Abstract
The previous chapter described the initiatives taken by NASA to promote scientific collaboration through bilateral agreements with friendly states in Europe, and with ESA. It was stressed that this form of collaboration, while not without its tensions, was not bedeviled by the dilemmas that accompany technology transfer. This chapter explores those dilemmas in some detail, discussing the early attempts made by NASA, in consultation with other agencies in the administration, to define and implement a policy for technology transfer. Satellite-launching technology, be that with expendable or reusable systems, was the key issue around which these debates took place both within the administration, and between NASA and Western Europe.
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Notes
John Krige and Arturo Russo, A History of the European Space Agency, 1958–1987. Vol. I. The Story of ESRO and ELDO—1958–1973 (Noordwijk: ESA, SP-1235, 2000), Chapters 3, 4.
Active satellites are to be distinguished from balloons or other “passive” surfaces that are used as “reflectors” in space to bounce off telecommunications signals. Echo I was a project of this kind: see Andrew J. Butrica, ed., Beyond the Ionosphere: Fifty Years of Satellite Communication (Washington, DC: NASA SP-4217, 1997).
Memo from Frutkin to Eugene M. Emme, “Comments on COMSAT History, ‘NASA’s Role in the Development of Communications Satellite Technology’,” December 20, 1965, NHRC Record no. 15726. See also
Marcel Thué and Jean-Pierre Hussin, “Les Reltions Franco—Etats-Unis dans les Domaines de Telecommunications par Satellite,” Les relations franco-américaines dans la domaine spatiale (1957–1975), Quatrième Rencontre de l’IFHE, Paris, 99–113.
David J. Whalen, “Billion Dollar Technology: A Short Historical Overview of the Origins of Communications Satellite Technology, 1945–1965,” in Butrica (ed.), Beyond the Ionosphere, 95–127. See also David J. Whalen, The Origins of Satellite Communications, 1945–1965 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002).
John Krige, “Building Space Capability through European Regional Collaboration,” in Steven J. Dick (ed.), Remembering the Space Age. Proceedings of the 50th Anniversary Conference (Washington, DC: NASA-2008–4703, 2008), 37–52. See also
Walter A. McDougall, “Space-Age Europe: Gaullism, Euro-Gaullism, and the American Dilemma,” Technology and Culture (1985), 179–203.
“Draft U.S. Position on Cooperation with Europe in the Development and Production of Space Launch Vehicles,” attached to internal correspondence between Frutkin and Milton W. Rosen, October 15 and October 30, 1962. Frutkin told Rosen that the “Draft” position developed by the State Department was in fact now firm US policy, Record no. 14548, International Cooperation and Foreign Countries, Europe, Folder US-Europe 1965–1972, NHRC. The arguments here resonate with those used to justify sharing civilian nuclear energy with Euratom: see John Krige, “The Peaceful Atom as Political Weapon: Euratom and American Foreign Policy in the Late 1950s,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 38:1 (2008), 9–48.
Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, Le défi americain (Paris, 1967), published in English as The American Challenge with a foreword by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (New York: Atheneum,1968).
See, e.g., the lead article by Philip H. Abelson, “European Discontent with the ‘Technology Gap’,” Science 155:3764 (February 17, 1967). For a summary of Servan-Schreiber’s argument, see “West Europeans Attribute Continuing Technological Lag Behind U.S. to Inferior Management,” New York Times, December 13, 1967, 6. See also
Henry R. Nau, “A Political Interpretation of the Technology Gap Dispute,” Orbis XV:2 (Summer 1971), 507–524.
Arnold W. Frutkin, “The United States Space Program and its International Significance,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 366 (July 1966), 89–98, at 90. See also Space Business Daily 25:35 (Monday, April 18, 1966), 285–286.
John M. Logsdon, John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 113–114.
This is described in Whalen, The Origins of Satellite Communications. Whalen sees this as government “intervention” in business. Lee, on the other hand, sees it as an embodiment of the symbiotic relationship between corporations and the US government described in Galbraith’s New Industrial State. William E. Lee, The Shaping of an American Empire. Negotiating the Interim Intelsat Agreements, paper presented at the sixtieth Annual Meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism, Madison, Wisconsin, August 1977, available at http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/, ERIC #ED151783 (accessed on November 11, 2009).
Lee, The Shaping of an American Empire, 30; Steven A. Levy, “Intelsat: Technology, Politics and the Transformation of a Regime,” International Organization 29:3 (1975), 655–680. See also Galloway, The Politics and Technology of Satellite Communication and
Richard R. Colino, The Intelsat Definitive Arrangements. Ushering in a New Era in Satellite Communications (Geneva: European Broadcasting Union, 1973).
The launch of ELDO is described in detail in Krige and Russo, A History of the European Space Agency, Vol. 1, Chapter 3. See also Michelangelo De Maria and John Krige, “Early European Attempts in Launcher Technology,” in John Krige (ed.), Choosing Big Technologies (Chur: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1993), 109–137; Also McDougall, “Space-Age Europe.”
For an account of the British program in Australia, see Peter Morton, Fire across the Desert. Woomera and the Anglo-Australian Joint Project (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service for the Department of Defence, 1989).
Stephen B. Johnson, The Secret of Apollo: Systems Management in American and European Space Programs (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), Chapter 6, describes the failure of ELDO’s management system in detail.
This section draws heavily on the story told in John Krige, “Technology, Foreign Policy and International Collaboration in Space,” in Stephen J. Dick and Roger D. Launius, Critical Issues in the History of Spaceflight (Washington, DC: NASA SP-2006–4702, 2006), 239–260. For details on the crisis in Europe, see Krige and Russo, A History of the European Space Agency, Vol. I, Chapter 4.3.2.
For general accounts of US relations with France during the Cold War, and with de Gaulle in particular, see, e.g., Frank Costigliola, France and the United States. The Cold Alliance Since World War II (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992);
Christian Nuenlist, Anna Lochner, and Garret Martin, eds., Globalizing de Gaulle. International Perspectives on French Foreign Policies, 1958–1969 (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2010);
Robert O. Paxton and Nicholas Wahl, eds., De Gaulle and the United States. A Centennial Reappraisal (Oxford: Berg, 1994);
John Newhouse De Gaulle and the Anglo-Saxons (New York: Viking Press, 1970).
J. Bouvet and A. H. Schendel, “Le Projet Symphonie,” presented to the UN Conference on peaceful exploration and use of outer space, A/CONF.34/I.12, June 24, 1968, NHRC, Record no. 6408, Spaceflight—Satellites and Probes, Symphonie Satellites, Folder Symphonie (France/West German satellite), 1969–1983.
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© 2013 John Krige, Angelina Long Callahan, and Ashok Maharaj
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Krige, J., Callahan, A.L., Maharaj, A. (2013). Technology Transfer with Western Europe: NASA-ELDO Relations in the 1960s. In: NASA in the World. Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137340931_3
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