A History of the European Space Agency, 1958-1987 (review)

A History of the European Space Agency, 1958-1987. By John Krige et al. 2 vols. Noordwijk: European Space Agency, 2000.

Those of us who have benefited from interior windows on the United States' civilian space program know only too well the difficulty of coordinating and sustaining large-scale collaborative efforts--even when the collaborators speak the same language, share a similar cultural outlook, and salute a single national objective. Consider, then, the enormous challenge faced--and substantially met--by those who built the European space program. Even the formal history of European cooperation in space between 1958 and 1987, sponsored by the European Space Agency (ESA), is the fruit of international collaboration, one that surely entailed its own diplomatic as well as intellectual challenges. John Krige and Arturo Russo, aided initially by Michelangelo de Maria and subsequently by Lorenza Sebesta, are to be commended for having seen the project through to this valuable outcome.

Much like the publications produced over the past four decades by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's own history office, we would not have this road map through one of the labyrinths of twentieth-century science and technology were it not for the commitment of both European and U.S. space organizations to historical transparency. In Europe, the challenge of capturing the "how" of what was accomplished--as well as the achievements themselves--was able to lay claim to resources, to establish open archives (at the Historical Archives of the European Community at the European University Institute in Florence), and to support their use.

The ESA History Project has yielded numerous studies in the ESA-HSR (History Studies Report), seminars, and specialized publications. A History of the European Space Agency is its capstone, though Krige modestly acknowledges that much of the material in these two volumes has already been circulated in ESA-HSR reports, and that "the results of the scientific programmes, the evolution of the application programmes and of the user communities and their institutions . . . the internal decision making processes within different national bureaucracies, all . . . remain to be studied in depth."

The story begins with the awkward pas de trois--familiar to students of the U.S. and Soviet space programs--of scientific aspirations with postwar international political and military realities. The Italian physicist Eduardo Amaldi and his French colleague Pierre Auger, already successful veterans of the creation of CERN in Geneva in the 1950s, supplied the entrepreneurial leadership behind the emergence of a European space program. Appreciating that development of the necessary technologies would require international financial and technical collaboration, Amaldi and Auger campaigned among their network of influential science administrators on the European continent. They argued for a purely civilian organization, both for moral authority and so that scientists could work unencumbered by military secrecy (which eliminated any reliance on NATO's Advisory Group for Aerospace Research and Development for the new space program's institutional footings). They also argued for an organization that was genuinely European, dependent on the good will of neither of the cold war's principal combatants. The "space race" between the United States and the U.S.S.R. served as a spur; Europe should not be left behind.

In time, good fortune handed Amaldi and Auger a powerful final argument for their model. In November 1959 the collaborative European CERN's proton synchrotron became the most powerful high-energy accelerator in the world. Shortly afterward, they and their like-minded colleagues were ready to take full advantage of a meeting in Nice of the United Nations' Committee on Space Research. Thus began a series of meetings that produced ESRO, or the European Space Research Organization, predecessor to today's European Space Agency.

No review can do justice to this capably written narrative of international big science. It serves its readers well as much more than a reference work, in that coverage of ESA's own projects, as well as its collaboration...