487 



Space-Age Europe 201 



satellites, and associated services and ground equipment."'" In 1978 

 the French targeted remote sensing from space, developed a system 

 called Spot designed to compete with NASA's Landsat, and founded 

 another chartered company, Spotimage, to provide data for minerals 

 prospecting, fishing, land-use analysis, mapping, and soil and agri- 

 cultural management, especially to developing nations. Since the U.S. 

 government has been unable to decide whether or how to market 

 Landsat data, France threatens again to reap the rewards of a technol- 

 ogy pioneered by the United States. And if the United States should 

 determine to make full use of the Shutde and exploit the prospects for 

 space-based manufacturing in low orbit, the Europeans are ready; ESA 

 is currently evaluating various plans for a minishuttle of its own, either 

 the manned Hermes or the unmanned Solaris, as well as several space- 

 station concepts. 



Hence the age of Gaullism and Euro-Gaullism has spawned national 

 and multinational, government-funded and -managed inventions 

 of the future — not to encourage the presumed interdependence 

 and integration stemming from global technologies but to preser\e 

 national autonomy and power. As de Gaulle perceived, however, com- 

 petitiveness abroad necessitated centralization at home. Each of the 

 European governments has absorbed or consolidated its aerospace 

 companies into giant, semipublic behemoths: British Aerospace, 

 France's Aerospatiale, Italy's Aerospaziale, recently the German mer- 

 ger of MBB (Messerschmidt) and VFW. Whatever the power of com- 

 puters, nuclear weapons, jet aircraft, or space communications to make 

 of our world a "global village," "Spaceship Earth," or a "lifeboat" in 

 which all survive or perish as one, the space age has nonetheless 

 sparked new political-economic fragmentation, even within the non- 

 Communist world. The efforts of the "great" but not "super" powers to 

 mobilize and scrap for an abiding autonomy and self-sufficiency mean 

 that neither the Wilsonian nor the Leninist model, but rather the 

 Gaullist model, of international order is riding the tide of technology in 

 our time. 



Where does all this leave the putative "free world leader"? It seems 

 that the United States, the traditional, secure industrial leader and 

 exponent of free trade, finds itself in a position reminiscent of late- 

 19th-century Britain — not challenged in o\erall leadership but out- 

 maneuvered first in one market then another by determined local 



^'Jean-Marie Liilon. "La Politique spatiale franc^aise," Les C.nhifrs fraufats, May- 

 September 1982, p. 94. 



