COLUMN ONE : Big Science Faces Big Troubles : Current projects will cost $160 billion to build and operate. Critics question their affordability and worry that individual researchers are being shortchanged.
Over the past 17 years, the federal government has spent $1.5 billion to finance construction of a huge telescope in space in order to provide scientists with unprecedentedly clear photos. Last year, it was launched--only to contain a badly flawed mirror.
The superconducting super collider, an $11-billion project that would allow physicists to study the fundamental building blocks of the universe, is in danger of going broke for lack of contributions from international partners.
And just last month, U.S. space officials admitted that the space shuttle Columbia had been flown repeatedly with a poorly redesigned--and badly cracked--temperature sensor, which might well have broken loose in a fuel line, leading to the destruction of the orbiter and its crew.
Such disappointments and frustrations--together with a rapidly shrinking funding pool in the federal budget--have inflamed an issue that has long plagued policy-makers and scientists: Does America really need Big Science?
One response will come Thursday when the House will be asked to restore $1.93 billion in funding next year for the proposed space station. Earlier this week, the House Appropriations Committee voted in effect to kill the program by allocating only $100 million for it, barely enough to close the venture down.
The project’s supporters turned up the heat on House members Tuesday as Budget Director Richard G. Darman warned that President Bush will veto a larger appropriations measure if it does not contain funding for the space station. At the same time, Japan and the European Space Agency--key partners in the $30-billion project--told members of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee that American credibility is on the line and that if Congress kills the space station, Washington will meet stiff resistance when it seeks foreign contributions for other large science projects--namely the superconducting super collider.
Proponents of science megaprojects say that it is primarily the large undertakings that have led to the use of radar, X-rays and microwaves--not to mention thousands of jobs. For the most part, megaprojects have involved gigantic machines shared by many researchers, such as telescopes, atom smashers, seagoing research vessels and assorted spacecraft that have revolutionized human understanding of the cosmos.
“These things have given us the capability to do first-rate science, and researchers have come here from all over the world,” said Lewis M. Branscomb, a Harvard University science policy analyst. “And don’t forget: The Apollo program gave us back our self-respect.”
But others contend that such big projects produce marginal benefits while seriously draining funds from smaller-scale research such as that which has led to antibiotics, lasers and transistors.
“These megaprojects are so big and so enormous that they may very well work to the detriment of the individual investigator,” said Allen Heininger, a retired Monsanto vice president and now head of the American Chemical Society.
Huge Investment
The federal government already has a huge investment in Big Science. Projects already in the works will cost more than $60 billion to build and take $100 billion to operate.
Currently, major science projects include the space station, a $3-billion program to map the human genetic code and the superconducting super collider planned for construction in Texas. Many other expensive projects are still on the drawing boards.
Yet last autumn’s budget agreement, which set a 5% growth ceiling on total domestic appropriations, has left Congress little room to maneuver in financing such megaprojects. Scientists increasingly are having to compete for funds with a host of domestic interests--in addition to one another.
“We’re at the crossroads in terms of our investment. This is really a critical period,” warned Rep. George E. Brown Jr. (D-Colton), chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee.
“These conflicts have come up before--but never with the intensity as right now,” said physicist Robert Park, who lobbies on behalf of the American Physical Society. “We’ve never been faced with a zero-sum game before. Everything’s different now.”
Until this spring, Big Science had the upper hand. But last May, several congressional panels looked closely at the funding pie--and made a sudden, stunning turnaround.
One subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee voted to scrap the space station altogether, a decision backed on Monday by the full committee, setting up Thursday’s House vote. The full Appropriations Committee cut $100 million, or almost 20%, from the Bush Administration’s request for $534 million for the super collider in fiscal 1992.
Critics of megaprojects--once considered heretics--are finding plenty of political cover these days. Even D. Allan Bromley, the respected White House science adviser, is a skeptic. “Quite frankly,” he said, “I don’t believe it is possible for us, with the best of intentions, to support all of those projects simultaneously without wrecking the science and technology base.”
Historically, says University of Minnesota chemist Paul Gassman, Congress and the public by and large have been enamored of big, high-profile projects, whether it was the race to the moon or the development of the space shuttle. “And no one was talking about the individual investigators,” he said. “Until Bromley came along, it was still the bigger-is-better syndrome.”
Yet for all the polarization between advocates of big and small science, it’s far from clear that megaprojects detract all that much from small science. As Darman has observed, when the House Appropriations Committee denied funding for the space station, it quickly doled out the “savings” to social projects that have nothing to do with science--big or small. The same happened with the super collider, Darman said, charging that “every single dollar of the ‘savings’ went to unrequested, uneconomic, special-interest water projects!”
About the only thing on which everyone agrees is that what’s at stake, beyond money, is America’s place in the 21st Century as a world leader in science and technology. Indeed, much of the push toward Big Science is driven by fear that the United States might otherwise lose out competitively to the Japanese. In earlier years, the Soviets’ launch of Sputnik spawned a similar push for increases in science education.
Any cutbacks in financing will have their unforeseen costs. In the early 1970s, Congress approved early funding for a state-of-the-art atom smasher that was to enable American scientists to retain their pre-eminence over the fast-charging Europeans and Japanese in a prestigious field called particle physics. The total estimated cost was $500 million.
Today, the only thing authorities have to show for their efforts is a 2 1/2-mile, doughnut-shaped ditch on New York’s Long Island. After pouring $150 million into the ambitious project, the Energy Department killed the program in 1983 after experiencing serious delays over technical problems. In the meantime, much to Washington’s embarrassment, scientists working in Europe, using their own particle accelerator, had made a number of key discoveries--including one that won the Nobel Prize for its inventors. For all practical purposes, the project had become obsolete.
Even without killing a project outright, some say, scaling one back--for financial or political reasons--could so alter it as to render it virtually useless. That indeed was how many Japanese and European scientists reacted after the United States decided unilaterally to downsize the space station. It took months of high-level ego-massaging to persuade them that the smaller facility will still be capable of doing groundbreaking science.
Bromley, a Yale physicist, warns that some of the big projects may now have to be delayed, or staggered, in part so that foreign partners can be found to help defray the costs. “It’s quite clear that not all of them can continue on a parallel,” he said.
Erich Bloch, the just retired director of the National Science Foundation, agrees: “These big projects are important. But they can also wait.”
Others, however, fear that such messages are being heard not only on Capitol Hill but also on foreign shores, giving potential partners in megaprojects cold feet.
Foreign Partners
The superconducting super collider to be built near Dallas is a case in point. The House has set a $5-billion cap on federal funding for the project, which would allow physicists to study the fundamental building blocks of the universe. The rest of the money is to come from foreign partners and the state of Texas.
But so far, the only solid commitment from overseas is $50 million from India. With potential construction costs of $11 billion or more, it’s an open question whether the Department of Energy can coax billions of dollars from other countries--particularly since European nations already have their own particle accelerator and are loathe to give Washington one penny.
A further complication arose last month when Japan bluntly warned Washington that it may not help out at all in any of the megaprojects--particularly the super collider--if Congress kills the space station. At U.S. urging, Tokyo has made the space station the focus of its own space program for the next two decades--and already has spent more than $650 million on a major component of the station.
If foreign contributions are not forthcoming, the super collider project may well die, with Congress reluctant to increase the $5-billion cap.
“The mood in Washington is not very healthy these days for science,” fretted Nobel laureate Leon Lederman, a University of Chicago physicist and president of the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science.
Aside from the budgetary squeeze, congressional disenchantment also is rooted in the recurring problems involving some recent big projects--the Hubble Space Telescope and the unpredictable space shuttle program, for example.
Another source of congressional irritation with megaprojects is the proponents’ history of providing low initial cost estimates, only gradually revealing the true costs long after the project was under way. A classic example is the atom smasher proposed for Texas. When it was first proposed, its cost was put at $4 billion, compared to $11 billion now.
“Mega science projects are intentionally sold to us with a low price tag,” said Rep. Bob Traxler (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee that voted to scrub the space station.
Federal spending for research and development, adjusted for inflation, has remained fairly constant in the past two decades. But the number and size of big projects have grown sharply while there are now vastly more academic researchers competing for the shrinking share of the science-funding pie. Between 1978 and 1988, the number of practicing scientists doubled to 4.6 million.
Traditionally, the National Science Foundation has been the primary government funding source for math, physics, chemistry, engineering, biology and computer science. But while its funding is now $2.08 billion, up from $1.72 billion just three years ago, the foundation also has taken on some big projects, such as the $110-million high magnetic field laboratory and the $190-million gravitational wave observatory. President Bush has vowed to double the foundation’s funding.
Projects Provide Jobs
In addition, there are many other expensive projects still on the drawing boards, such as a $480-million Compact Ignition Tomahawk to control nuclear fusion, a $500-million Advanced Neuron Source for studying new materials and an $800-million orbiting Space Infrared Telescope Facility for observing stars.
“Some of these things must be done on a prioritized order,” Bloch said. “We just can’t afford all of them at once.”
But killing or even scaling back any one of the megaprojects will not be easy, for each has acquired a loyal and sizable constituency. “Most of them have become public works projects,” said Gassman of the University of Minnesota.
In lobbying Congress to restore full funding for the space station, for instance, NASA officials are telling members that the program’s demise would seriously hurt the nation economically.
And the 54-mile underground superconducting super collider already has 1,100 people on the payroll, and 8,500 contracts totaling more than $100 million have been awarded to researchers in 43 states. Not one spade of dirt has been turned as yet.
“There’s support for it because it’s jobs,” Gassman fumed.
Still, says Freeman Dyson, a physicist at Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Study, at least the super collider is “an honest scientific project.” The space station, he says, is not.
In the mid-1980s, Dyson served on an Office of Technology Assessment panel that reviewed NASA’s space station plans. “NASA gave us a list of 40 projects--biology, materials, astronomy and so forth--that would be done on the space station. We went through this list and concluded that 38 could be done--and done better--without the space station. There were only two that actually needed the station, and they involved studies on long duration of living in space,” Dyson recalled. “This is being pushed to help keep NASA alive.”
“It’s not a science project. Let’s face up to that,” Bloch said.
But Bill Taylor, the space station’s chief scientist, says the facility will “enable a lot of good, neat science to be done that can’t be done easily” elsewhere, such as studies on the prolonged effects of zero gravity on human physiology--a necessary steppingstone to human exploration of Mars.
Many influential lawmakers, including House Science Committee Chairman Brown, say new ways are needed to help lawmakers weigh the competing science projects--as well as balancing science against society’s other needs.
“I’ve been proposing a congressional oversight committee that can look at overall spending for research and development and then make some rational decisions,” Bloch said. “You need both. But there’s a need for a balance.”
Warned Richard S. Nicholson, executive director the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science: “The worst thing that can happen, and the most likely thing, is that we’ll end up sort of muddling through and not make a total commitment to some project. Instead, we’ll stretch it out forever and end up spending a lot more in the end--while losing opportunities along the way. That’s the worst of all outcomes. But we seem to do it with everything.”
Challenging Big Science
Critics are suggesting that some of the biggest science projects on the drawing boards may not be worth the money. Among them:
COST COMPLETION PROJECT (billions) DATE LIFE SPAN Space Station Freedom $30.0 1999 30 years Earth Observation System $17.0 2000 15 years Super Collider $11.0 1999 30 years Human Genome Project $3.0 2005 None Hubble Space Telescope $1.5 Launched:1990 15 years
