President Charles de Gaulle longed for a time when France itself was a major center of power. Thus when the USA and the USSR were busy going to space, it was a natural that France became the third country to start a space program. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
This stamp celebrated the twentieth anniversary of CNES, the French space agency. The single issue crams a lot of space activity onto the stamp. However the reality was that de Gaulle’s vision of a proprietary space program was no longer operative. The facilities had been integrated into the wider European program and even the active French astronauts transferred.
Todays stamp is issue A938, a 2.60 Franc stamp issued by France on May 15th, 1982, a little late for the 20th anniversary being celebrated. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 50 cents used.
Things went fast for the French space program under de Gaulle. The CNES was to manage the program and train astronauts. By 1963, a small payload unmanned rocket named Berenice was launched from a launch site in Algeria. As that site would not be available much longer, new space centers were built in Toulouse and in French Giana.
They eventually built 12 Berenice rockets but they were small and could only get satellites into a low, 600 mile up orbit. It was a start though, and since France has been the spearhead behind the European Space Agency’s long line of ever bigger but unmanned Ariane rockets. French astronauts have been to space, but only as guests on American and Soviet/Russian space missions.
That is not to say there is nothing going on these days at the French CNES space agency, which has a near 3 billion Euro a year budget. In 2020 an unmanned solar orbiter was launched by a private company in the USA for a seven year mission to study the heliosphere of the sun. There is also a seven year program in collaboration with Germany to develop a reusable, cheaper, and more environmentally sensitive replacement for the Ariane one use rockets. They hope to have the new rocket flying by 2026. A program that takes over 10 years is not very likely to have any cost advantage short of some wild accounting.
President de Gaulle was older by the 1960s so could not be around to keep the early momentum of the French space program going. I wonder if he realized what a do nothing Eurocrat boondoggle it would degenerate into, he would have skipped the whole thing?
Well my drink is empty. I notice on the quite fancy website of the CNES, there is a place for PhDs to apply for grants. I have a PhD, how about a grant for a stamp gasbagger? I bet you have funded stupider. Just kidding. Come again soon for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.