European Star Wars. The Emergence of Space Technology through the Interaction of Military and Civilian Interest Groups

Abstract

A fu-!1damental shift for preparing the entry into a new, militarily relevant big technology is currently taking place in West Germany. This technology its proponents maintain can be compared in terms of its dimensions, costs, and social consequences with nuclear energy. I am referring to West Germany's plans for manned space flight, which have been outlined by a number of decisions during 1985 and 1986; they will eventually lead to anational space program and thus to a fundamental reorganization of research priorities. While it is still impossible to predict the outcome of these ongoing processes, we have the chance of observing the emergence of a new big technology out of a specific area of social, political, economic, and military interests; we can also observe the actions of those interest-groups, which begin to form a stable pattern of argumentation and legitimation, thus producing, step by step, a self-consolidating social structure with its own interests and its own dynamics. The space lobby, however, doesn't start from zero; a system (in terms of social force and the power to determine research policy) to some extent comparable to the U.S. military-industrial complex has been established during the last thirty years. It possesses an inner coherence and institutional resistance. The development of this complex is one important point this paper will examine. German plans for