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196 Walter A. McDougall 



Shuttle program. The Germans were especially enthusiastic, but this 

 seemed to imply the permanent "subcontractor status" that the French 

 in particular despised. The United States also proved accommodating 

 in the scheduled renegotiation of the INTELSAT convention. F,uro- 

 peans, together with Third World members, won the right to outvote 

 the United States in the assembly — for example, on placement of 

 contracts — and an eventual termination of the COMSA I Corpora- 

 tion's management contract. But Europe could not take full advantage 

 of such concessions without its own launch capacity and state-of-the-art 

 Comsat technology. 



All was not bleak. France and Ciermany collaborated on a com- 

 munications satellite named Syrfiphotiie and Britain on a geosynchro- 

 nous test satellite of its own. France, of course, pursued her own 

 military missiles, national satellite programs, and limited cooperation 

 with the United States and, after 1966, with the USSR. After 1967, 

 when the Hanmiaguir lease expii ed, de (iaulle also appro\ ed construc- 

 tion of a new equatorial spaceport in Kourou, French Ciuiana. yXbove 

 all, the ELDO and ESRO experiences, however barren of results, gave 

 firms and agencies the apprenticeship they needed in space technology 

 and management. Iheir work on the Coralie, for instance, taught 

 French engineers to handle hNpergolic fuels and the high-energy 

 LH2/LOX upper stages favored for boosting heavy payloads to geosyn- 

 chronous orbits. Finally, the organizational flaws that plagued ELDO 

 and ESRO could be corrected. EUROSPACE electronics and aero- 

 space firms formed multinational consortia with names like MESH, 

 STAR, and COSMOS to compete for contracts and alleviate problems 

 oi juste retour. The European Space Conference sponsored the Bignier 

 and Causse Reports that proposed fundamental reforms of the Euro- 

 pean space effort. Ihey included a single European space agency, 

 long-range program plaiming with guaranteed budgeting, centraliza- 

 tion of authority for program management and systems integration, 

 and smorgasbord participation by which member states could elect to 

 share "in some major programs and opt out of others, overall responsi- 

 bility for major projects to be vested in the country paying most of the 

 bill.'^'' 



^'Michel Bourely, La Conference spatiale europeenne (Paris, 1970); j. Hciirici, An Overall 

 Coherent and Long-Term European Space Program (Munich, 1969); 1 heo Lefevrc, Europe 

 and Space {Rrussch, 1972); Laurence Reed, Ocean-Spare — Europe's i\'ew Eronlier (l.ondim, 

 1969); C. R. Turner. "A Review of the Third F.llROSPACK HS-Kuropcan Conference" 

 and I . \i. E. Nesbiti, "Future US European Coojjeration in Space; Possibilities and 

 Problems," Spacefiight, January 1968 and May 1969; A. V. Cleaver, 'The European 

 Space Program, DIS(X)RDE," Aeronautics and Astronautics, ()cl()l)er 1968. 



