Grevsmühl, Sebastian

English

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Submitted on 25 Sep 2019
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1965: Astérix Among the Stars
Sebastian Grevsmühl
To cite this version:
Sebastian Grevsmühl. 1965: Astérix Among the Stars. Patrick Boucheron; Stéphane Gerson. France
in the World: A New Global History, Other Press, pp.813-817, 2019, 978-1590519417. ￿hal-02297032￿
Please cite as: Sebastian V. Grevsmühl, “1965: Astérix Among the Stars,” in: Patrick Boucheron (ed.), 
France in the World: A New Global History, New York: Other Press, 2019, p.813-817. 
1 
 
 
1965 
Astérix Among the Stars 
 
In 1965, the cartoon hero Astérix accomplished his fictional tour of Gaul and gave his name 
to the first French satellite for its inaugural orbit of the earth. The French press was ecstatic. 
Was the nation’s global power about to be relaunched too? Amid the fanfare surrounding the 
launch, it was sometimes forgotten that the nation’s space autonomy owed much to earlier 
international cooperation. 
 
On November 26, 1965, France officially joined the elite of space powers. With the launch of 
Astérix, the first French satellite, from the military base of Hammaguir in Algeria, France 
became the third country after the Soviet Union (1957) and the United States (1958) to 
Please cite as: Sebastian V. Grevsmühl, “1965: Astérix Among the Stars,” in: Patrick Boucheron (ed.), 
France in the World: A New Global History, New York: Other Press, 2019, p.813-817. 
2 
 
possess its own space agency, the National Center for Space Studies (CNES, created in 1962) 
and its own access to space beyond the world’s atmosphere. This exploit was all the more 
astonishing in that, prior to the late 1950s, the country had barely engaged in space research at 
all. 
 Astérix showed that French technology was capable of tackling a completely new 
domain, and with a rapidity that beggared belief, by pioneering new methods of organizing 
scientific research and institutions that would coordinate that research. In purely technical 
terms, success was sealed by the development of a rocket capable of carrying payload into 
orbit. The launcher, called Diamant-A, was part of a program known as Pierres Précieuses 
(Precious Stones); it carried a satellite, A-1, which the public later came to know under the 
more telling name Astérix. It consisted of a small capsule weighing about ninety pounds 
whose principal role was to communicate back to Earth a variety of data concerning the 
launch itself. Even though this capsule soon stopped functioning, it turned France into a 
serious European competitor in the race for independent access to outer space. 
 For many years—and this is particularly true of human activity in space—historians 
have favored a binary interpretative approach that reduced the Cold War to a confrontation 
between the United States and the USSR. Yet despite the undeniable importance of these two 
principal world powers, the Astérix satellite and French space activity in general make clear 
that it would be wrong to discount the European nations in the field of space exploration. 
Viewed transnationally, globally, an intense circulation of techniques and individuals had 
existed for some time, along with extensive sharing and transmission of knowledge about 
space. The historian Asif Siddiqi, a specialist in space activities, has noted that, just as in the 
nuclear domain, “every nation involved [in the development of ballistic missiles and space 
technology] has been a proliferator and has taken advantage of proliferation.”  
 Informal international space-research networks first took shape in Europe and the 
Please cite as: Sebastian V. Grevsmühl, “1965: Astérix Among the Stars,” in: Patrick Boucheron (ed.), 
France in the World: A New Global History, New York: Other Press, 2019, p.813-817. 
3 
 
United States in the 1920s, while the development of ballistic missiles in Germany shortly 
afterward benefited greatly from exchanges of technology and knowledge with other 
countries. In the 1950s, German engineers and scientists who had contributed to the 
construction of wartime V-2 missiles were able to help with the space programs of the two 
superpowers, with France and the United Kingdom also gaining from their knowledge. Later, 
China and Japan took full advantage of the new technologies flowing out of the USSR and 
United States. Thus only ten years after Astérix reached orbit, all these countries had become 
members of the exclusive club of space powers. They were joined in the 1980s by India and 
Israel, who also relied on the support offered by Western Europe, the United States, and the 
Soviet Union. 
 Even so, the scale of transnational exchange should not blind us to the relevance of the 
nation itself as a basis for analysis. Technologies developed through space research played a 
vital role in the construction of a new national identity for postwar France. Indeed, the 
burgeoning space research sector in the late 1950s contributed to a broader venture: the 
modernization and reinvention of France as a dynamic, diplomatically and militarily 
autonomous technological power. There was an overriding military imperative to this 
impetus, embraced by de Gaulle after his election as president in 1958, as demonstrated by the 
production, in parallel with the development of space technologies, of new nuclear weapons 
as a means to project French power. France’s participation in both the arms and the space 
races added political and symbolic clout to the country’s advances in the postwar decades. 
 The Diamant launcher was the product of this uneasy relationship between military 
goals and civil applications. Although Diamant was a civil project, much of its technology 
came from the military domain, and more specifically the Pierres Précieuses program that 
France had put in place in the early 1960s. Persuaded that in the event of a new war it could 
not depend on the United States or the United Kingdom, de Gaulle’s France sought to attain 
Please cite as: Sebastian V. Grevsmühl, “1965: Astérix Among the Stars,” in: Patrick Boucheron (ed.), 
France in the World: A New Global History, New York: Other Press, 2019, p.813-817. 
4 
 
its strategic objectives by developing its own nuclear deterrent and its own independent 
capability to deliver nuclear warheads. When in 1961 de Gaulle gave the SEREB ballistic 
missile research consortium the green light to continue developing a launcher, French 
engineers had already successfully tested powder-propelled missiles using trial vehicles. By 
combining powder-propelled and liquid-propelled stages, they came up with the Saphir 
guided missile—which became the blueprint for the Diamant launcher that blasted Astérix 
into orbit. 
 Predictably, the French press celebrated Astérix as a feat of huge national importance. 
Yet France had been quietly engaged in a variety of cooperative scientific endeavors from the 
time of her earliest space forays, beginning with a research program known as the 
International Geophysical Year (1957–1958). One early French satellite rode on a NASA 
launcher. Ever since its own creation in 1958, NASA had routinely invited other nations to 
participate in the conquest of space; France (like several other European nations) had 
welcomed the opportunity to send engineers and scientists to the United States, where they 
were able to acquire new knowledge and learn how to orchestrate complex technical projects. 
All this contributed to the establishment of a common language for the field of space activities 
on both sides of the Atlantic. 
 Within Europe, too, thanks to the initiatives of influential scientists like Edoardo 
Amaldi and Pierre Auger, in the early 1960s efforts in the domain of space research and 
exploration began to be shared and coordinated. France took part in the creation of the 
European Space Research Organization (ESRO), which was founded in 1962 in the spirit of 
the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, in order to pool the 
European resources dedicated to the development of scientific experiments and satellites for 
space. The much more sensitive question of a European launcher, which was explicitly 
excluded from ESRO, was entrusted to another European consortium set up in March 1962 
Please cite as: Sebastian V. Grevsmühl, “1965: Astérix Among the Stars,” in: Patrick Boucheron (ed.), 
France in the World: A New Global History, New York: Other Press, 2019, p.813-817. 
5 
 
under the name of the European Launcher Development Organization (ELDO). France 
pledged to build one of the three stages of this launcher, which was named Europa. Even 
though ESRO had many difficulties and ELDO was ultimately a failure, this dual approach 
made it possible for France to take the lead in the domain of European space research, notably 
by militating in favor of a European space agency in the mid-1970s. This brought the two 
sectors of innovation and research—launchers and satellites—together under a single 
umbrella organization.  
 All this stemmed from the original Astérix, a modest technological advance that remains 
to this day the historic symbol of France’s entry into the vast area of space politics and 
activities, to which it has made significant contributions ever since the 1950s. 
 
Sebastian Grevsmühl 


1965: Astérix Among the Stars

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1965: Astérix Among the Stars

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