The 1982-1984 "Lapse": Navigation and Rescue, Bion, and Atmospheric Science

The 1977 Bilateral Agreement on the Peaceful Sharing of Outer Space lapsed in 1982, not to be renewed until President Reagan signed a 1984 Joint Resolution of Congress, Public Law 98-562.93 However, the end of detente did not dictate that the world’s two leading space powers would resort to unilateral or bifur­cated multilateral space policy in toto. In some respects, the two nations con­tinued their tacit competition, such as maintaining leadership roles within their respective blocs of communications satellites. For the biosciences, atmospheric sciences, and navigation and rescue satellites, this period was more a time of “business as usual.” Often the execution of these programs depended on the tenacity of a few key individuals.

It was at this time that the international search and rescue programs COSPAS (including the Soviet Union and several allies) and SARSAT (including the United States, Canada, and France) united. In addition to continuing research in space biology and medicine, NASA continued with planetary data exchanges on programs such as the exploration of Venus, solar-terrestrial physics, and the exchange of lunar samples and cartographic data.94 In the meantime, researchers at the Fermi Institute sent their Dust Counting and Mass Analyzer (DUCMA) to Halley’s Comet in 1983-1984.

A few nongovernmental initiatives took place among research institutions based in the United States and USSR. These included the execution of an agreement between the California Institute of Technology and Moscow State University. Dating back to the late 1970s, this agreement carried out joint work in gravitational physics—roughly 30-40 percent of which dealt with space-re­lated fields such as the design of a gravitational wave detector.

In 1985 and 1995, the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) released its reports US-Soviet and US-Russian Cooperation in Space. Therein the assistant director of the OTA, OTA’s director of international security and the space program, and NASA’s director of international relations labored to make sense of the rapidly changing field of international collaboration in space. Among a broad spectrum of policy concerns, the OTA took some time to reflect on the anomalous nature of collaboration following the 1982 lapse in bilateral coopera­tion. Rather than indicate a “lapse,” the OTA reported a sort of premature glas – nost setting in among researchers and policymakers. Life science in particular encountered an improvement in institutional relations. Before 1982,

[t]here were significant difficulties in acquiring information on mission plans, and in obtaining accurate and complete scientific data. These problems varied in sever­ity through time and across different fields. But workshop scientists believed that the situation was improving noticeably, with regard to both openness and data quality, when the intergovernmental agreement expired. . . At that time, US scien­tists were for the first time being taken into Soviet laboratories and shown instru­ments, performance data, etc.95

The authors continued, distinguishing between individuals and bureaucracy, “While recognizing more openness on the Soviet side,” “scientists stress the still essen­tially closed nature of Soviet scientific and technical programs, and the difficulties Soviet scientists may have working through their own political bureaucracies.”96 The OTA report of 1995 supplies an intriguing list of cooperative activities over the so-called Soviet-American hiatus. Indeed, researchers in both nations exhibited an unmistakable determination to cooperate—with or without a state mandate.

Human relations played a significant role in the sustainability of biosatel­lites. In her history of the Cosmos Biosatellite Program, Kristin Edwards details how the low level of personnel turnover—in the NASA ARC as well as Soviet Institute for Biomedical Problems—fostered a level of personal trust and respect that spanned decades. In Moscow, Dr. Yevgeni A. Ilyin managed each Cosmos mission from its beginning in 1973 to its end. At Ames, internal promotions constituted the only major changes to personnel.97

NASA commenced with negotiations for two Bion missions over the course of 1982-1984. In 1983, Moscow’s Institute for Biomedical Problems, partnered with space programs in the United States, Czechoslovakia, France, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the German Democratic Republic, launched Cosmos 1514. Researchers held the 1983 Cosmos mission in especially high esteem since this would be the first such satellite to carry primates—two rhesus monkeys.

Immediately thereafter, negotiations commenced on the next mission, Cosmos 1667, which was slated to carry on biomedical research and experi­ments regarding extraterrestrial radiation. By the time the Soviets had launched 1667 in July of 1985, US-Soviet relations had not only warmed, but the Reagan administration had even advanced the idea of simulated space rescue mission between the Shuttle and the Salyut-7 Space Station.

Multinational Cosmos Biosatellite programs continued, essentially in the same vein through 1992’s Bion 2229. This, the eighth consecutive mission to carry US instruments, was regarded as the most integrated set up for tech­nical collaboration to date. Notes ARC’s history of bioscience: “Russian and American scientists and engineers worked together more closely on Cosmos 2229 than on any previous space mission. NASA developed several flight hard­ware units for the mission, trained Russian engineers and technicians to operate the hardware, and in collaboration. . . developed postflight procedures.”98 These measurements included body temperature, electrical activity of the heart, and electrical currents generated in active muscles during space flight.99 With princi­pal investigators hailing from Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, University of Texas Medical Branch, ARC, University of California at Los Angeles, University of Louisville, University of California, and Davis, this mission still exhibited a drop in participation from the last satellite, which had more than 85 NASA-sponsored researchers from 19 states and 3 foreign countries.100

In practice, there were few marked differences between Cosmos 2229 and its successor, the Bion 11. Most notable is the fact that flight hardware on the satellite was the “most highly integrated combination of NASA and Russian sys­tems. These supported research in musculoskeletal, neurovestibular, and regula­tory experiments and necessitated a great deal of joint engineering in post-flight ground-based hardware.”101 However these two missions bridge an historically significant shift in NASA-Soviet principles and guidelines for cooperation.

Even before the launch of Cosmos 2229, Americans realized that they would be paying half the expenses of flight on the next satellite. These funds (roughly $16 million), in one respect, covered a portion of the operating expenses neces­sary for Bion satellites, but also functioned to infuse much-needed capital into the collapsing Soviet space infrastructure. A variety of factors led to the Institute of Biomedical Problems’ request that NASA fund half the Bion 11 and 12 mis­sions. In order to explore the circumstances that precipitated this transition in the principles of collaboration, we must first understand Soviet state infrastruc­tural changes that took place in the preceding decade.102