Spacelab

The offer by NASA to build a Sortie Module as Europe’s contribution to the post – Apollo program was taken up by West Germany. On August 14, 1973, NASA administrator James Fletcher and ESRO director general Alexander Hocker signed an MoU for a “Cooperative Programme Concerning Development, Procurement and Use of a Space Laboratory in Conjunction With the Space Shuttle System.”37 The project, which would be spearheaded by the Federal Republic, foresaw the construction of a human-rated laboratory and a number of pallets that would be housed in the shuttle’s payload bay. NASA agreed to provide technical support, to manage the operational uses of the laboratory, and to develop essential technological items such as the access tunnel between Spacelab, as it was called, and the orbiter’s cabin.

The history of Spacelab has been written from various angles: by Douglas Lord (NASA) and the many European and project managers and engineers who built it38; by historians Lorenza Sebesta and Arturo Russo from the point of the general policy framework and the user community, respectively39; by indus­trialists who were engaged in it40; and by some of the scientists who actually exploited it.41

Though the user communities were not enthusiastic about the venture, industry was more interested. Niklas Reinke has noted the “enormous value in terms of contracts: German industry anticipated no less than DM625 million in turnover from the transatlantic cooperation project.”42 The prime contrac­tor, ERNO (MESH) in Bremen, also gained considerable insight into American methods of systems management. All the same, these were just “add-ons, designed to make [Spacelab] more convincing,” according to Wolfgang Finke, a senior official in the Federal Ministry for Research and Development. For him, political considerations dominated Germany’s willingness to continue with an “appendix” to post-Apollo after NASA had drastically reduced the scope of col­laboration. Central to Bonn’s thinking was the need to reassure her Western allies that she was a reliable ally even as she opened up toward the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc (the so-called Ostpolitik). “The German government looked for opportunities to demonstrate her attachment to the Western camp and especially her reliance on the United States,” said Finke, “without jeopardising her new policy toward the USSR and her neighbours in Eastern Europe. Among other things cooperation in space technology seemed to offer such an opportunity.”43 German officials also hoped that participation in Spacelab, “an endeavour that was at the time considered to be the most advanced,” would reduce the technol­ogy gap and contain the brain drain.44

Spacelab was a collaborative success at the working level. On the other hand it cost far more than expected—$750 million, more than twice the 1973 esti­mate. The laboratory only flew 16 times between 1983 and 1998 and the overall scientific return was disappointing.45 ESA and Germany also came to regret the terms of use agreed with NASA in the MoU. Europe agreed to build the first module, to fly one of their astronauts on it along with sharing the payload with the United States, and then to hand it over to NASA who could use it free of charge. NASA only had an obligation to buy one more Spacelab—and it did that and no more. This was far less than Europe had originally hoped for (the sale of four-eight units).

Whatever the disappointments, Spacelab was a major technological project that involved considerable industrial learning and that enabled Europe to engage directly for the first time in human spaceflight. It provided an essential platform for subsequent participation in Space Station Freedom and the International Space Station (see chapter 13). The last word is best left to Reimar Lust:

International cooperation does indeed depend a lot on the actual balance of power, but the benefits of cooperation cannot always be explained solely in figures. Just as many European firms today [1989] spend a lot of money to buy themselves into joint ventures with American and Japanese high-tech companies, in order to get knowledge on new technologies transferred into their firms, so ESA had to pay the price of Spacelab to acquire the basics of manned spaceflight.46