Space Hunt Falls Victim to Earthly Budget Problems

Just as it was getting off the ground, the scientific search for life on other worlds has collided with the congressional search for dollars on Earth.

The effort known as SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) for three decades has been limited to intermittent shoestring operations here and in the Soviet Union.

Now the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has developed what scientists say are revolutionary computer and signals-processing technologies to sweep up cosmic radio signals and analyze them for intelligent patterns.

Comprehensive Search

The new equipment would provide a search 10 billion times more comprehensive than all previous efforts combined, according to SETI scientists.

But a key Senate Appropriations subcommittee, struggling to accommodate tight spending limits, last month voted to delete a $5-million increase for SETI from NASA’s budget.

NASA has spent five years developing the technology, on a budget of about $2 million annually, officials said. The $5-million increase is sought to begin building the new super-receivers and computer software needed to launch the project as scheduled in 1992.

The SETI increase is still in the House version of the appropriations bill. A House-Senate conference to reconcile the differences between the two versions is expected soon.

Sources on the Senate subcommittee for the Department of Housing and Urban Development and independent agencies, which funds NASA, said that in a time of huge budget problems, they had to cut somewhere and spread the remaining money “in a balanced way” among a number of important space science projects.

One aide described the SETI issue as “minutiae.” Another said, “SETI was asking for a tripling of their funding and (members) felt this was unjustified.”

Astronomers have long held that there are probably so many planets in the universe that even if only a tiny fraction were suitable for life, there should be thousands or millions of planets with life. Recent advances in astronomy and physics have strengthened the theory that there could be many planetary systems hospitable to life.

The SETI strategy holds that one sign of “civilization” would be artificially generated electromagnetic signals--alien versions of a television series, for instance--similar to the buzz of radio, TV and military radar signals that rush continually from Earth. By now the earliest of those signals to leave Earth are nearly 100 light years away in all directions.

Buzz From Earth

The buzz from Earth gives the SETI program special urgency, said Frank Drake, a pioneer in the field and director of the SETI Institute in California, which is under contract to NASA. “Radio pollution on Earth is getting worse, so our search becomes more difficult and expensive the more we delay.”

If funding can be found, he added, “This program has a good chance of succeeding by the end of the century in finding an intelligent signal.”

The improved SETI, managed by NASA Ames Research Center in California, would use radio telescopes around the world to scan for high-frequency radio signals.

One or more of the new super-receivers (called multichannel spectrum analyzers) that can scan 10 million channels simultaneously would be attached to each telescope.

The search would follow two approaches. One, called the sky survey, would sweep the cosmos in all directions, covering 10,000 times more frequencies than all previous survey attempts, for from five to seven years.

The second, called target search, would concentrate on about 800 stars considered likely to have Earth-like planets and focus on a smaller range of radio frequencies with high sensitivity for three to five years.

In addition to its scientific uses, the new technology has broad commercial potential for medicine and other areas, according to SETI supporters.

“This is a very small-scale project, where you don’t get surprised by things,” said NASA SETI program scientist John D. Rummel. “At this point, we can only hope somebody sees the light.”