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1 80 Walter A . McDougall 



restore French greatness through technology, not empire. I he Treaty 

 of Evian ended French rule in Algeria in 1962 but reserved to the 

 metropole, for a time, its proving grounds at Hammaguir, whence 

 Gaullist France would become the world's third space power. 



French technicians — some in burnooses-like a cosmic foreign le- 

 gion — were mainly men of the Societe pour VEtude et la Realisation 

 d'Engins Ballistiques (SEREB) and the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales 

 (CNES). Back home the SEREB shared in the design of intermediate- 

 range ballistic missiles to cradle the bombs of the world's fourth nu- 

 clear deterrent, and the CNES designed satellites for cooperative pro- 

 grams with the United States and European space agencies. But the 

 Algerian task was final checkout of Diamant, a French-made space 

 booster, and the goal was to place a French satellite in orbit before 

 ER-1 , another Gallic spacecraft, went aloft aboard an American Scout 

 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base. From the start, France's 

 national program was competing with her own cooperative programs, 

 with the Americans, and with other Europeans in the race to become 

 the third nation in space. 



The Diamant booster was a three-stage configuration composed of 

 engines developed in previous rocket programs, one propelled by the 

 exotic mix of nitric acid and turpentine, the others solid-fueled. 

 Together they developed 107,000 pounds of thrust, roughly equiva- 

 lent to that of the Jupiter-C that had launched the first American 

 satellite seven years before. By mid November of 1965, the NASA 

 launch of FR-1 and a French presidential election were both three 

 weeks away. Forty-three months before, the design for Diamant had 

 been frozen and airframe construction commenced at the Nord Avia- 

 tion plant for SEREB. Now the identity of Gaullist France, wedded to 

 the prestige and power of technological dynamism more consciously 

 even than Kennedy's America, rode on the outcome. "Trois, deux, 

 un . . . ," the countdown ended on November 26. Preset charges ex- 

 ploded the bolts holding down the sleek cylinder, and its own large 

 exhaust nozzle fired up to full thrust. Soon the tracking stations re- 

 ported in: Asterix-1, a modest 42-kg satellite named for the red- 

 whiskered barbarian of French comics, was transmitting from orbit. Its 

 chemical batteries quit after just two days, but Diamant had glistened, 

 and Le Monde proudly proclaimed "La France Troisieme 'Puissance 

 Spatiale'!" 



Today, over a quarter-century after Sputnik, the political patterns of 

 the space age have undergone a radical shift. Where two superpowers 

 vied alone for prestige and military advantage, now seven nations have 



