465 



Space-Age Europe: 

 Gaullism, Euro-Gaullism, 

 and the American Dilemma 



WALTER A. MC DOUGALL 



"It is a far cry from Cape Kennedy," wrote a correspondent for the 

 New York Times. "There are no neon signs, no drive-ins — and no night 

 clubs. There are only some scattered huts and towers, lost in a desolate 

 flatland as big as New Jersey, its pebbly floor covered with a pale green 

 haze after a spell of rain. In the huts, which are filled with electronic 

 equipment, one can hear, almost any morning, a calm young voice on a 

 loudspeaker saying 'dix, neuf, huit, sept . . . ' In the distance a needle 

 with a tail of fire slowly rises above the desert and roars into the sky."' 



The site was Hammaguir, an adobe village where sheep, goats, and a 

 few dromedaries nosed about in the brittle weeds. Colomb-Bechar, the 

 nearest town, lay 80 miles to the north, itself 700 miles into the Sahara 

 from Algiers. Nearby, the parallel lines of an abandoned railroad 

 vanished into the dunes, perhaps to meet at infinity, an artifact of 

 France's first stab at a colonial dream, the trans-Saharan railway. In 

 1965, the imperative of international competition had brought 

 France's finest engineers back into a desolation that proved congenial 

 to the most advanced technology even as it swallowed the remains of an 

 earlier industrial revolution. For the Algerian civil war prepared the 

 return of Charles de Gaulle, who forestalled a military threat to over- 

 throw the Fourth Republic by overthrowing it himself and pledged to 



Dr. McDougall is associate professor of history at the University of California, 

 Berkeley. This article stems from research conducted for his book, . . . The Heavens and 

 the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age {New York, 1985). He thanks those who aided 

 his work on the European side of space technology, especially Michel Bourely, Alain 

 Dupas, and the staff of the European Space Agency, Paris; J. L. Blonstein, consultant for 

 EUROSPACE, Paris; the International Institute for Strategic Studies, London; Barbara 

 Luxcnbcrg, formerly of the Science and Technology Division, (Congressional Research 

 Service, Library of Congress; Monte D. Wright and Alex Roland (Duke University), 

 formerly of the NASA History Office; and Dr. Hans Mark, deputy administrator of 

 NASA (now chancellor. University of 1 exas), who kindly look time to read the manu- 

 script. 



'John L. Hess, "The Last Countdown," New York Times, February 11, 1967. 



CO \Wh by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 

 00 to- 1 (i.-)X/85/26()2-000 1 $0 1 .00 



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