ESTRACK - A History of the European Space Agency Volume 1

Setting up a tracking network
(p.59)

A word is in order about ESTRACK, if only to bring out the extent to which political considerations and national interests, along with a passionate determination by Member States' delegates to control costs, impeded the rapid establishment of the network. The network foreseen for the first phase of ESRO's programme consisted of four stations: at Redu, in the Belgian Ardennes, which was to be used for tracking and telemetry, at Fairbanks in Alaska, at Spitzbergen in Norway, and on the Falkand Islands off the coast of Argentina. Only the first of these was set up without considerable difficulty. The French consistently opposed the site in Norway, because this country had not joined ESRO after participating in the COPERS work. The site in the Falklands, which was foreseen as an enlargement of an existing British radio and space research station, was also most unpopular. Technically there was the danger that the UK's communications transmitter would interfere with incoming satellite data. Administratively there was the feeling in the Council that the case for the station had not been properly prepared by the ESRO Secretariat, which was anxious to get a site in the region approved quickly in anticipation of the launch of ESRO I and ESRO II. Politically, there were repeated objections from Spain against ESRO funding a station in, what it said, was a territory with disputed sovereignty. Despite these difficulties, the Council managed, in March 1966, to agree to install a telemetry station in the Falklands, the vote being six in favour with four abstentions - only to have the French delegation insist that, according to the Convention, this decision was null and void as it should have been taken by a two-thirds majority. The French let the matter pass at the time, but within a month the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had approached the Council chairman insisting that the issue be reopened at the next Council session. This it was, and in the face of a very determined statement by the United Kingdom, the Council voted by eight to one (Spain) to pay Britain for the work it had done to date on providing a telemetry station for ESRO on the Falkland islands.

The establishment of a telemetry station at Fairbanks created a quite different set of difficulties. NASA, which was responsible for operating the station, demanded that it have the right of access to the scientific data received. The members of ESRO's Scientific and Technical Committee, supported by some Council delegates, were most unhappy about this. NASA's demand, they felt, violated their intellectual property rights, as well as ESRO's arrangements with its own experimenters. After lengthy negotiations, a compromise was reached. In December 1966, the Council agreed that ESRO should provide NASA with any raw or unreduced data that it wanted and was prepared to pay for. In turn, the use of unpublished data by the American agency required the prior permission of ESRO