Why would a small country like the Netherlands become active in space? The field was monopolized by large countries with large military establishments, especially in the early years of spaceflight. Nevertheless, the Netherlands established a space program in the late 1960s. In this paper I will analyze the backgrounds of Dutch space policy in international postwar politics, national industrial policy, and science. After the Second World War, European space activities were shaped by the interplay between transatlantic and European cooperation and competition, limited by American Cold War diplomacy. At the national level the Dutch space program was shaped firstly by two powerful companies, Philips electronics and Fokker Aircraft. As I will demonstrate, these two firms sought to gain crucial management skills as well as technological ones. Meanwhile, the nation's astronomers were able to capitalize on an advantageous confluence of political, economic and scientific ambitions to forward their own agenda. They succeeded in obtaining two of the most expensive scientific instruments ever built in the Netherlands: the Astronomical Netherlands Satellite (ANS, launched 1974) and the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS, 1983). Both were joint Dutch-American missions, but the nature of the cooperation on each was very different, reflecting the changing relationship between America and Western Europe from the 1950s until the 1980s.In 1965, the Dutch astronomical community received a letter from the Ministry of Education and Sciences. The government had decided to fund the construction of a satellite; would the astronomers have any use for it? The result, launched in 1974, was the Astronomical Netherlands Satellite (ANS). Several years later, the same thing happened again. Almost without having to ask, the astronomers were provided with two of the most expensive scientific instruments ever built in the Netherlands, the only 'national' Dutch satellites. To understand why, one has to analyze international politics, small country diplomacy, industrial ambitions, and a remarkably efficient scientific community.Putting scientific instruments into space is an appealing idea for scientists, but realizing it requires an expensive infrastructure and access to strategically important technologies. Until recently, only national governments had the resources needed to sustain space programs. And even then, very few nations were able to acquire access to space on their own. Because of the possible military uses of satellites and launch vehicles (missiles), but also because of the high public visibility and prestige of space technology, spaceflight has always been shaped by international relations.During the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union exploited space for strategic and diplomatic aims (MacDougall 1986;Logsdon 1996;Krige 2006b).In Western Europe, the Cold War was not the most important political context for spaceflight, however. Effectively shut out of direct competition with the superpowers, European countries fo...

On Sunday 3 March 1918 Ernst Frederik van de Sande Bakhuyzen, director of Leiden Observatory, unexpectedly died. Within days Willem de Sitter was appointed acting director, pending further decisions. De Sitter immediately contacted J. C. Kapteyn, the grand old man of Dutch astronomy and his former mentor in Groningen, to discuss the future of the observatory. This was their chance to resurrect the institution after decades of stagnation.It was also a chance to make astronomy join the "second golden age" of Dutch science that played a prominent role in contemporary cultural nationalism. 1 Scientists such as J. D. van der Waals, H. A. Lorentz, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes and Hugo de Vries were considered the direct heirs of Christiaan Huygens and Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, the heroes of the first "golden age" in the seventeenth century. Kapteyn (Figure 1) was a national pride too, but he was a lonely figure. He had built his reputation against all odds, having started without any facilities, funding or staff. 2 The rest of Dutch astronomy did not share in the recent successes of the other sciences. The

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, changing social and cultural climates challenged the position of scientists in Western society. Ringer and Harwood have described how scientists reacted by adopting either pragmatist or 'comprehensive ' styles of thought. In this article, I will show how a group of Dutch intellectuals, including many scientists, came up with an alternative approach to the dilemmas of modernity, and eventually became influential in shaping Dutch society. They combined elements of both styles into what I call a 'synthetic technocrat ' ideology, a reaction against intellectual and political fragmentation. These ideas were often combined with pleas for educational reform, culminating in a plea for gebildete Tatkraft. I will analyse the development of the synthetic technocrat movement from the late nineteenth century into the 1940s. During this period, the movement became increasingly political in nature, but in a radically different way to comparable movements in other countries, especially Germany.

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