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

50 reMeMBerINg the SpaCe age
nicely illustrates the point. So does the case of postwar germany, for whom,
as we have seen, the european road was a crucial path back into scientifc
and technological collaboration in sensitive domains. In the early days when
most national programs were weak, the loss of autonomy required by supranational
integration was, at least for the larger powers, a useful way to acquire
the scientifc, technological, and industrial capacity needed for an independent
national program (that is, if a government eventually decided that it wanted
one). In this sense, then, Milward is right. But his argument must be relativized
to take account of the changing circumstances under which national space
policies were defned in Western european states with the passage of time and
the evolving attraction of “going it alone” or working with select partners as
national space programs matured.
the ongoing debates over industrial policy illustrate the changing
equilibrium between the national and the regional. When eSrO established the
principle of fair return in the 1960s, a coefcient of 0.8 was deemed acceptable.
today, however, member states demand a coefcient very close to unity, itself
an expression of the enormous weight that they attach to space as an industrial
activity in the high-tech sector. Smaller states such as Belgium are particularly
emphatic about this since they cannot dream of having signifcant national
space programs of their own, and they justify their participation in space at the
political level by the advantages it brings to domestic industry. Larger states see
matters otherwise. Fair return was important to France, germany, and Italy in
the 1960s and Spain in the 1970s. By the 1990s, however, a country like France
had developed such a broad-based strength in all dimensions of space that were
of interest to it, and its government was so committed to the space efort, that
it was in a position to go it alone or to work bilaterally with selected partners.
regional collaboration, with the requirement imposed by the fair return
principle—that French frms become integrated into transnational consortia,
sometimes with partners far less experienced than themselves—turned from an
asset into an albatross, especially if there were frms that could do the same job
in France itself. put diferently, the stronger a nation becomes, the less interest
it has in collaborating meaningfully with others in supranational projects. the
political motivations have to override the centrifugal pull of industrial and
commercial benefts and the control over programmatic matters that a purely
national or loosely collaborative project allows. regional and international
collaboration in advanced technology is not a taken-for-granted given: it has to
be constantly sustained if it is to survive.