1061 



74 SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL COOPERATION 



. . . might not fulfill their commitments." This concern has diminished 

 over time; "in the few cases where serious delays occurred, as in the 

 Solar Polar project, it was more often the United States that was respon- 

 sible .... Had NASA personnel not been susceptible to the then univer- 

 sal belief that other nations necessarily lagged behind the United States 

 in technological capability, the policy of collaboration in space matters 

 could almost certainly have been even more rewarding. "^'^ For another, 

 when foreign experiments have been selected by NASA, some U.S. 

 scientists have raised the question of whether the foreign experiment 

 was really selected over a competing U.S. experiment based on merit or 

 whether it was selected because it would be provided to NASA free of 

 charge. 20 Another reservation with respect to foreign participation has 

 been that "by selecting a high-technology experiment, the United States 

 encourages development of the industrial base in the foreign country 

 which will contribute to a decreased United States competitive position 

 in world trade. "^^ Yet another concern is that management of a U.S. 

 space science project is greatly complicated by the need to integrate the 

 experiments or other contributions from a foreign partner. 



While growing European capability has muted concern about the first 

 of these factors, it has also created a healthy competition among all 

 space scientists for access to orbit and beyond for their experiments. 

 While European scientists have always been able to propose ex- 

 periments on U.S. missions, U.S. scientists are only now gaining a 

 reciprocal opportunity to serve as principal investigators for ex- 

 periments on ESA missions. 



A major attempt to engage Europe with NASA's technology develop- 

 ment efforts took place in the 1969-1973 period, as NASA itself sought 

 to gain presidential and congressional approval of an ambitious post- 

 Apollo program of manned space flight. The negotiations on European 

 participation in the post-Apollo manned program were much more 

 political in character than prior (and subsequent) negotiations on 

 cooperative undertakings in space science. This post-Apollo ex- 

 perience, perhaps justifiably, has left a lingering "bad taste" in Europe. 

 NASA's objective was "to stimulate Europeans to rethink their present 

 limited space objectives, to help them avoid wasting resources on ob- 

 solescent developments (this was a reference to European plans to 

 develop an independent launch capability) and eventually to establish 

 more considerable prospects for future international collaboration on 

 major space projects. "^^ 



A basic problem in this case was that NASA could not deliver on 

 what it was promoting in Europe. NASA's post-Apollo ambitions in- 

 cluded a space station and a fully reusable space shuttle and the agency 



