Joseph Sharp received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in psychology/neuroanatomy from the University of Utah. In 1961, he began his career as a research psychologist at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research where, in 1970, he was appointed Deputy Director of Neuropsychiatry. He has also served as Chief of the Department of Experimental Psychology and Behavioral Radiology at Walter Reed, and in 1969 and 1970, was Deputy Commissioner of Public Health for the State of New York. He came to ARC in 1974, and the last five of those years, served as Director of Space Research at Ames. Currently he is with the College of Science at the University of Utah, Cedar City, Utah.
In 1974, soon after he joined ARC, he attended a U.S./U.S.S.R. Joint Working Group meeting in Tashkent, U.S.S.R., with the Director of Life Sciences at NASA Headquarters, David Winter. "That was when the Russians, unannounced, dropped the offer on us to fly U.S. experiments on the Cosmos series," he recalled. "There had been zero preparation for that back in the States. Dave didn't know whether he had the authority to accept the offer, whether he had the budget, and what the scope was. I can remember walking for hours in the garden near the meeting place, discussing the offer. We finally talked ourselves into it, and Dave accepted. I was responsible for putting people and experiments together back at Ames. The time to launch was very short. We didn't even know what quality to build our equipment to." Finally, it was decided that Apollo-Soyuz quality standards would be used.
"Getting that first series of experiments on Cosmos was really tough stuff," Sharp said. Some of the experiments had to be simplified, to have them ready in time for flight. "But that first series started a process that continues to this day. The vitality of the program is shown by the fact that it has survived for so long, even during the Reagan era. All the joint Nixon-Breszhnev programs were killed during that period, except for the Cosmos flight program. The agreement was signed before Reagan took office, and he honored it. So we carried on through that time, with reasonably good communications. At that time experiment complexity was increasing, so there was more and more dialogue going on between the two countries. Of course, everything had to be blessed by the National Security Council." The intelligence agencies also monitored the Cosmos activities, though indirectly. "We didn't do some of the things we wanted to do," Sharp said, "because of technology transfer concerns."
Cosmos has evolved over the years. "Things have gotten more bureaucratized," Sharp explained. "But the Program has also become more productive. Experiments are more complex now. There are more collaborations between scientists. I think more Soviet scientists have been brought into their space program because of this than would have otherwise. And in our country, there are now many scientists who have collaborated with the Soviets."
The Cosmos program brought NASA into direct contact with French and other European life scientists. This contact led to several collaborative projects. The early Cosmos flights served as a catalyst to bringing Ames into the modern era of flight programs. "When I arrived at Ames, there was no real life sciences flight program although good science was being done," Sharp says. "The U.S. biosatellite program had withered by the mid '70s. Cosmos really allowed us to organize to do the Shuttle flights."
Sharp attributes much of the Cosmos program's success to Oleg Gazenko, the now retired Director of the Institute of Biomedical Problems in Moscow. "He kept it all together," Sharp says. Although he now acts in an advisory role, Gazenko's influence on the Soviet space program is still strong.