The Collaborative Effort Is Reduced to a Sortie Can

By the end of February 1972 Frutkin was persuaded that NASA should strongly discourage European participation in the shuttle. He was deeply concerned by the management difficulties, cost overruns on the European side, and the risk of delays involved in having Europeans subcontractors build integral parts of the main orbiter.14 His sentiments were confirmed at the meeting of an interagency group on March 17, 1972, reported on by Pollack to Secretary of State Rogers.15 Pollack noted that “Kissinger, Flanigan and David each had representatives on this group, and they were unanimous in reflecting the prevailing spirit in their home offices as one of deep skepticism as to the desirability of European par­ticipation in the development of the hardware for the space shuttle or other ele­ments of the post-Apollo space transportation system.” Their underlying reasons for this attitude, Pollack added, centered on “protecting the technological posi­tion of the U. S., maximizing balance of payments and employment benefits for the U. S., and avoiding managerial difficulties that may be encountered in inter­national cooperation in technological activities.” In their view, the only reason to continue with the Europeans now was that “we have gone so long and so far in our discussions with the Europeans as to be ‘stuck’ with their participation.” Ten days later, on March 27, Deputy Administrator George Low confirmed that, in his view, only pressing foreign policy concerns could now keep Europe in the post-Apollo program. In a memo to Fletcher that was transmitted to Flanigan in the White House Low wrote that

our position is that from a programmatic point of view we would like to develop the Shuttle and all of its ancillary equipments domestically. It would be NASA’s view to seek foreign participation in the use of the Shuttle, but not in its develop­ment. (When I say Shuttle, I also mean tug, sortie module, etc.). However, it is also NASA’s position that if there are overriding international reasons to invite foreign participation into the development of the Shuttle, we would be willing to do so provided certain conditions are met [to be specified in separate paper].16

By the end of March 1972, then, it was clear that NASA was no longer willing to fight for direct European participation in the STS system, notably the shuttle. Throughout 1971 it had struggled valiantly against those who argued that there would be a serious leakage of technology to Europe. It had devised managerial schemes that, it thought, would both contain technology transfer and be practi­cable and efficient. It had never persuaded David, Flanigan, or Whitehead of the merits of its case and, now that the shuttle had been authorized, it did not have the will to go on. Only the State Department, by appealing strongly to foreign policy concerns, could save significant post-Apollo cooperation. Johnson was persuaded that such participation “would be damn useful and valuable from a foreign policy and public-relations point of view.”17 Low implied that NASA would be cooperative. Fletcher concurred. “NASA is a service,” he told U. Alexis Johnson in January 1972. “We’ll do whatever the people want us to do.”18 But which “people”? Whose voice would prevail? Was a consensus possible?

On April 29, 1972, Secretary of State Rogers turned once again to his president detailing the foreign policy situation.19 Summarizing the history of US-European exchanges he pointed out that until recently the American authorities had “provided the Europeans every reason to believe that the U. S. was seriously interested in having them participate in the development of cer­tain parts of the Shuttle, in one or more of the RAMs and especially in the Tug.” In response Europeans had spent or committed $11.5 million on pre­liminary technical studies. Now all this was in jeopardy. He repeated the argu­ments that Pollack had reported to him as regards participation in the shuttle. He noted that there were objections that the tug was too difficult technically for the Europeans. That left the RAM. To reduce European involvement to one or two RAMs, however, would be “judged by them as a clear reversal of our previous policy,” and would “buy more trouble with the Europeans than can be justified by the ephemeral domestic advantages that we may gain by denying them participation.” America must not be seen to change tack now. Rogers sug­gested that the United States “accept, but not encourage” European participa­tion in the five shuttle tasks identified by NASA—on condition that they made a “prior commitment” to “undertake the subsequent development of one or more RAMs.” He also insisted that there was no need for the United States to reverse its position on the tug, since it would require several more years of design study. Instead, what the United States should do was to create an exit strategy for itself, in the event that one was needed, by bringing “the Europeans to agree that consideration of their undertaking of the development of the Tug will be deferred pending further study.”

NASA administrator Fletcher wrote to Kissinger a few days later comment­ing on Rogers’s memo. He took a harder line than did the secretary of state. As regards the shuttle work packages, “we continue to feel such European partici­pation is highly undesirable and that it would complicate our shuttle manage­ment problems.” These concerns could be overridden if the president insisted, but only on condition that the Europeans were responsible for both estimated costs and overruns and also built a sortie module. Fletcher also confirmed to Kissinger that, even if further studies established that a tug was feasible in Europe, NASA wanted “to reserve the right to escape from an agreement,” and did not anticipate “technical support of the European study” unless directed by the president to do otherwise. “For all of these reasons,” Fletcher wrote, NASA did “not recommend European involvement in the tug.”20

And then the president’s science adviser, Ed David, stepped in.21 He insisted that the Europeans understood American reservations about technology flow and management difficulties, and were pragmatic enough not to let these con­cerns in Washington drive them to abandon cooperation. He claimed that the French were going to propose anyway that Europeans give priority to Sortie or RAM modules to be carried in the shuttle payload bay, and that they may abandon plans to develop the tug or contribute to subsystems of the shuttle. In short the United States could drastically reduce the scale of its offer of post – Apollo cooperation without creating the foreign policy blowback that the State

Department feared. With that fear removed, David insisted that negotiations on participation in the orbiter and discussions of the tug should be terminated at once on the grounds that the United States now believed that “they would lead to excessive additional costs and managements complications that the U. S. is unwilling to accept.” The United States could accept European participation in the shuttle program, he added, but only “if limited to RAM and Sortie payload modules.”

David’s view prevailed. Pollack conveyed what was now official policy to a high-level ESC delegation that had come to Washington on June 16 to discuss post-Apollo cooperation. He informed his visitors that European participation in the development of the shuttle “can no longer be encouraged by us even on the limited scale we are still discussing.” He also killed “consideration of mutual development of the Tug,” which, he said, had “of necessity been set aside.” European participation in the development of Sortie modules and in the use of the shuttle system were, by contrast, warmly welcomed.22