Conclusion

The idea of foreign participation in the post-Apollo program moved through two quite distinct phases. The first was dominated by NASA administrator Tom Paine, and lasted for about a year from October 1969 through September 1970. Paine’s enthusiasm for including other countries and regions—Western Europe, but also Australia, Canada, and Japan—in NASA’s ambitious schemes for the 1970s and 1980s, produced a flurry of activity on both sides of the Atlantic. Frutkin took the lead in exploring, along with interlocutors represent­ing the European Space Conference, the financial, industrial, technological, and managerial possibilities of a major contribution to the Space Transportation System. In the second phase, which lasted from the end of 1970 to the middle of 1972, new and extremely determined actors played an increasingly impor­tant role in shaping the contours of collaboration. White House staffers Peter Flanigan and Tom Whitehead, with the support of the president’s science adviser Edward David, led the charge. They were hostile to Paine’s “swash-buckling” approach, believed that NASA had to completely rethink its role and redefine its demands on the public purse, and were deeply concerned about technol­ogy transfer to Western Europe. New NASA administrator Jim Fletcher, while willing to fight for the STS, shared their grave doubts about international col­laboration. His sentiments permeated through NASA once the president had authorized the shuttle program, and were adopted by Deputy Administrator Low and by Arnold Frutkin. By March 1972 only the State Department was still prepared to make a strong case for European participation in the core of the program, but it was too late.

Senior negotiators on both sides adopted entrenched positions that were immune to argument. For the Europeans, it was the Belgian chairman of the European Space Conference, Theo Lefevre, with strong backing from France, who demanded watertight launch guarantees before he would fully commit Europe to post-Apollo cooperation. The horizons of his thinking were domi­nated by the fear that the United States might use its monopoly on access to space to impede the development of a strong European telecommunications sat­ellite industry. The short history of Intelsat in the 1960s had convinced him, and many people in Europe, that America would only relinquish its control of this lucrative market with great difficulty, and that the State Department would work along with Comsat to undermine meaningful competition from separate, regional telecom systems.

On the US side it was Whitehead, along with David, who sought cast-iron guarantees that there would be no significant technological leakage to Europe through its participation in the shuttle program. When Paine launched post – Apollo cooperation in 1969 the argument that the United States should help close the technological gap with Europe still had considerable traction in Washington, DC. By 1970 it was technological competition, not collaboration that dominated the thinking of many in the White House. Whitehead, who could barely conceal his contempt for Paine, was convinced that NASA was reck­lessly giving away US technology to Europe. Endless reports and analyses failed to change his position, which found resonance with Ed David. When one adds this unrelenting hostility to technological leakage with the problems of manage­rial organization, the dangers of cost-overruns, and the fears that the Europeans were not quite up to the technological tasks they wanted to undertake, one has a bundle of arguments that was immensely corrosive to any collaborative project.

The president had the authority to bring his White House staffers to heel. The image of Nixon that emerges from these debates, however, is one of a presi­dent whose policy pronouncements were often vague, imprecise, and off the cuff—and open to manipulation and self-serving interpretation by his closest advisers. There is no doubt that Nixon was genuine in his desire for interna­tional space collaboration, above all with the Soviets and the eastern bloc (see chapter 7). This was central to his geopolitical strategy of detente, a strategy that sidelined Europe in the interest of improving relations with both the Soviet Union and Mao’s China. Within that broad policy framework the president was usually vague about the scope and intimacy of technological collaboration. This left considerable room for officials in NASA and the White House—doubtless in good faith—to justify policy agendas, even conflicting policy agendas in the president’s name. Though Kissinger was extremely frustrated by these gambits, Nixon apparently ignored them: certainly he did little to clarify his position.

American industry did not share the concerns over technological transfer that so preoccupied senior members of the administration. All of the major American aerospace contractors were positive about incorporating European firms as sub­contractors in various parts of the shuttle system. They had identified European technological strengths, which complemented their own. They were convinced that a foreign contribution would provide greater long-term stability to the program, especially before Congress. And they had no doubt that, even if the Europeans did acquire new and significant knowledge from them, they would still emerge superior in the long run, both because of what they picked up them­selves from Europe, and because they were confident that US industry was far more dynamic, entrepreneurial, and innovative than its sluggish, bureaucratized European partners.

The Department of Defense was another actor that had little influence on the trajectory of post-Apollo collaboration. It was deeply implicated in the shut­tle design by virtue of its demand for an orbiter cross-range capability of some 1,250 nm. That demand, in turn, made major technological demands, particu­larly regarding the Thermal Protection System on the leading edge of the delta wings. Europe’s experience with Concorde was a potential asset here, however. If the Air Force eventually took little interest in the course of deliberations it was because it rapidly concluded that it would need to build its own tug anyway— and of course as the technological feasibility of that element waned so too did the Department of Defense’s engagement in the negotiations.

From the European perspective, the departure of Paine and the arrival of Fletcher turned out to be a serious setback to post-Apollo collaboration. Paine’s enthusiasm was infectious, yet his optimism was misguided, even irresponsible. He simply did not have the support in NASA, and certainly not in the Nixon White House for an ambitious collaborative project. Of course Frutkin and Low did what they could to carry out the administrator’s wishes. Their efforts were truly Herculean. They had to contend with European negotiators who sought to be treated as equals in a massively asymmetric financial, industrial, and technological project. They found attempts to move forward on discuss­ing concrete sites for collaboration constantly thwarted by European demands for launch guarantees. On top of this they found the ground cut away under their feet by senior officials in other sections of government. Johnson’s will­ingness to yield to Charyk’s last-minute demand to reinterpret the meaning of votes on what counted as significant economic harm in the Intelsat Assembly of Parties infuriated Europeans and isolated NASA. So too did the collapse of the negotiations over Aerosat, in which once again Whitehead and Flanigan’s concerns about technological leakage played an important role. Fletcher, for his part, seems to have had no stomach for a fight with the White House staffers. More precisely, perhaps, he agreed with their concerns. He too was concerned about the multiple complications that would ensue on giving the Europeans a large technological role in post-Apollo, and quickly came to the conclusion that the only possible merit of post-Apollo collaboration was its foreign policy aspects. It was a definitive move in a climate in which, as we have said, Europe was no longer a major concern in the president’s foreign policy agenda, and its growing technological maturity—and not concerns about the “technologi­cal gap”—was shaping the contours of policy thinking by senior White House staffers. Rogers and Johnson—the latter already discredited for having made a too-generous deal with Japan over launcher technology (see chapter 10)—could not hope to bring off a major collaborative project with Western Europe under these circumstances.

If the Sorie Can/Spacelab survived this lengthy process at all it was because Germany remained determined to keep the collaborative ball in the air, because the State Department saw considerable interest in working closely with a tradi­tional ally that was itself reevaluating its relationships with the eastern bloc and the Soviet Union, and because this technological element embodied Frutkin’s two cardinal principles of “no exchange of funds” and “clean interfaces” in their pure form. In March 1972 George Low wrote that NASA sought foreign par­ticipation in the use of the shuttle, not in its development. Spacelab satisfied that requirement.