artificial political construct to an organization that was working to improve its management structure and that now had a well-defined technical mission. For the moment at least, the Europeans would blaze their own trail into space. They would do so under a new regime led by a Republican president who was sworn into office in January 1969.