NASA BUDGET : Cuts the Flat Earth Society Would Love

There is a crisis in science funding in America. The GOP-dominated Congress is even contemplating the dissolution of the Office of Technology Assessment--its only source of advice on science and technology. If present trends in the House and Senate budget committees materialize, overall funding for civilian science and technology may be cut about 35% by the turn of the millennium. American science may never be the same.

We spend money on science today so that the benefits accrue later. There is no room for impatience or a monomaniacal devotion to the bottom-line. This is one of the many reasons why the “privatization” of science generally doesn’t work. Science pursues deep questions, whose practical benefits are wholly unexpected and often far off in time. Some of these discoveries helped create a civilization worth defending; they permit us to understand the universe in which we live.

Draconian cuts in the federal budget must be made, we are told, because of an urgent need to balance the budget. Oddly, an institution whose share of gross domestic product is higher than the entire federal domestic discretionary budget is essentially off limits. This is the military, whose budget for fiscal ’96 is set at about $265 billion, compared with $17 billion for all civilian science and space. Why should Pentagon spending be sacrosanct when so much else that our national well-being depends on is in danger of being thought- lessly destroyed?

Consider an agency that has directly added to American prestige and self-confidence and made fundamental advances in world science. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, while planning a dramatic and historic shuttle rendezvous and docking with the Russian space station Mir, was asked by the Clinton Administration to cut $8 billion from its 1996-2000 budget. NASA obediently drew up a plan to fire about 28,000 scientists, technicians and others, to bring its work force to a level not only smaller than that before Apollo, but smaller than that before Alan Shepard’s first suborbital space flight in 1961.

Yet, key NASA programs have been preserved: the International Space Station; the Mission to Planet Earth and its Earth Observation Satellite; a rendezvous with a near-Earth asteroid, of the sort that poses a long-term danger to our civilization; small missions to Mars, where increasingly there are hints of past or present environments congenial to life. (The Cassini Mission to Saturn and its moon Titan, however, is endangered.) NASA’s restructuring has been praised both by Vice President Al Gore and House Speaker Newt Gingrich as an example of how government should be “reinvented.”

NASA’s reward? The House has ordered up another $5 billion to be cut from the space agency’s 1996-2000 budget. It looks to be an unmitigated disaster.

NASA has five primary areas of activity or “enterprises”: aeronautics, engineering, manned space flight, the study of the Earth’s environment and the exploration of space. You might think that a Republican-dominated Congress, intent on privatization and feeling the necessity of making deep budget cuts, would hone in on corporate welfare: government subsidies to the aerospace industry. But the argument is heard that other nations subsidize their aerospace industries, and so the NASA aeronautics program is needed to achieve equity, to ensure a “level playing field.”

A similar commercial justification is offered for continuing to develop the technology of manned space flight, but, generally speaking, the payoff is too far in the future for any company to make sufficient short-term profit. So the private sector is unwilling to invest its own money. Despite all the hype, there is no short-term spinoff return on manned spaced flight to justify the tens of billions of dollars the international manned space station Alpha, for example, would cost. Nevertheless, given the glories of Apollo--of which this summer’s hit movie “Apollo 13” remind us--what politician would want to be responsible for killing the U.S. manned space program?

NASA’s engineering program has been underfunded for years, and thus unable to develop cheaper access to space or more efficient alternatives to the chemical rocket. That leaves on the congressional chopping block two kinds of programs, both focused on fundamental science: studying the Earth from space, and studying other worlds, other stars, other galaxies from space. These are the only truly exploratory aspects of the NASA enterprise. These programs have visited 70 new worlds in our solar system and made breathtaking discoveries about the origin, nature and fate of our universe.

Studying the environment of the Earth has become peculiarly controversial. Many conservatives look on it as an attempt to prove global warming and thereby increase the costs on industry--either by mandating that companies be much more efficient in their use of fossil fuels, or by forcing them to partly replace fossil fuels with an alternative reusable energy source. The authorization bill for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is designed to challenge any study that smacks of global warming.

The Republican House leadership proposes that NASA take most of the additional $5 billion out of Mission to Planet Earth--essentially gutting the program. Mission to Planet Earth is a thoroughgoing investigation of the Earth’s environment. It doesn’t presume one answer or another. It’s open to whatever answers nature provide. It will also generate an enormous amount of subsidiary information, conceivably including clues to other global dangers and opportunities. Foes of the program apparently don’t want to know about the safety of the global environment. But what should a conservative be conserving if not the planetary environment on which all our lives depend?

If global warming must be taken seriously--as new data affirm--it provides new entrepreneurial and industrial opportunities. The only companies that would lose money are those unwilling to invest in new technologies. Is it wise to close our eyes to a possibly serious danger to the planetary environment so as not to offend such companies and those members of Congress whose reelection campaigns they support?

Meanwhile, any way the pie is cut, NASA has already been reduced to well below its funding and staffing levels before the Apollo began. By being clever, by involving universities and other nations more, many worthwhile activities can still be carried out. Even at present budget levels, though, there will be irresistible temptations to curtail boldness, to cut corners, to pull back on the Apollos and Vikings and Voyagers and the orbiting space telescopes that transformed our time into an age of exploration and brought so much honor to our nation.

NASA is about much more than aeronautics and science and engineering. It’s about inspiring our children to do their homework, to know something deeply, to believe as we did that the future will be better than the past. NASA is about our species and our planet. And so is much of the rest of American science now at risk.