NASA Prepares for Collaboration

International participation in the space station was not universally welcomed inside NASA. The benefits were easily defined. International partners would provide dollars—perhaps as much as 12 percent of the costs of the development program by ESA and by Canada, and $100 million annually by Japan.18 They would also provide added political robustness, and confirm to skeptics that there was merit to NASA’s claim that the time had come to develop the station. There were drawbacks too, though.19 Kenneth Pedersen tackled the issue head-on.

Pedersen was keen to get other countries involved in the space station from the outset. In January 1982 he called a meeting of potential space station part­ners at the Johnson Space Center. Each participant was invited to undertake Phase A (conceptual) studies at their own expense to determine what the mission of such a station should be. NASA’s partners were not being asked “to contribute mere pieces to a U. S. conceived, designed and managed programme but to join with NASA in developing and operating an international space complex fitted to their collective requirements.”20 This is what had gone wrong in post-Apollo. As Pedersen explained to the director of NASA’s Space Station Task Force, he objected strongly to encouraging partners to get involved technologically and financially in Phase A studies like those currently under way, either of separable components (like a sortie module or a tug, in post-Apollo), or of an integrated system (like the shuttle itself).21 This was because he had noticed that, as post – Apollo had evolved, NASA’s priorities had changed. It preferred collaboration in the use of space, not in joint engineering projects. It had concluded that European industry was five-ten years behind that in the United States. It did not want to depend on foreign countries for critical parts of the shuttle. It did not want the tug to use liquid propellants, as Europe was proposing. As a result in 1972 the US government found itself in the embarrassing position “of having to walk back from the European perception of the cooperative possibilities” in the program, creating suspicion and distrust that still persisted in some quar- ters.22 The mistake would not be repeated. Foreign partners should focus their work during Phase A studies on mission requirements rather than hardware con­tributions. All cooperation should be managed through NASA Headquarters, and should be exclusively with representatives from foreign governments, who would keep their national industries informed of developments. Foreign visi­tors to field centers were to be discouraged for fear that they would become embroiled in intercenter rivalry over mission concepts. There was to be no for­mal industry teaming.23

To build domestic support Pedersen emphasized that NASA should retain close contact with all agencies that had foreign policy responsibilities—and there were many, including the State Department, the National Security Council, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Department of Defense. The DoD was likely to be particularly important, since, thanks to SDI, “the interest and debate over the militarization of space is at an all-time high—much more intense than at the time of post-Apollo planning activities.” Pedersen surmised that “the question of how military involvement would infringe on access rights to the sta­tion” was likely to be “in the end the single most important factor influencing foreign participation.”24 Opposition to this would probably be least in Canada, who did not object to the DoD’s use of the Remote Manipulator System that it had built for the shuttle. By contrast, although Japan was eager to join in the sta­tion, feeling that it had missed a key opportunity by not joining in post-Apollo, the science minister of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party had already warned NASA that its participation would be “unavoidably narrowed” if the program had a large military component. The situation in Europe depended on the coun­try concerned. Pedersen felt that this thorny issue was best dealt with by “work­ing to accommodate both civil and military uses within the basic design of the space station, so that one does not make the other impossible.”

In August 1982 Pedersen had little new to add to the guidelines for control­ling technology transfer that had emerged in the post-Apollo debate. He favored cooperative agreements for discrete hardware pieces with minimal interfaces. He also emphasized that this was an increasingly sensitive issue in the administra­tion. It was essential for NASA to remain in close contact with the export control community. Increasing evidence that the Soviet Union was engaged in a major, centrally coordinated effort to gain access to American high technology by any means possible had led to “closer application of existing guidelines and review of appropriate future steps in staunching the flow of advanced technology.”25 Space industries in Europe were also stronger than they had been in the early 1970s, and Europe had just acquired independent access to space by qualify­ing its Ariane launcher in December 1981. In short, as McCurdy puts it, as regards cross-border knowledge flows, the guidelines laid down by Pedersen in 1982 “reaffirmed the traditional conservative values that had governed interna­tional participation within NASA for more than twenty years.”26 By building the core elements of the station, by excluding collaborators from making con­tributions to the critical path, and by keeping interfaces as clean as possible, the asymmetry in technical and financial contributions to the project was built into the hardware of the station from the start.