Petar Markovski
C
OOPERATION IS EASILY ESTABLISHED as an objective but is far more difficult to implement. If it is to achieve meaning in the affairs of men, it must progress beyond lip service, slogans and token exchanges. It must go forward substantively and realistically within the existing, rather than always a future, political framework, and with due regard for modes and channels, for first and immediate steps and for ultimate objectives.1—Arnold W. Frutkin, NASA Assistant Administrator for International Affairs (1963–78)
In a May 1987 ESA Bulletin, Reimar Lüst, former director general of the European Space Agency (ESA), reflected on American and European coop- eration in space, emphasizing “the importance of a free and open exchange of views between the scientific communities of the United States and of Europe.” It is true, he wrote, “and we should never deny the fact, that we live in a world of conflicting, or at least, divergent, political and economic inter- ests. But in spite of that, I do believe that many of our present problems can
1. Arnold Frutkin, International Cooperation in Space (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1965), p. iii.
be solved more easily when there is an international community of scientists and scholars free to follow common goals and common objectives.”2
While I can only speculate as to whether Lüst was referring to anything specific, it would not be farfetched to think that he might be referencing a turbulent episode in NASA-ESA cooperation earlier in the decade, a result of the collapse of an agreement between the two agencies for a jointly devel- oped International Solar Polar Mission (ISPM). Although the ISPM was not launched as originally planned—two solar probes exploring the north and south poles of the Sun—the plan was eventually reworked and launched in 1990 as the Ulysses mission. While NASA and ESA eventually carried out a joint solar polar mission, with a single spacecraft named Ulysses, the evolu- tion of ISPM to Ulysses had a lasting impact on U.S.-European cooperation in space.3
This important episode in the five-decade-long history of international space cooperation also happens to be one of the most strenuous ones. The ISPM had its origins in the mid-1960s, when European space scientists worked on building a scientific constituency for a spacecraft that would explore the Sun out of the ecliptic plane (OOE), particularly at the poles and other high latitudes (hence its original designation as an out-of-ecliptic mission).4 Through the mid-1970s, NASA and ESA established working groups and hosted a number of symposia and conferences to determine both the scientific and technical merits and capabilities of an out-of-ecliptic mis- sion. These efforts resulted in a proposal for the ISPM, which was officially established as a joint mission with the 29 March 1979 signing of a memoran- dum of understanding (MOU) between NASA and ESA.5
To date, there have been three primary historical studies of Ulysses. Two of these analyses have focused on the origins of the mission. Historian Karl Hufbauer’s account of the genesis of an out-of-the ecliptic solar mission
2. Reimar Lüst, “Cooperation Between Europe and the United States in Space,” ESA Bulletin 50 (May 1987): 98.
3. Joan Johnson-Freese, “Cancelling the US Solar-Polar Spacecraft: Implications for International Spaceflight,” Space Policy 3.1 (February 1987): 24–37.
4. See Karl Hufbauer, “European Space Scientists and the Genesis of the Ulysses Mission, 1965–1975,” in Science Beyond the Atmosphere: The History of Space Research in Europe.
Proceedings of a Symposium Held in Palermo, 5–7 November 1992, ed. Arturo Russo (Noordwijk, The Netherlands: European Space Agency, 1993), pp. 170–191; and Ludwig Biermann, “Some Aspects of the Physics of Interplanetary Space Related to Out-of-Ecliptic Studies,” Advances in Space Science and Technology, 7 (1965): 437–447.
5. European Space Agency, “NASA Signs Agreement with ESA for 1983 Solar Polar Mission,”
ESA News Release, 30 March 1979; “NASA, ESA Sign Solar Polar MOU,” Aerospace Daily (16 April 1979): 187.
focuses on the viewpoint of European space scientists whose “early visions of an out-of-ecliptic probe eventually found expression in the Ulysses mission.”6 Hufbauer’s analysis builds on another, more narrative history of Ulysses, told by English space scientist Harry Elliot.7 According to Hufbauer, his account “provides a fuller account of the steps leading up to the mission’s approval” and “reveals that European space scientists, always an essential group of mission proponents, played an increasingly circumscribed role in the campaign that culminated in the ESA/NASA memorandum of under- standing for the International Solar Polar Mission.”8 Joan Johnson-Freese gives a third account, in which she examines events leading to the cancel- lation of the U.S. spacecraft for the ISPM and its potential ramifications for international cooperation in space.9 She concludes that the whole “poorly handled” affair, itself contingent on the political climate of the then-new Reagan administration, set a precedent and became an invaluable learning experience for Europe in international space cooperation.10
In this chapter, I will revisit the 25-year history of Ulysses, from its origins as a proposed OOE mission to its emergence as the dual-spacecraft ISPM
6. Hufbauer, “European Space Scientists,” p. 170.
7. Harry Elliot, “The Genesis and Evolution of the International Solar Polar (Ulysses) Mission,” COSPAR Information Bulletin 122 (December 1991): 82–89.
8. Hufbauer, “European Space Scientists,” p. 172.
9. Joan Johnson-Freese, “Cancelling the US Solar-Polar Spacecraft,” pp. 24–37.
10. Ibid., pp. 36–37.
Artist’s concept of Ulysses approaching the Sun. (NASA/ESA: 1418–ulysses.jpg)
and its eventual reemergence as Ulysses. I will pay particular attention to the multitude of actors that reshaped early conceptions of an OOE mission into Ulysses. In doing so, I will reframe the history of Ulysses from a trans- national perspective, suggesting that Ulysses was a transnational project. I will focus on the flow of ideas, discussions, and events involved in defining the OOE spacecraft. Ultimately, I will argue that the transnational element is embedded within the technology itself—that is, the spacecraft, which was negotiated in various ways at various times by different individuals and groups from both Europe and the United States. This historical analysis seeks to supplant more standard nation-centered accounts of international cooperation in space. This chapter contributes to a newly emerging interest in cooperation in space, which aims to identify a new global narrative of space history.
THE HISTORY OF SPACE AND TRANSNATIONAL HISTORY
Space history as a field of inquiry has often been written as a history of Cold War competition. While this perspective has been fruitful in examining the dynamics of U.S. and Soviet space programs, the Cold War era represents only part of more than a century of space history. Historians exploring the Cold War era have focused on the political, economic, and military relation- ships between governments and large technoscientific programs, including national space programs. More recently, others have looked at how these types of programs have contributed to the emergence of modern national identity in both the post-colonial and post–Cold War context.11 A few recent studies have aimed to decenter “Cold War–ness” from post-war history.12 As these authors contend, the Cold War was a global conflict, involving not only the United States and Soviet Union, but also a range of other global actors.
This emerging perspective can be conducive to the study of under-explored areas of spaceflight, such as transnational cooperation in the history of
11. For instance, see Global Power Knowledge: Science and Technology in International Affairs, Osiris 21, ed. John Krige and Kai-Henrik Barth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Gabrielle Hecht, The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity After World War II (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998); Itty Abraham, The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb: Science, Secrecy, and the Postcolonial State (London: Zed Books, 1998); Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large:
Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996);
and Armin Hermann, Lanfranco Belloni, and John Krige, History of CERN (Amsterdam:
North Holland, 1987).
12. Gabrielle Hecht, ed., Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).
space exploration. In doing so, it might be a step forward in constructing what historian Asif Siddiqi calls a “global history of space exploration.”13 Constructing a global historical perspective on space, shying away from a nationalistic framework and concentrating on lines of cooperation between two of the biggest and most successful actors in space history, NASA and ESA, will help to reframe space history.
While the Cold War certainly had a tremendous influence upon U.S. and Soviet (and later Russian) programs, what influence did it have on programs that matured in the post–Cold War era, such as the Chinese, Japanese, and Indian programs, or programs not as connected with military development, such as ESA’s? Siddiqi prescribes a new approach that looks “with new lenses as more and more ‘new’ narratives join the old cold-war-centered approach to space history.”14 While not advocating the overthrow of previous space histories, Siddiqi urges historians to step beyond the constricting scope of Cold War and nationalistic narratives and move toward the incorporation of “a broader matrix of approaches, including, particularly, the highlighting of global flows of actors and knowledge across borders, communities, and identities.”15 Ultimately:
This approach might lend itself to constructing for the first time a global and transnational history of rocketry and space travel. Since a global history would theoretically be decentered and a nation’s space program rendered as a more nebulous transnational process, one might expect a multitude of smaller, local, and ambiguous processes and meanings to become visible.
With a new approach grounded in a global history of spaceflight, we might learn much more about how individuals, communities, and nations perceive space travel, how they imbue space exploration with meaning, and especially how those meanings are contested and repeatedly reinvented as more and more nations articulate the urge to explore space.16
In concentrating on these elements and bringing them to the foreground of my analysis, I will recast the so-called “standard narrative” of the his- tory of ISPM and Ulysses. My reexamination of this history will be a step toward this larger project of providing a transnational history of cooperation in space.
13. Asif Siddiqi, “Competing Technologies, National(ist) Narratives, and Universal Claims,”
Technology and Culture 51.2 (2010): 425–443.
14. Ibid., p. 443.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid., p. 443.