Jason W. Callahan
P
LANETARY SCIENCE IN THE UNITED STATES is a public activity, in that the federal government provides nearly all the funding for it and the vast majority of its resources are managed by a federal administration. Over the past 50 years, scientific communities, the executive branch, and the legisla- tive branch have negotiated to varying degrees of success the direction, scale, and composition of this effort.In this time, the scientists, engineers, technicians, managers, accoun- tants, students, and others involved in all of the activities of planetary sci- ence have coalesced into a coherent scientific community. Furthermore, they have adapted to the shifting federal bureaucratic landscape with three important effects:
1. Despite many factions, the community now acts with a great deal of unity.
2. The community strategizes in terms of programs rather than projects.
3. The community, using the first two points, has developed a systematic method for bounding the options for planetary science activities from which politicians and policymakers choose.
Although the planetary science community has made great strides in communicating its goals, funding for planetary science has not followed a stable trajectory over the last 5 decades. Because NASA spending constitutes
50 YEARS OF SOLAR SYSTEM EXPLORATION: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES 36
a minor fraction of the federal budget, which itself is a relatively small part of the U.S. economy, factors determining the allocation of resources to solar system exploration are not always within the control of Agency leadership or the science community. Understanding NASA’s place in the U.S. economic environment helps explain some of the perennial turmoil that typically sur- rounds the annual budget process. It also sheds light on the influence of national priorities, an important factor to consider as the planetary science community tries to convey the necessity of a continuing solar system explo- ration program. This chapter considers planetary science in the context of the federal budget, other federal research and development activities, and other space science activities at NASA.
This chapter also analyzes the history of the U.S. space program, which is marked by major decisions of presidents, members of Congress, and NASA Administrators. The role of the space science community is integral to understanding the importance of NASA’s scientific program and the value of federal investment in science and technology generally. Members of the planetary science community have played a vital role in shaping the U.S.
space program by defining options available to national leadership. They have also played a critical part in forming methods by which scientific com- munities communicate among themselves, with other communities, and with stakeholders.
BUDGETING FOR EXPLORATION
The first thing to recognize when looking at the U.S. economy is that, at least in the last three decades, there is little correlation between the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and spending. In times of recession, federal spend- ing goes up. In times of expansion, federal spending goes up.1
The financial indicators shown in figure 1 demonstrate one other some- what disturbing trend over the last five decades. Beginning in the late 1970s (labeled “A”), government expenditures outpaced receipts consistently, and the federal debt grew at a rate matching, and often outpacing, the rate of increase in GDP. The result of this expanding debt is an increasing cost to the federal government each year to pay just the interest on the debt, without bringing down the principal. Interest on U.S. federal debt in 2010 cost $414 billion, roughly 23 times the NASA budget that year. This is not to suggest that the United States would necessarily spend more on exploring the solar system if it carried less debt, but it demonstrates that an increasing debt load
1. See the Appendix for this chapter on page 79 for an explanation of the sources of data for the charts in this chapter and the methods by which the author prepared the charts.
37 CHAPTER 2 • FuNdINg PLANETARY SCIENCE: HISTORY ANd POLITICAL ECONOMY
can place a significant burden on limited resources. As figure 1 clearly dem- onstrates, NASA has not encountered a budgetary environment quite like this before.
One fundamental function of government is the allocation of resources, and one of the clearest indications of national priorities is the level to which they are funded. Nearly every resource that is not money still costs money.
Therefore, examining the fluctuation of funding levels in a government bud- get can shed light on the relative standing of national priorities. Situating planetary science within the federal budget is necessary for understanding the role that solar system exploration plays in the federal environment.
The federal budget is broken into two categories: mandatory spending and discretionary spending, as shown in figure 2. Mandatory spending involves Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs that do not require an annual appropriations bill from Congress. Discretionary spending includes everything that requires appropriations legislation, including the Departments of Defense (DOD), Education, Energy, Commerce, and Justice, as well as NASA. The largest expenditure in the discretionary budget by far is defense, and so it is common to see budget numbers broken into defense and nondefense discretionary categories.
Figure 3 shows NASA’s budget line in the context of nondefense discre- tionary spending. NASA averaged between 2 and 2½ percent of the discre- tionary budget—and roughly 6½ percent of the nondefense discretionary budget—from the early 1960s to the end of the Apollo program. But since the
FIGURE 1. GDP, federal outlays, federal debt, and federal receipts, 1959–2010 (in millions, adjusted to 2010 dollars).
50 YEARS OF SOLAR SYSTEM EXPLORATION: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES 38
end of Apollo (labeled “B”), it has averaged less than 5 percent of nondefense discretionary spending.
Figure 4 provides a comparison of the nondefense discretionary line to the budget for the Department of Defense. The budget lines for NASA, the Department of Energy (DOE), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the National Science Foundation (NSF) are at the bottom of the graph. Along with the Department of Defense, these organizations receive the highest budgets in the federal government for science and technology research.
FIGURE 2. Federal budget outlays, 1962–2010 (in millions, adjusted to 2010 dollars).
FIGURE 3. Nondefense discretionary and NASA budgets, 1962–2010 (in millions, adjusted to 2010 dollars).
39 CHAPTER 2 • Funding PlAnETARy SCiEnCE: HiSToRy And PoliTiCAl EConomy
Figure 5 displays the organizations with the largest research budgets in the nondefense discretionary line. The term “nondefense” means only that these budget lines are outside of the Department of Defense, not that they are completely removed from any military application. There is, in fact, a fair amount of discourse between researchers in the civilian and military worlds, but that is outside the scope of this research.
FIGURE 4. Nondefense discretionary, DOD, NASA, National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Department of Energy (DOE) outlays, 1962–2010 ($M, adjusted to 2010 dollars).
50 yEARS oF SolAR SySTEm EXPloRATion: HiSToRiCAl PERSPECTiVES 40
Figure 5 provides a representation of shifting research priorities for the nation over the last five decades. In the 1960s, the focus on the Moon landing is represented by a spike in NASA’s budget (see “C”). In the 1970s, the focus moved toward energy (see “D”), seen in the Department of Energy budget line. Beginning in the 1980s and lasting for the next 20 years, the shift toward health and medicine in the NIH budget line is evident (see “E”).
Following the spike in each of these budget lines, funding seems to reach equilibrium, give or take a few billion dollars. What this demonstrates is that, barring a renewed interest in space as a national priority on the scale of the space race of 1957–69, NASA is unlikely to see a significant increase in its budget. A far more likely scenario is that projects and programs within NASA will continue to compete for resources at or near current levels—
again, give or take a few billion dollars.
As an interesting comparison, figure 6 shows the Department of Defense research and development (R&D) budget line with those of the nondefense R&D agencies. Again, there are upward shifts during periods in which defense R&D increased as a national priority, particularly in the 1980s and following the 11 September 2001 attacks. It is also interesting to note that the defense increase in the 1980s correlates with a decrease in Department of Energy spending (see “F”), which had been on the rise through the 1970s.
FIGURE 5. NASA, NSF, NIH, and Department of Energy outlays, 1962–2010. (in millions, adjusted to 2010 dollars).
41 CHAPTER 2 • FuNdINg PLANETARY SCIENCE: HISTORY ANd POLITICAL ECONOMY
And the defense spending increase beginning in 2001 coincides with a downturn in spending on the National Institutes of Health (see “G”), a clear R&D priority through the previous 20 years. Federal R&D spending is by no means a zero-sum game, but figure 6 does illustrate the dynamic nature of national priorities and, by extension, the risks and rewards of aligning an organization’s goals and activities with U.S. national priorities.
So, where do NASA and the field of planetary science fit into this picture?
NASA has averaged 1.2 percent of the federal budget, though this aver- age is skewed by the massive investment in the human spaceflight program during the 1960s. In recent decades, the average is below 1 percent. As seen in figure 7, space science as a whole averaged less than 20 percent of NASA’s budget over the last 50 years, while the planetary science portion of that bud- get averaged about 6.5 percent. Factoring out the anomaly of NASA’s space race activities in the 1960s, these averages are all a bit lower.
Delving into the NASA space science budget, divided by the themes of planetary science, astrophysics, heliophysics, and Earth science, allows a comparison of trends in space science funding over five decades, but the methodology is inherently inexact. NASA has not always used this arrange- ment to allot science funds. In fact, it is quite new, historically speaking.
NASA’s budgets have been constructed in at least a dozen different arrange- ments over the years, making it extremely difficult to parse them into
FIGURE 6. DOD research and development (R&D), NASA, NSF, NIH, and Department of Energy outlays, 1962–2010 (in millions, adjusted to 2010 dollars).
50 YEARS OF SOLAR SYSTEM EXPLORATION: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES 42
FIGURE 7. NASA budget, 1959–2010 (in millions, adjusted to 2010 dollars).
FIGURE 8. Planetary science outlays, 1959–2010 (in millions, adjusted to 2010 dollars).
consistent budget lines. (See the Appendix for this chapter on page 79 for further information regarding these divisions.)
Planetary science was the dominant portion of NASA’s space science bud- get in the mid-1970s. Prior to that period, many space science efforts were attached to the human spaceflight program, and, following it, the planetary community met with increasing competition from astrophysics, Earth sci- ence, and heliophysics. When looking at the history of funding for solar
43 CHAPTER 2 • FuNdINg PLANETARY SCIENCE: HISTORY ANd POLITICAL ECONOMY
system exploration, as shown in figure 8, the budget line happens to divide into decades, with peaks in three of them and a trough between the last two.
The lowest part of the planetary science line shows why the 1980s are often referred to as the “lost decade” of planetary science (see “H”). Between 2003 and 2006 (see “I”), planetary science enjoyed its highest level of funding ever.2
The astrophysics budget, shown in figure 9, has clearly taken a very dif- ferent historical path, initially overshadowed by planetary and lunar efforts, space physics missions, and other NASA priorities (which in turn were driven by the Cold War space race to a large degree). The astrophysics budget began a long, upward path in the mid-1970s, as NASA embarked on the early design of the four Great Observatories.3
Figure 9 shows that, following the Viking program in the 1970s (see “J”), planetary science received consistently less funding than astrophysics for the next 20 years, though the two funding lines were not entirely dissimilar.
In the early days at NASA, heliophysics was closely associated with space physics, and knowledge gained from experiments conducted in these fields
2. This was due in part to an accounting change temporarily placing the funds for the Deep Space Network (averaging nearly $300 million a year in 2010 dollars) in the planetary sci- ence budget line.
3. Nancy Grace Roman, “Exploring the Universe: Space-Based Astronomy and Astrophysics,”
in John M. Logsdon, ed., Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in the History of the U.S. Civil Space Program, vol. 5, Exploring the Cosmos (Washington, DC: NASA SP-2001- 4407, 2001), pp. 501–543.
FIGURE 9. Planetary science and astrophysics outlays (in millions, adjusted to 2010 dollars).
50 YEARS OF SOLAR SYSTEM EXPLORATION: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES 44
also provided a better understanding of launch environments and commu- nications, among other technical fields required for space exploration.
Funding for heliophysics since the 1960s, as seen in figure 10, has remained below that of the other space science themes, though the heliophysics budget did see a significant increase in the early 2000s (see “K”), in line with other increases in space science funding.
Figure 11 shows that Earth science had a somewhat slow start at NASA but became a more pronounced priority for stakeholders in the early 1990s (see “L”). In the early 2000s, NASA attempted to bring the funding levels of all four themes into closer alignment with one another (see “M”), though all NASA science budgets experienced a downward trend even before the worldwide economic downturn in 2008. The downturn in budgets coincides with U.S. involvement in two wars, along with other domestic issues faced by the nation.
Since WWII, Congress has generally accepted scientific priorities in fed- erally funded civil science endeavors recommended by the appropriate sci- entific communities, provided that those communities could demonstrate a consensus on priorities. The allocation of resources to support scientific pri- orities, however, often depends on how those scientific priorities align with a broader national agenda, predicated in terms of national security, geopoli- tics, or domestic policy. A brief discussion of events in each decade of NASA’s planetary science efforts can help demonstrate how interactions between
FIGURE 10. Planetary science, astrophysics, and heliophysics outlays (in millions, adjusted to 2010 dollars).
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NASA, the rest of the planetary science community, and government stake- holders have worked to establish the federal allocation of resources for solar system exploration and how those interactions have evolved.
THE POST–WORLD WAR II PERIOD THROUGH THE 1950S
If the U.S. civil space program was formed as a Cold War counter to Soviet space efforts, why did NASA engage in planetary science so early in its space program, and why does the effort continue?
The answer to these questions dates back to the post–WWII period and involves communities of researchers in fields as disparate as radio and radar research, cosmic-ray research, ionospheric physics, and meteorology.
Scientists in these communities began to coalesce around the idea that data required to answer some of their most pressing questions could be obtained only by placing scientific instruments outside Earth’s atmosphere. Early work in this area involved mounting instruments atop captured German V-2 rockets. These experiments were developed by researchers at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), the California Institute of Technology’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and the Naval Research
FIGURE 11. Planetary science, astrophysics, heliophysics, and Earth science outlays (in millions adjusted to 2010 dollars).
50 YEARS OF SOLAR SYSTEM EXPLORATION: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES 46
Laboratory (NRL), among others.4 To coordinate their research, these sci- entists formed the Upper Atmosphere Rocket Research Panel (UARRP), an unofficial, nonmilitary panel that met to discuss and plan rocket research.5 THE INTERNATIONAL GEOPHYSICAL YEAR
A group of scientific leaders in several of these space-related fields met in 1950 to discuss the best path forward for their research. Their host was James Van Allen, a physicist at APL and a member of the UARRP who would go on to have a substantial impact on the field of planetary science. The group included Sydney Chapman, a British geophysicist; Lloyd Berkner, head of Brookhaven National Laboratory; Fred Singer at APL; J. Wallace Joyce, a geophysicist with the Navy and adviser to the Department of State; and Ernest H. Vestine from the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution. The outcome of this meeting was the group’s proposal to the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU) for an International Geophysical Year (IGY), modeled on the International Polar Years that were held in 1882–83 and 1932–33. The IGY would take place from July 1957 to December 1958.6
The purpose of the IGY was to bring together researchers from various fields and nationalities to address fundamental scientific questions about Earth’s geomagnetic field, oceans, atmosphere, and more. Some of the research was not space-related, and some involved sounding-rocket or satel- lite instruments. Many of the scientific questions addressed during the IGY required vast resources to address, resources that were beyond the reach of individual scientists, academic departments, or even most military labs.
By consolidating efforts into a unified enterprise—brought together by the nongovernmental ICSU—scientists in fields as varied as astronomy, geod- esy, chemistry, physics, biology, math, radio, and geography were able to obtain financial and logistical support from their governments. This sup- port included military resources not normally associated with science, such as large naval vessels and helicopters for the transport of heavy equipment and personnel to remote locations across Earth, ballistic missile expertise for launching several sounding rockets, and two lines of U.S. scientific satellites along with their tracking and support networks.
4. Homer E. Newell, Beyond the Atmosphere: Early Years of Space Science (Washington, DC:
NASA SP-4211, 1980), https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4211/ch4-4.htm, chapter 4, p. 2.
5. Ibid., chapter 4, p. 4.
6. Constance McLaughlin Green and Milton Lomask, Vanguard: A History (Washington, DC:
NASA SP-4202, 1970, https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4202/chapter1.html), chapter 1.
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In terms of governance and national security, the first U.S. satellite pro- gram, Vanguard, initiated as a U.S. contribution to the IGY, also was intended to establish satellite overflight as a benign and useful activity.7 It is extremely unlikely that President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration would have funded Vanguard had it not constituted a critical step toward establishing U.S. satellite overflight as a peaceful activity, thus providing a justification for later reconnaissance satellites.
While U.S. achievements in Earth and space science during the IGY were in many regards overshadowed by the Soviet launch of Sputnik and the ensuing space race, the IGY was an important formative experience for the nascent space science community.
FORMING NASA
By the end of 1957, the Soviet Union had placed the first artificial satellite, called Sputnik, into orbit. The space race was on, and the United States was trying to determine how best to compete. Lawmakers began consulting with anyone who might have insight into how to best the Soviets in space, includ- ing many of the scientists who represented the United States during the IGY.
Several prominent researchers called to testify before Congress were mem- bers of the Rocket and Satellite Research Panel (RSRP), a successor to the UARRP. Among them were Homer Newell from NRL; William Pickering from JPL; and James Van Allen, by then at the University of Iowa. All had participated in the IGY. The RSRP produced a proposal (which ultimately received support from the American Rocket Society) for “A National Mission to Explore Outer Space” and delivered it to Congress.8
“In the interest of human progress and our national welfare,” this docu- ment began, “it is proposed that a national project be established with the mission of carrying out the scientific exploration and eventual habitation of outer space.” It is clear from this initial statement that science was at the forefront of the proposal, at least on equal footing with a human spaceflight program. “It is essential that the National Space Establishment be scientific in nature and in concept and be under civilian leadership and direction.”
7. Walter A. McDougall …the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New York: Basic Books, 1985), p. 123.
8. Rocket and Satellite Research Panel, “A Proposal to Explore Outer Space—A Proposal by the Rocket and Satellite Research Panel,” in Hearings Before the Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee of the Committee on Armed Services, U.S. Senate, 85th Cong., 1st and 2nd sess., part 2, pp. 2135–2136 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1958).