European Participation in the. Post-Apollo Program, 1972: Disentangling. the Alliance—The Victory of Clean. Technological Interfaces

The Shuttle Is Authorized. . . and the Options Shrink

On January 5, 1972, President Nixon announced that the United States should proceed at once to develop “an entirely new type of space transportation system designed to transform the space frontier of the 1970s’s into familiar ter­ritory,” readily accessible to humans in the decades to come. The space shuttle would “revolutionize transportation into outer space.” It would “take the astro­nomical costs out of astronautics.” It promised to become “the workhorse of our whole space effort, taking the place of all present launch vehicles except the very smallest and the very largest” (the Scout and the Titan-III rockets) soon after it became operational at the end of the 1970s. The economic benefits of reusabil­ity, which promised to “bring operating costs down as low as one-tenth of those for present launch vehicles,” would allow the shuttle to transport humans safely, routinely, and relatively cheaply. The shuttle would take America “out from our present beach-head in the sky to achieve a real working presence in space.” It would also secure the “pre-eminence of America and American industry in the aerospace field” by engaging the talents of thousands of highly skilled workers and hundreds of industrial contractors who would ensure that the United States maintained its leadership in “man’s epic voyage into space.”1

Nixon did not refer to the military use of the shuttle in his public statement. He authorized NASA administrator James Fletcher, and his deputy George Low, to mention military applications, however. And indeed this aspect was one of several emphasized by the two NASA officials at the San Clemente White House immediately afterward.2 In the press conference Fletcher claimed that the low cost and the ability to launch “on a moment’s notice, when something strange happens,” to be in space within “24 to 48 hours,” would certainly interest the Department of Defense. The NASA administrator said that he was “sure the military will be using the shuttle routinely for most of their payloads,” though he did not specify that this would involve the development of the space tug.

The president only made passing reference to international collaboration in his official January announcement. In conversation just beforehand, however, he told Fletcher and Low how important international collaboration was to him, particularly the flying of astronauts from all nations, East and West.3 He affirmed that it would also be valuable to encourage “meaningful participation” in experiments “and even in space hardware development.”4 Foreign participa­tion, he said, could reduce the development cost of the shuttle, now estimated to be $5.5 billion, by some 10-15 percent.

The group of NASA/ELDO/ESRO experts were scheduled to meet again early in February to narrow down the options for collaboration discussed at the end of 1971. Now that the shuttle was authorized, there was a flurry of activ­ity inside the administration intended to adjust the US position, and the scope it allowed for transatlantic collaboration to the new, more stable political and budgetary situation. A subcommittee of the International Space Cooperation Committee met four times in the latter half of January. The meetings in January 1972 were chaired by John Walsh, a senior staff member of the National Security Council. They dealt with various technological, managerial, and foreign pol­icy aspects of post-Apollo collaboration with Europe that had the shuttle at its core.5 One meeting was devoted to presentations from senior businessmen from the Aerospace Corporation, Hughes Aircraft Company, Lockheed of Georgia, and McDonnell Douglas, all of which had experience in working with European firms. A summary report of the findings of the Walsh subcommittee was sub­mitted to Herman Pollack in the State Department on February 18, 1972, and received in NASA on February 23.6

The European delegation to the joint experts meeting, held in Washington from February 8 to 10, 1972, was again led by Causse and Dinkespiler.7 The US delegation was led this time by Philip E. Culbertson, the director of advanced missions in the Office of Manned Space Flight. The first striking development since the previous expert meeting a little over two months before was the reduc­tion in candidate work packages on the shuttle (see table 5.3). There had been fourteen such packages in all in December. Now there were just five which had a “high probability of being suitable for development in Europe”: the tail assem­bly, elevon, cargo bay door, nose cap, and the landing gear and door. Europe’s potential financial contribution to the shuttle program had also dropped sharply, from about $400 million for the original fourteen packages to $100-115 mil­lion for the five items on offer (see table 6.1).

Several technology-related concerns drove this reduced offer. Culbertson and Frutkin assured John Walsh’s ad hoc committee that the five work packages offered to the Europeans were limited to “subsystems which require least trans­fer of technology,”8 and to tasks that their firms could carry out “substantially on their own, thus minimizing European need for US technical assistance.”9 NASA also stipulated that anything Europe built should not have a significant impact on critical US schedules. If the Europeans failed to deliver as expected, there had to be “reasonable recovery options” on the US side. It was also impor­tant to choose elements whose design was more or less frozen, and not likely to change. National security concerns provided an added twist. Indeed the entire propulsion package was withdrawn at the second experts meeting, probably to reduce the risk of proliferating missile-related technology. The net result was a

package that was relatively simple and “exclude[d] the most interesting tasks” (Frutkin). Indeed, he added, “they have already been termed uninteresting by Europeans involved.”10

Two other major difficulties beset a joint effort on the shuttle even with the work packages simplified to reduce technological transfer to the minimum. One was the problem of project management. As we saw earlier, everybody agreed that the prime contractor on the shuttle would be an American firm. The sub­contractors would be European, and they would be paid for their work by the appropriate European funding authorities. While this mechanism respected the principle of “no exchange of funds,” it raised problems of its own. Among the more serious management problems identified by the joint expert group were “source selection, the negotiations of out-of-scope changes, limitations on the control by the prime contractor over the subcontractor and the relations between subcontractor and its own government authority.”11 In an international project such strains could rapidly escalate to the government level since the American prime would have to negotiate their resolution with the European funding agen­cies that were supporting the subcontractors. As one document put it, “There is a high probability that the contention and acrimony of the subcontracting rela­tionships will degrade, rather than improve, our relations with Europe.”12

The different rhythms of the decision-making process on both sides of the Atlantic complicated technological collaboration on the shuttle even more. NASA was calling for bids for the orbiter in mid-March and expected phase C/D development to begin by July 1, 1972. The expert meeting agreed that if European subcontractors were to be included in the bids by the American prime contractor, a draft government-to-government agreement had to be settled, at least “in principle,” by this date. Frutkin rejected this timeline outright two weeks later. “A working level draft is not adequate for the confidence level we need to defer US subcontractor negotiations and to authorize instead exten­sive interplay between US primes and foreign subs,” he wrote.” The American authorities negotiating with Lefevre and the ESC should insist upon a “commit­ment in principle or letter(s) of intent signed at the ministerial level in interested countries” by July 1 (emphases throughout in the original). It was necessary, wrote Frutkin, “to shock senior European officials into a recognition of the magnitude of the commitments they would have to undertake and the very inad­equate time for negotiating them.”13