480 



1 94 Walter A . McDougall 



three and one-half times the initial estimate. The European Space 

 Conference, at French insistence, debated plans to shift priorities in 

 ESRO from scientific to commercial satellites, while Britain and Italy, 

 pleading straitened finances, threatehed to pull out of the European 

 space effort altogether. 



Insufficient capital, political disputation, the problem o{ juste re- 

 tour — any of these handicaps might alone have crippled such an awk- 

 ward venture in multinational command R&D. But there was more. 

 Systems integration for an international space booster was a boondog- 

 gle. Every technical hurdle had to be surmounted by an international 

 committee whose babble of tongues only exacerbated the habitual lack 

 of communication among scientists, engineers, and bureaucrats. One 

 of the more tolerant veterans of those days recalled that whenever an 

 improvisation was called for, the French stubbornly refused to violate 

 any hard-won procedural principle; the Germans endorsed the princi- 

 ple, then listed all conceivable exceptions; the Italians excitedly inged 

 renegotiation of the principle to accommodate the offending contin- 

 gency; while the British cheerfully accepted any iinprovisation so long 

 as iHider no circumstances would it serve as a precedent! Nor did the 

 French send their best men to ESRO and ELDO, reserving them for 

 the national effort, while others were accused of loading the space 

 agencies with deadwood personnel.*" 



By the end of the decade the European space program was a sham- 

 bles — and this at the peak of concern over the technology gap, brain 

 drain, and "industrial helotry," all presumably products of explosive 

 American technocracy. EUROSPACE tried to capitalize on this mood, 

 best expressed by Jean- Jacques Servan-Schreiber's The Americau Chal- 

 lenge, by warning its cultured countrymen against their tendency to 

 sniff at the technical achievements of boorish Americans: Carthage's 

 flourishing culture did not sa\e it from the Romans, nor did Rome's 

 superior culture fend off the barbarians. Echoing NASA, EURO- 

 SPAC^E identified the real value of Apollo not in lunar exploration 

 itself but in the perfection of techniques for large-scale R&D, national 

 mobilization, and technological spin-offs. If Europe did not steel itself 

 to make the necessary effort toward technological independence, it 

 would soon be too late. The (iermans expressed this as Torschlusspanik: 

 Europe must jump through the door to the space age before the door 



^"On the problems of the European spate program in the l*>6()s, sec especially; ELDO, 

 1960-1965: F ml Annual Report (Brussels, l<>(i.5) and Annual Refmrts ( 1 966-): ESRO, Eifsl 

 General Report, 1964-65 (Paris, 1966) and Annual Reports (I967-). Books on the frustra- 

 tions of the I9fi()s include [actjues lassin, Vers I'Europe spatiale (Paris, !<»7()) and Orio 

 (>iarini. L'Eurtipe et I'espare (Lausanne, 1968). Anecdote on national temjieramenls from 

 Tassin, pp. 9S-99. 



