Formalizing the Collaboration

The legal instruments codifying the design, construction, and use of the space station (bilateral MoUs between agencies and an IGA between the governments) were signed after 15 rounds of negotiations over three years in September 1988. The flexibility available to NASA and the American delegation was constrained by a number of requirements. One of the most contentious of these, as we have seen, was that they had to “explicitly reserve the right to conduct national secu­rity activities on the U. S. elements of the Space Station, without the approval or review of other nations.” They were also not to “accede to multilateral decision­making on matters of Space Station management, utilization, or operation.” Technology transfer was to be controlled by not permitting a “one-way flow of U. S. space technology to participating nations who are also our competitors.” And finally, they were to ensure that the concept of “equal partnership” did not “displace either the reality or symbol of U. S. leadership.”53

The Europeans were reasonably satisfied with the final agreements. Take the question of management. In the midst of the negotiations Pedersen publicly wrote that “perhaps [the] most difficult leadership adjustment for NASA is to learn to share direct management and operational control in projects where it is the largest hardware and financial contributor, especially when manned flight systems are involved.” How did the legal instruments respect this? On decision­making procedures, for example, it was agreed that although the United States would be responsible for the overall coordination of the program, the Europeans had jurisdiction and control over their three Columbus elements. The United States and Canada were attributed 49 percent utilization of the APM in return for their contributions to the core elements of the station. Europe also had access to the whole station. And it was allowed to use its space transport system and communications equipment, in addition to having access to those that the United States would provide. This meant that the MTFF and the PFF would be launched by Ariane.54

The management practices were shaped by the architecture of the project. At the macro-level this restricted technology transfer to flows across clean inter­faces. NASA alone would build the core of the station. This core would be augmented by discrete hardware elements that would be dedicated to scientific and/or manufacturing research of potential commercial interest. Only Canada’s robotic arm for assembly was critical to mission success.55

What of “genuine partnership”? Peggy Finarelli, who was among those who negotiated these agreements on behalf of NASA, explained that she was emphatically against the “metaphysical” phrase “genuine partnership” being included as such in the legal agreements. Instead she asked for a list of 25 things that constituted “genuine partnership,” “then we’ll negotiate on each of those twenty-five points, and, god knows we did. . . and twenty-five more. That’s why at the end of the day we were all happy with the agreement, even though it did not include that phrase.”56

Another traditional area of disagreement concerned the legal ties oblig­ing partners to sustain their commitment to the station once the project was embarked upon. As pointed out in the discussion of ISPM in chapter 2 , the Europeans were particularly sensitive to programmatic changes required of NASA by the annual revision of its budget allocation by Congress. They hoped to get around this by raising the space station agreements to the status of an international treaty. Finarelli insisted that this was not in anyone’s interest. As she put it:

What the partners wanted was a mechanism to make the space station agree­ments 100 percent binding, something that we would never be able to walk away from. Their thought was that a treaty tying in the US Congress would accomplish this goal. But we said: We can’t do it. Its impossible in our govern­ment. Even if we have a treaty, it’s still subject to the availability of appropri­ated funds [as required by the Antideficiency Act of 1982 that prohibited the incurring of obligations or the making of expenditures in excess of such funds]. So what you’re asking for, number one, does not accomplish the end that you would like to accomplish, and number two, you’re running the risk of putting a whole new set of players in this thing, many of whom hate the Space Station and don’t like NASA much either, meaning there’s a very high probability that the treaty would be rejected.57

In the event in the final agreement NASA (and all the parties) could still appeal to the lack of availability of funds as a reason for reconfiguring the project, though each signatory did formally undertake “to make its best efforts to obtain approval for funds” to meet its international obligations.58