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

Abstract

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.