Europe Is Invited to Join

On October 13-15, 1969, Paine met with the ministers of science and senior space program officials of France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. He also described to a distinguished committee of senior officials of the European Space Conference (ESC) the details of what he called the “President’s new space pro­gram,” which would be presented to Congress for funding in FY1971.18

The ESC was a gathering of ministers or their delegates in the several coun­tries in Europe interested in defining a European space policy for the 1970s. It first met in 1966. The national representatives got together when needed, and very frequently in times of crisis. The ESC was superseded when the European Space Agency (ESA) came into being in 1975, when its key functions passed to the ESA Council.

Paine spelt out the STG proposals in considerable detail to his European audience (as well as to authorities in Australia, Canada, and Japan).19 He sug­gested that NASA could achieve its goals within its then-current levels of fund­ing ($4-6 billion annually). And he welcomed European participation. He had come to Europe, he said, to “personally make it as clear as I can that it is the desire of America not only to continue but indeed to expand the cooperation which from our standpoint has proved so fruitful and which we hope, from your standpoint, has also been significant.”

It is important to realize how radical Paine’s proposals were. Space was no longer being defined primarily as a strategic resource to be deployed in a com­petitive struggle for global technological supremacy with the Soviet Union. It was rather being seen as a new frontier to be explored and colonized, a place to live and work. “For us in America,” Paine said, “which has been called the new world, we feel that space may represent another new world, a seventh continent, which is now opening to mankind in the region 100 miles above the surface of the globe.”20 Europeans realized the revolutionary implications. A report to a committee of the ESC written by Jean-Pierre Causse (of ELDO) and Jean Dinkespiler (of ESRO) noted that “ [t]his really does mean a total metamorphosis of space activity” (emphasis in the original).21 The delegates to the ESC meeting “expressed the hope that European countries would soon have the necessary data to enable them to give as positive an answer as possible to the offers of cooperation made by the American authorities.”22

Paine was careful not to oversell cooperation. He avoided giving definitive schedules or firm commitments, talking instead in general terms of program directions, plans, hopes. This was not simply because the program was still some­what schematic, and would surely be implemented piecemeal, as Congressional and presidential approval was forthcoming. The most significant reason was that NASA did not want to steer Europeans down particular paths at the outset. Participation was not to be imposed from above but something that bubbled up from below because the Europeans wanted it. As Frutkin put it,

We would not wish to constrain imaginative European thinking and initiative regarding the structuring of participation, i. e., we want to give the fullest and fre­est reign to European proposals. [. . . ] Europeans must determine for themselves whether they are interested in participation and what is the nature of their interest.

It would then be a short and logical step for them to give thought to how that inter­est should be pursued and structured. (Emphasis in the original)23

To improve communications, it was agreed in February 1970 that ESRO and ELDO would together station a representative in Washington on a permanent basis. An ELDO team, headed by Causse, would make periodic visits to NASA and its contractors to keep abreast of developments in both the space shuttle and station. They would be invited to regular NASA “internal” three-month brief­ings, and NASA would provide for “full observation and participation opportuni­ties in the planned summer study activities on the space station in 1970-71.”24 Classification was another important obstacle that was quickly removed. Deputy Administrator George Low and Robert Seamans agreed at once “that the space shuttle program should be conducted on a generally unclassified basis” in the same sense that the Apollo program was unclassified, bearing in mind “the international flavor of the program.”25 In mid-February 1970 Paine and Seamans signed an official agreement between NASA and the Air Force estab­lishing a joint NASA/USAF committee whose task was to ensure that the shut­tle “be designed and developed to fulfill the objectives of both the NASA and the DOD” and confirmed that it “will be generally unclassified.”26

NASA was emphatic that collaboration would be pointless if Europe did not reciprocate, above all by increasing its space budgets. In 1969 ESRO’s annual budget was slightly over $50 million, ELDO’s was about $90 million, and the entire European effort, including that of individual nations, was about $300 mil­lion.27 Frutkin was quite blunt about it in his briefing for Paine before the admin­istrator’s trip to Europe in October. It was imperative, he wrote, for Europe to increase its level of financing several-fold if it had “substantial space ambitions and wishes to take hold of the opportunities of the future.” In any event, “signifi­cant participation in planning for future space exploration and use cannot really be considered, and would even be a waste of time,” he added, “if there is not an intention to seek much larger funding.”28