Roger Handberg
F
ROM THE U.S. SPACE PROGRAM’S INCEPTION in October 1958, human spaceflight has been deeply intertwined with the space science programs at NASA. Space science writ large existed prior to NASA, but the Agency’s creation, offering the possibility of access to space, helped focus public and congressional attention more intently on what was considered an exotic field known to most only through Chesley Bonestell’s and others’ artistic fantasies of planets and the vehicles that humans would use to fly and live in space.The illustrations depicted a human adventure reaching out to the planets and beyond, one that appealed to early generations of space enthusiasts.
Bonestell’s glamorous and imaginative scenarios were rarely accurate except to exhibit the loneliness and beauty of other worlds, and they grabbed public attention. Remember that this period was just past the age of Percival Lowell’s “canals on Mars” claims, at least as far as the public was aware.
Bonestell did not lay out any agenda for space exploration. That was his col- laborator Wernher von Braun’s task, with his vision of humans pushing out into outer space.1 Von Braun’s vision, often unacknowledged, still dominates discussions of future U.S. human spaceflight endeavors. These two types, the
1. The most famous pictures appeared in Willy Ley’s The Conquest of Space (New York:
Viking, 1949). For some of the images, go to “Chesley Bonestell” on the Cosmic Café and Outer Space Art Gallery website, http://www.outer-space-art-gallery.com/chesley-bonestell.
html (accessed 6 August 2020).
50 YEARS OF SOLAR SYSTEM EXPLORATION: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES 90
artist and the dreamer, made outer space a real destination possibility for humans, not just a figment of science fiction. So, from before the beginnings of the U.S. space program, human spaceflight and space science have existed as uneasy partners and collaborators, continuing with the establishment of NASA and its emphasis on human spaceflight along with space science.2 SETTING THE STAGE
The title for this chapter is drawn from a book published in the 1960s, The Politics of Pure Science, in which author Daniel Greenberg described a dis- connect between the high-minded goals of science and the way in which decisions about how to conduct and fund that science were made.3 My pur- pose here is not to expose, but rather to determine how to judge the impact of two complementary but often competing perspectives on future directions for the U.S. space program, embodied in the concepts of robotic missions and missions including a human presence.
The linkage between space science and human spaceflight comes (from the perspective of space science) in the form of a Faustian bargain. Human exploration dominates popular media coverage of the space program, while space scientists feel that their efforts have actually moved space exploration further ahead. The science program, from this view, is one steady, usually systematic progress marred by occasional accidents or glitches. Yet oth- ers may view space science differently. Take, for example, the 2012 landing of Curiosity on Mars. A burst of media coverage occurred, but much of it focused on people, not on the science of the mission. Rather, after Curiosity returned its first images, coverage shifted focus to a scientist’s Mohawk haircut and a dance video put out by fans spoofing JPL personnel.4 Using
2. The National Aeronautics and Space Act, Pub. L. No. 111–314 124 Stat. 3328 (18 December 2010). Section 20112 (a) (2) directs NASA to “arrange for participation by the scientific community in planning scientific measurements and observations to be made through use of aeronautical and space vehicles, and conduct or arrange for the conduct of such measure- ments and observations;….”
3. Daniel S. Greenberg, The Politics of Pure Science (New York: New American Library, 1967). Greenberg published two later books on the politics of science: Science, Money and Politics: Political Triumph and Ethical Erosion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001) and Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2007).
4. Patrick Kingsley, “Mars Curiosity Rover: Upstaged by NASA Mohawk Guy,” Guardian (6 August 2012), http://www.guardian.co.uk/fashion/shortcuts/2012/aug/06/mars-rover- curiosity-nasa-mohawk-guy (accessed 8 October 2012); Denise Chow, “We’re NASA and We Know It,” Space.com (16 August 2012), http://www.space.com/17140-mars-rover-music- video-spoof-lmfao.html (accessed 8 October 2012).
91 CHAPTER 3 • THE POLITICS OF PuRE SPACE SCIENCE, THE ESSENTIAL TENSION
social media to generate public attention and interest is not a problem, but it reflects the reality that to keep public attention on space science, one must go all out. The Hubble Space Telescope, the star of NASA science with its imagery, has experienced a decline in public attention even as its science has become more spectacular. How many images can you use as a screen saver?
The same phenomenon has impacted Curiosity as it settled into the work of scientific exploration and public attention shifts to the newest Mars rover, Perseverance.5
The essential tension that exists between the space science community and the human spaceflight community arises over how funds are allocated and which specific strands of space science should be a priority.6 Parts of space science are explicitly in support of the human exploration program.
Other major areas are distant. Politically, all must ultimately justify their existence and their budgets based on some value to the larger program within which they exist. The requirement that NASA programs be justified is a critical one because they are publicly funded; their audiences are not always their scientific peers or even their peers within the Agency itself. For example, NASA’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program and its High Resolution Microwave Survey (HRMS) project, which began opera- tions in 1992, were abruptly canceled by Congress in 1993 after sustaining some public ridicule by several members.7 There is some evidence that SETI research is not dead at NASA, but it is extremely low-profile, embedded in
5. One can see this effect comparing the following headlines: Emi Kolawole, “Mars Rover Curiosity Takes First Sample of Soil on the Mars (photo),” Washington Post (8 October 2012), http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/post/mars-rover-curiosity- takes-first-sample-of-soil-on-the-red-planet-photo/2012/10/08/d08da152-1163-11e2-ba83- a7a396e6b2a7_blog.html (accessed 9 October 2012). and, Elizabeth Howell, “NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover landing: Why do we keep going back to the Red Planet?” Space.
com (18 February 2021), https://www.space.com/why-return-to-mars-perseverance-rover- landing (accessed 19 April 2021). For a positive spin on the cost of Curiosity, but also, more generally, planetary missions, see Casey Dreier, “Curiosity Comes Cheap—Why the Latest Mars Rover (and All Planetary Exploration) Is a Steal,” The Planetary Society (9 August 2012), http://www.planetary.org/blogs/casey-dreier/20120809-curiosity-comes-cheap.html (accessed 9 October 2012).
6. The essential tension is the subject of Thomas Kuhn’s first forays into his pursuit of the question of when scientific revolutions occur. See his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). It is the conflict or tension between the established view of what physical reality is and the pressure exerted by newer evidence and theories.
7. Stephen J. Garber, “Searching for Good Science: the Cancellation of NASA’s SETI Program,”
Journal of the British Interplanetary Society 52 (1999): 3–12.
50 YEARS OF SOLAR SYSTEM EXPLORATION: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES 92
other programs including the Kepler mission to search for extrasolar plan- ets, focusing especially on Earth-size planets in or near the habitable zone.8
What occurs within the space science community is a multi-track process in which the various broadly defined disciplinary communities within it work out a framework for establishing funding priorities while the human space- flight community works on keeping a viable flight program alive. All of this activity occurs against a background of the primacy of human exploration on NASA’s agenda. Conflicts occur at several levels: within the sub-disciplines of space science; among the major themes within space science, including plan- etary science, Earth science, heliophysics, and astrophysics; and between the scientific community and the human space exploration community.
Priorities arise within the space science community through decadal- survey recommendations, developed under the auspices of the National Research Council for NASA—a politicized process. What further compli- cates the process is that decadal surveys can, depending on the area they cover, address space-based and ground-based research projects. The astron- omy and astrophysics decadal survey directly confronts this division—one currently exacerbated by cost overruns and schedule delays for NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Fortunately for the JWST, the story of
8. https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/overview/index.html (accessed 8 August 2021).
Artist’s concept of Kepler-186f, the first Earth-size planet in the habitable zone. (NASA Ames/SETI Institute/JPL-Caltech: PIA17999)
93 CHAPTER 3 • THE PoliTiCs of PuRE sPACE sCiEnCE, THE EssEnTiAl TEnsion
its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, with its problems but eventual triumph, provides support for pressing forward regardless of current prob- lems because the science will be so productive. The politics here are driven by conflicting community interests and aggressive space science entrepre- neurs who lobby for specific programs. Within NASA, those priorities are worked out in the context of specific missions (supposedly chosen based on their excellence and scientific value) to be funded at what rate. For example, the $2 billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer-02 (AMS-02), presently on the International Space Station, was an audacious experiment that absorbed resources and was behind schedule. What protected it in the end was its high cost. It was too costly to cancel. In addition, its extensive international team created political support beyond the usual suspects in the United States.9
Efforts to expand the funding “pie” for the space science community have occurred by pursuing several pathways. One has been to expand the amount of funding appropriated for such activities. Since the Apollo program, NASA has chronically defined itself as underfunded. For years, advocates for NASA have cited 1 percent of the federal budget as a necessary goal in order to sus- tain a robust space program. This is an overly optimistic perspective, based on what is now clearly a historical anomaly—the early years of the Apollo program (1964–67), when NASA’s budget accounted for around 4 percent of the federal budget.10
The spaceflight community works to ensure that funding and commit- ments are supported in Congress and the executive branch to continue specific flight vehicles such as the Space Shuttle and various attempts at a successor. Given that NASA budgets are finite, sharp controversies occur over the rate and size of spaceflight funding. In times of need, the space sci- ence community is, in effect, taxed to support the more important—accord- ing to Agency leadership—human spaceflight endeavors. The latter can draw in Congress as members act to protect constituent interests in protecting jobs and companies. NASA leadership has sought presidential engagement to initiate and fund human spaceflight projects, but this approach has proven repeatedly to be a weak reed to rely on given other presidential priorities.
NASA efforts have fallen on deaf ears in Congress and the White House.
9. https://ams.nasa.gov/index.html. The cost of this project is estimated at $2 billion. Tia Ghose, “Dark Matter Possibly Found by $2 Billion Space Experiment, Space News, 3 April 2013, https://www.space.com/20490-dark-matter-discovery-space-experiment.html (accessed 7 September 2021).
10. Perry D. Clark, “Viewpoint: One Percent for NASA, a Big Benefit for Humankind,”
MLive.com, 22 July 2011, updated 21 January 2019, https://www.mlive.com/opinion/
muskegon/2011/07/viewpoint_one_percent_for_nasa.html (accessed 25 November 2020).
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The second approach has been to slice the budget pie into thinner pieces, providing the illusion of a bigger program. NASA’s “faster, better, cheaper”
mantra of the 1990s was the most public version of this approach.11 It was not a response aimed at expanding space science’s share of the budget, but rather an effort to expand human spaceflight’s share. By sending space science off to a cheaper realm, this approach enabled the human spaceflight side of the house to continue on a path of business as usual after NASA’s 1993 crisis (see below).
CONFLICTING PRESSURES—NOT REINFORCING
Human spaceflight at NASA has been considered the public face of the U.S.
space program since its inception, manifested in displays of astronauts for publicity purposes. The Mercury 7 were the prototype astronaut-heroes and remained so even as spaceflight became, in principle, more routine and safer.
Two Shuttle losses during flight, one during liftoff and the other during reen- try, returned an aura of extreme danger to the astronaut’s public persona.
The takeaway from these two tragedies was that human spaceflight is inher- ently dangerous and that NASA was committed to its continuation. Return to flight was not just a technical task but an absolute priority within the Agency. This human spaceflight focus has led to a series of abortive efforts at Shuttle replacement. A controversial analysis of these efforts suggests that
$20 billion over 20 years was “wasted” or misspent.12 From the perspective of the space science community, this commitment contrasts with the much smaller commitment to space science over a similar time period in which greater success was achieved. Post-Shuttle human space flight programs have floundered, thus far, due to cost factors and technical issues not solv- able within expected budgets.
NASA leadership’s vision is bounded by its relations with Congress, especially at the committee and subcommittee level (see figure 1), and the executive branch, especially the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
Public attention provides a constant backdrop to Agency leadership actions
11. Lt. Col. Dan Ward, “Faster, Better, Cheaper Revisited: Program Management Lessons from NASA,” Defense AT&L (March–April 2010), https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/1016355.
pdf (accessed 23 September 2012).
12. Marcia Smith, “Did NASA Really Waste $20 Billion in Cancelled Human Space Flight Programs?” Space Policy Online, 22 September 2012, http://www.spacepolicyonline.com/
news/did-nasa-really-waste-20-billion-in-cancelled-human-space-flight-programs (accessed 9 October 2012). There is some dispute over whether the total cited is accurate, but the political point is made, given that the chart cited here is from a congressional website, http://
culberson.house.gov/reps-culberson-wolf-posey-and-olson-introduce-the-space-leadership-act/.
95 CHAPTER 3 • THE POLITICS OF PuRE SPACE SCIENCE, THE ESSENTIAL TENSION
and reactions. The operative assumption is that publicly visible failures will generate a decline in public support for the program. What is feared, or more disruptive, is members of Congress and their constituents. NASA Centers and JPL are significant local economic engines, so changes affecting them, especially declines in funding, generate intense congressional interest and backlash. These interests play out in the strug- gle over space science funding, where members from California and Maryland aggressively resist reprogramming funds from space science to support human spaceflight.
A PATTERN OF BEHAVIOR
Conflict over resource allocation to space science and human spaceflight was muted in NASA’s early days because of the newness of the field.13 Scientists flocked to space science in pursuit of new opportunities. Within the space science field, this influx created some controversy as established space scientists (a small, intimate group) confronted demands from new- comers for access to funding and flight opportunities.14 In addition, the newcomers challenged supposed cozy situations where established space sci- entists judged each other’s work, creating an appearance of a closed shop.
Meanwhile, NASA decided that it would run the space science enterprise through a Headquarters division or directorate. External players such as the National Research Council (NRC) and its Space Science (later Space Studies) Board (SSB), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and various disciplin- ary associations would operate in an advisory capacity. Internally, NASA reorganized the space science program several times in pursuit of maximum efficiency and responsiveness to upper-level management and to the science and engineering communities that actually implemented the program.
One early decision was to have a scientist and an engineer fill the two top slots at NASA. This decision reflected the reality that space science involves
13. For a more intimate and detailed analysis of the early years, see Homer E. Newell, Beyond the Atmosphere: Early Years of Space Science (Washington, DC: NASA SP-4211, 1980).
14. John E. Naugle and John M. Logsdon, “Space Science: Origins, Evolution, and
Organization,” in Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in the History of the U.S. Civil Space Program, ed. John M. Logsdon, vol. 5, Exploring the Cosmos (Washington, DC: NASA SP-4407, 2001), pp. 8–15.
FIGURE 1. Major players.
NASA Leadership Congressional-Constituents,
Presidential Goals-Budget, Public
Human Spaceflight Directorate NASA Centers, Contractors,
Public
Science Directorate Scientific Communities:
NASA Centers, Associations and Societies
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both science and technology. A failure to understand science and technology requirements for a mission could result in disaster. Also, early on, it became clear that as space science disciplines evolved away from their terrestrial roots, space science projects were becoming a bit of a gamble. If a mission failed, it was unlikely to be repeated quickly, meaning that scientists work- ing on it over years or decades might have only one shot at conducting the experiments they saw as essential for advancing knowledge. In the earliest days, some of NASA’s planetary missions often launched in pairs—such as Vikings 1 and 2 and Voyagers 1 and 2—doubling the chance of a data return.
Reorientation or diversion of space science program funding could turn a subdiscipline into a virtual intellectual desert for a generation, as ambitious newcomers either chose not to enter the field or moved off into other areas.
Concurrent with the startup of the space science arm of the Agency, the Apollo program announced by President John F. Kennedy in May 1961 was already under way. With NASA virtually on a war footing, it meant that budgets were ample, at least for a time. The impact of Apollo on the space sci- ence program was real. JPL, for example, was tasked with landing (actually crash-landing) on the lunar surface to assess the composition of the Moon rather than pursuing its preferred mission of studying Mars or Venus. JPL’s lunar odyssey involved a series of missions that failed for an assortment of reasons (see chapter 14). JPL’s lunar craft carried television cameras rather than scientific equipment. The focus of these missions was on identifying landing locations for Apollo missions.15 Even more telling was the fact that the Apollo landings on the lunar surface did not produce the flow of scien- tific data that some expected. Astronaut Harrison Schmitt, a trained geolo- gist, was the only scientist to fly on an Apollo mission (17, the last). The last two planned Apollo missions, with significant science components, were canceled. For space science, Apollo was a diversion, although some science was accomplished once Apollo requirements had been met. The later Ranger missions photographed areas of interest to science. What was clear during and after Apollo was the relative priorities of science and human spaceflight as reflected in their relative shares of the NASA budget.
The end of the Apollo program left human spaceflight in danger. NASA’s Apollo Applications program, established in 1968 to develop science-based human spaceflight missions using hardware developed for the Apollo pro- gram, depended on the Saturn 5, which was determined to be too expen- sive for use in future missions. The Skylab missions in the early 1970s, along
15. Amy Paige Snyder, “NASA and Planetary Exploration,” in Logsdon, Exploring the Unknown, vol. 5, pp. 272–277.