Remembering the Space Age. - Black Vault Radio Network (BVRN)

BUILdINg SpaCe CapaBILIty thrOUgh
eUrOpeaN regIONaL COLLaBOratION
landings. 17 One of those arguments, used by Caspar Weinberger in his famous
memo to president Nixon in favor of developing the Shuttle, was that it would
save jobs in the aerospace sector. 18 Space policy is tightly linked to industrial
strength and competitiveness on both sides of the atlantic, even though this is
more obvious in europe than in the United States.
It is also more explicit. the europeans have developed the so-called
principle of fair return in which the proportion of money contributed by a
government to a collaborative program should be the same as the share of
technologically signifcant contracts that fow back to national industry from
that program. this policy provides smaller nations with one of their most
important incentives for remaining engaged in space since the industrial leaders
are “obliged” to include their frms in european-wide consortia to secure
contracts through eSa. It also explains the major contributions to the european
space program made by countries that were technologically “lagging” behind
the rest of europe in the 1970s, specifcally Spain as it recovered from the drag
of the Franco regime.
the teNSION BetWeeN the regIONaL
aNd the NatIONaL
this paper has stressed the importance of space as an instrument for
building a regional capability in Western europe. that process is not “natural”
or spontaneous: it requires ongoing work by scientists, engineers, industrialists,
and politicians. regional agreements require that states dilute their sovereignty,
industries build transnational consortia, and scientists take deliberate eforts
to construct multinational, multi-institutional collaborative payloads and
satellites. In short, the european path is not a necessity for many of the major
european states: it is an option. that option will be adopted only after careful
consideration and sometimes heated debate and power struggles between
interest groups both within nations and between them.
the economic historian alan Milward has argued, somewhat controversially,
that the integration of europe did not occur at major cost to the
sovereignty of the nation state. 19 On the contrary, it was compatible with the
rescue of the nation state as a major historical actor. For Milward, the european
option involved the pursuit of national interest through instruments and institutions
in which the benefts of integration were believed to outweigh the
costs. this view has many merits. the application of the principle of fair return
17. Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest. Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Cambridge: harvard
University press, 2003).
18. reproduced in roger d. Launius, NASA.A History of the U.S. Civil Space Program (Malabar, Fa:
Krieger, 1994), reading No. 19.
19. alan S. Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation State (London: routledge, 1992).
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