For Sale: Cold War Hardware

In the late 1980s, Soviet policymakers identified a new use for space infrastruc­tures. Over time and in certain circles, the Russian space program came to be interpreted not simply as a collection of state assets providing public and defense services, but also as a collection of products that might be sold on the interna­tional market. As state finances plunged, the sale and lease of space assets prom­ised cash from abroad.

Soviet space program officials had begun flirting with the notion of sell­ing or leasing equipment as early as 1985. That year the Ministry of General Machine Building (MOM) created the Main Directorate for the Development and Use of Space Technology for the National Economy and Science Research— Glavkosmos. This, the “commercial arm of the Soviet space program,” emerged from the Soviet industrial complex geared specifically to placing Soviet space technologies on the international market.1

Shortly thereafter, at a 1987 symposium for roughly four hundred foreign­ers, the world market perused many of the same goods and services that were offered for sale again in the 1990s. There, Glavkosmos offered microgravity space for rent in the then one-year-old Mir space station, space on returnable capsules, rocket launches on the Proton, entire communication satellites, along with com­munication satellite transponders. One American was particularly struck by the Soyuzkart mapping agency. Remarking on the quality of aerial and space imag­ery available for sale, he recalled, “[W]e bought what I think was the first print they sold, paying about $800 for a print of an area in Oregon with five-foot resolution—better than anything Landsat or Spot has for sale.”2

However, this early engagement between Soviet sellers and prospective buyers revealed a limited understanding of late-twentieth-century market mechanisms. The director of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Space Engineering Research Center (Edward Crawley), and a colleague in MIT’s Soviet Space Policy Institute (Jim Rymarcsuk) observed that “the USSR appears to have a limited conception of the financial and decision-making of US firms. The busi­ness planning process (including market assessment, capitalization, product development, and marketing) is new to the USSR.”3 The authors noted the ten­dency of Glavkosmos to insist upon the immediate sale of hardware as opposed to entering long-term development agreements that were common to US contract­ing relations. Driven by a need for hard currency, Soviet marketing resembled “US practices of old” in which the supplier need only assure final functionality of a part, but did not invite user input in design or production.4

In addition to this, the marketing of this surplus equipment and space facilities allegedly faltered under a number of American federal controls protecting domestic industry from foreign competition or prohibiting the transfer of defense-related technologies to other nations. Among these were the regulations laid out in the Arms Export Control Act, intended to block the transfer of items falling under the Munitions Control List to communist countries.5 This Western Bloc embargo dated to 1949, when seven nations signed on, including the United States, Belgium, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and the United Kingdom, forming the Coordinating Committee on Multilateral Export Controls (CoCom).6

As of the spring of 1992, nearly all space-related hardware was included in the US Munitions List and regulated by the Arms Export Control Act and its International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) (see chapter 14). Additionally, Congress exercised control over the export of space commodities destined for third parties intending to launch American space hardware on Soviet launch vehicles. These protectionist measures were intended to benefit both US national security and the nascent private launch industry.7

Thus it came as a shock to many when in 1992, the Bush administration eased into negotiations for a handful of hardware purchases. In the interest of upgrad­ing Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) systems, the Space Defense Initiative Office considered the purchase of a Topaz 2 nuclear power system and $6 million of plutonium 238, a nonweapons grade isotope commonly used in NASA deep space probes as well as some Defense Department applications.8 More important, but less publicized, SDI administrators were planning to purchase electric thrust­ers for station-keeping on a projected 40-60 Brilliant Eyes satellites.9

At the same time US firms GE Astrospace and Space Systems/Loral were con­sidering the purchase of thrusters from the Russians. GE Astrospace intended to use four such thrusters (costing $200,000-300,000) for station-keeping on AT&T satellites. Space Systems/Loral considered higher-performance thrusters.