The President Commits to the International Space Station

No sooner was the space shuttle declared operational in 1981 than the new NASA administrator, James Beggs, appointed by President Reagan, began to actively promote a space station as the next “logical step” for the agency.2 He quickly made a major effort to stimulate foreign interest in the new American project, using the shuttle to advertise America’s ongoing mastery of space. In June, 1983 Beggs and his deputy administrator, Hans Mark, toured European capitals with the unpowered prototype of the orbiter Enterprise piggy-backing on a specially adapted Boeing 747. It was displayed at the Paris Air Show on June 4 and to a wildly enthusiastic crowd at Stansted Airport near London the next day. It then went to Ottawa where 400,000 people turned out to see it, and the Canadian minster of science and technology announced the creation of a Canadian astronaut program.3

The opponents of the space station were not swayed by the excitement.4 Caspar Weinberger, the secretary of defense was particularly hostile to the project. George Keyworth, the president’s science adviser, was skeptical. Two pro-station staff members in the White House, Gil Rye, of the National Security Council Staff, and Craig Fuller, an ardent advocate of the commercial potential of space, decided to take steps to circumvent the opposition. They scheduled a Cabinet meeting on December 1, 1983, at which Beggs could present his case for the station directly to the president in a reasonably hospitable environment.5 The NASA administra­tor gave a masterful presentation that skillfully exploited Reagan’s concern about the decline of American power and prestige vis-a-vis the Soviet Union. He dra­matized the threat by showing the Salyut space station overflying the country, adding that the Soviets were preparing to launch an even bigger facility into space in the near future (Mir). If an American station was begun at once, said Beggs, it could build on the breadth and depth of the country’s spaceflight capability to ensure that the United States would “dominate the space environment for twenty years.”6 The president was persuaded that a civilian space station with scientific and commercial potential would be a useful counterweight and complement to his space-based antimissile system called SDI (the strategic defense initiative). A few days later David Stockman in the OMB met with Reagan and Beggs to sanc­tion the appropriation request for the space station.7

When Beggs spoke before the president in December he made no mention of international participation. The issue did arise though when the cost came up. Beggs suggested to Reagan’s associates that the station would cost $8 billion, a figure that was essentially determined by his judgment as to the maximum fig­ure that the president would accept. He added that international collaboration would provide additional funds. This argument was crucial at the time because the DoD were convinced that the station would drain money away from SDI. Peggy Finarelli, who joined NASA’s Office of International Affairs in 1981, worked closely with Rye to push the space station to the top of the president’s agenda.8 She takes up the narrative:

Defense Department objected to the Space Station, period. CIA sided with them because they’re part of the national security community. OMB sided with them because OMB hates anything that costs money. State Department sided with them because the Under Secretary in charge of science and tech­nology at State at that time was a fellow who had come from earlier political careers in both DoD and OMB, so even though he was at State, he was siding with the national security community and objecting to the Space Station. So we were alone in our proposal, but adamant that we wanted to do the Station and that we wanted to do it as an international partnership.9

The international issue remained a “major battling point” with the other agen­cies as NASA tried to figure out how to present the president’s decision publicly. Rye and Finarelli stuck to their guns, recognizing that “if it was an international project and it was announced as such in the State of the Union, it was going to be far harder to unwrap” than if it was simply a domestic project. They won the day, and it was to Beggs’s “surprise and pleasure” that Reagan chose to announce his support for the space station on January 25, 1984.10 In his annual State of the Union address the president reported that he had directed NASA to develop a permanently manned space station within a decade. Reagan announced that NASA would “invite other countries to participate so that we can strengthen peace, build prosperity, and expand freedom for all who share our goals.”11 Just before he made his public statement the president alerted the political leaders in Britain, France, Germany, and Italy, as well as in Canada and Japan. He added that Beggs would shortly be coming to meet with senior officials of foreign governments on his behalf to develop the cooperative effort.12 The space station was thus presidentially sanctioned as an advanced technological platform that would bind together the nations of the free world. This gave it immense social weight both at home and abroad. As one leading British space administrator put it to Finarelli, whereas the decision in principle of whether to build a station was taken in Washington, “we had a very different decision to make. The [decision] that our political authorities had to take was not whether a space station made sense to build. The decision we had to make was: Given that the U. S. has decided to build a space station, and has invited us to join, can we afford not to?”13

A further boost to international involvement was provided at the London Economic Summit in June 1984. It was one of the talking points on President Reagan’s agenda for private meetings. As the seven heads of state emerged from one of their meetings they were confronted with a model of the space station that included elements that could be built abroad. The communique issued after the London summit was positive but prudent, endorsing manned space stations as valuable for industrial and economic development and committing the signato­ries only to “consider carefully the generous and thoughtful invitation received from the President of the United States to participate.”14

Beggs made it clear that the United States was looking for significant contribu­tions to the space station project, roughly 10-20 percent of the partners’ overall space budgets for the next decade. Technological exchange would be restricted as much as possible. As he put it to the director of the Johnson Space Flight Center in April 1984, the administration was “concerned about careless and unnecessary revelation of sensitive technology to our free world competitors— sometimes to the serious detriment of this nation’s vital commercial competitive position.”15 Beggs hoped that participation in the station would draw the sting from this competition by diverting resources into a major technological project under American leadership. In fact the NASA administrator admitted as much in the presence of representatives from foreign industries and space agencies. The station, he said, lent itself “uniquely to international cooperation,” adding that “if we can attract that cooperation then other nations will be cooperating with us in the resources that they spend, rather than competing with us.”16 Beggs’s one-sided emphasis on the benefits to the United States of international participation was probably “particularly galling” (Logsdon) to those present, a clumsy way to resolve the tension between NASA’s joint obligations to lead and to collaborate.17