Making Sense of Space: The History of Norwegian Space Activities (review)

The growing interest in the history of technology in space might partly be explained by the fact that the year 1957, when Sputnik was launched and the space age is said to have begun, is now distant enough in time to be considered history by historians. Another explanation is that space activity plays an important role in many countries around the world, as a scene for scientific and technological endeavor, as a means for communication and information, and as a symbol of solidarity and superiority. Yet another reason is that space activity has grown to be commercial and profitable, a business conducted by large corporations and institutions that have the money to write their own history or to employ historians to write it for them.

Making Sense of Space has been written by four historians under a contract with the Norwegian Space Centre. The bulk of the text, however, is written by the editor John Peter Collett, with one chapter coauthored with Bjørn Lossius. The book covers the past hundred years chronologically. Robert Marc Friedman starts by giving a colorful description of Norwegian geophysic and cosmic science, which changed the world’s impression of Norway as a “backward” country. The activity was clearly nation building. Olav Wicken describes how the Cold War and international politics influenced Norwegian space efforts. The country’s political closeness to the United States, its strong ties to NASA and the United States Air Force, and the geographic closeness to the Soviet Union proved awkward.

The different views of what science and technology are, and what they should be, played an important part in the Norwegian decision not to enter ESRO in the 1960s. Norwegian science policy and the role of the linear model are neatly identified as factors whose value changed as time passed. The Andøya rocket range, the telemetry station at Tromsø, and the Kongsfjord satellite station, all established in the mid-1960s, were building blocks in forming a space policy. Gradually space activity evolved from a scientific to an industrial effort, and maritime satellite communication proved to be a niche for Norway, a shipping nation. The new oil-rich territory needed surveillance, and remote sensing proved important. Norway finally became a full member of ESA in 1987.

A fourth of the book is a compilation of data, comprising every imaginable person or event in Norwegian space history. The undated illustrations (never used as sources) portray mostly men, but there are also pictures of artifacts and of some beautiful environments.

Collett writes in the epilogue that the aim of the book is to explain how a small space lobby was set up and worked for Norwegian space development from the sixties onward. But he goes further. Much of the narrative and analysis occur on other actor levels. The book is a good account of postwar research policy in a small, nonneutral country. The defense relationship with the United States played an important role, as did the decision to stay out of the European cooperation generally. But old industrial structures and newly acquired natural resources also helped shape Norwegian space exploration.

The description of Norway’s long road to ESA membership clearly illustrates an inherent tension in international cooperation: most countries need to cooperate since very few have the national resources for solitary endeavors, while each nation at the same time wants to get as much out of the cooperation as possible. Collett thinks that Norway fared well in this particular game. The country stayed out of ESRO and ELDO, and did not join ESA fully until 1987, but still won contracts from these organizations. In the early eighties, however, Norway could no longer play the observer. It had to join ESA as an associate member for some years, after which it had to become a full member. “[C]ounting the pennies” (p. 296) might have worked for Norway, but if other nations would have followed suit—and the...