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Space program funding - he who dared
Book reviews Space program funding- he who dared NASA: a history of the US civil space program Roger D. Launius
Krieger Publishing, Malabar Florida USA, 276 pp, 1994, $20.35 This recent small-format book forms part of the Anvil series of historical studies by Florida-based Krieger Publishing, and consists of three parts: a brief introduction to the early history of rocketry; a fairly straightforward c h r o n o l o g i c a l n a r r a t i v e of space events, with an emphasis on NASA programs, from 1957 to 1993; and a collection of source documents on US legislation policies and initiatives in respect of civil space exploration. Launius, chief historian at NASA, treads the narrow line between scholar and employee as he examines the highs and lows of a remarkable American institution which, paradoxically, owes its existence and much of its success to Russia. Although most of the world hailed the 4 October 1957 launch of humanity's first artificial satellite, Sputnik, as a remarkable feat of engineering, science and vision, the event was seen differently by Cold War America. Launius devotes a chapter to what large sections of the US population viewed as 'the Sputnik crisis' - the presumed national security and world leadership downside of the Russian space spectacular. Organisational reaction was swift, with President Eisenhower's administration creating a National Aeronautics and Space Council and an executing arm, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, within a year with much behind the scenes help from Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, whose immense influence on American space efforts is revealed in Launius' book. N A S A was fleshed from the skeleton of an existing research and engineering body - the
SPACE POLICY August 1996
National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics - helping to give NASA a culture of achievement and hardheadedness. Interestingly, in reaction to the perceived Russian space challenge for world leadership, the US effectively adopted the same organisational instrument - the massive, topdown, centralised space program dedicated to a national political agenda which emphasised international visibility, and for which cost was no obj ect. NASA initially set about its business in a measured fashion, taking over facilities and space projects from universities, the Navy and the Army, concentrating on the Explorer unmann e d scientific satellite p r o g r a m . However, these conservative plans were upset on 12 April 1961 when the Soviet Union's Yuri Gagarin became the first human being in space, and Russia once again rewrote the American space agenda. Having asked his space, science and budget advisors how America could trump what he represented as a communist challenge to winning the hearts and minds of humanity, on 25 May 1961 President John F. Kennedy made one of the most dramatic political promises of all time - to send an American to the Moon, and return him, before the end of the decade. This extraordinary challenge - for at the time, no one really knew if it could be affordably and safely done - defined the 'Space Race' in popular imagination, and was to become both a blessing and a curse for the fledgling space agency. The presidential-mandated commitment to reach the Moon resulted in t h e e x p e n d i t u r e , a c c o r d i n g to Launius, of US$20 billion, worth about US$150 billion in current day terms. At the height of the one sided race, NASA was responsible for over 5% of the Federal budget and about 1% of Gross Domestic Product; by 1965, over 376,000 Americans worked
on the Apollo program, and Launius notes that during the 1960s, one in every 50 Americans worked for a time on some aspect of the national effort to make the 'Man on the Moon' an American. In the face of concern that the space race would rob other high technology areas of skilled personnel, NASA invested heavily in university programs and t r a i n i n g schemes. The size, dynamism and glamour of the Apollo program drew talented, idealistic and dedicated administrators, engineers and scientists to NASA, which rapidly became a byword for getting things done and for devising new management paradigms - such as the concepts of program management, in which 'headquarter' staff remained firmly at the reigns of large-scale enterprises involving distributed work teams, often comprising the leading exponents of their art. However, when the Apollo challenge was met and growth stopped, what could keep the brightest and the best? And how then would NASA's budget and plans be protected in the face of competing needs for social programs and winning an expensive and demoralising war? I n f i r m foundation L a u n i u s shows how unusual were the historical conditions under which Kennedy announced the decision to go to the Moon, and how infirm this foundation was to prove for a long-term commitment to space exploration. America was confronting the Soviet U n i o n , b u t was not yet overtly embroiled in the southeast Asian wars. Post-war prosperity was widespread, and the racial and political dissension which was to become a feature of the late 1960s had not yet become evident. In this brief and false summer, everything seemed possible. By the decade's end, nothing seemed possible: neither peace in Vietnam, nor racial reconciliation, nor bridging the Generation Gap. It took a resurrection of the menace of 'the Evil E m p i r e ' , under the Presidency of
225
Book reviews Ronald Reagan, to enable NASA to undertake its next great budgetary leap forward, the still unfinished task of building a permanent orbiting space station - the Free World's answer to the Russian station, Mir, first inhabited in 1984. Launius looks frankly at some of NASA's best and worst moments, including the Voyager planetary probes, the aborted promise of Skylab, the deaths of the Apollo astronauts Grissore, White and Chaffee in the 1967 capsule fire, and the explosion of Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986, with the deaths of the crew of five men and two women. At times Launius' retelling is frustratingly brief, although the reprinting of extracts from topical documents at least allows for reading b e t w e e n the lines. O n e of the strengths of the work is the insight into the political and administrative deci-
sion making, revealed by the contemporary sources. I was surprised at the omission from the extensive bibliography of Homer Newell's epic study of early A m e r i c a n space science at NASA, Beyond the Atmosphere, and Launius' brief coverage does not allow for in-depth exploration of themes (for example, there is little on the role of the US space program in promoting international scientific collaboration). However, these are quibbles about an entertainingly-written, honest and well-produced monograph about one of the most daring and achievementoriented bureaucracies of modern times.
Jeff Kingwell CSIRO Office of Space Science and Applications Canberra, ACT 2601 Australia
Hazardous impacts ROGUE ASTEROIDS AND DOOMSDAY COMETS by Duncan Steel John Wiley, Chichester, 1995, 308 pp, £16.99 Duncan Steel is a research astronomer at the Anglo-Australian Observatory and much quoted as an authority on the hazards of asteroid and cometary impact with the Earth. He is a major participant in the southern hemisphere component of the watch for such hazards, and advocates a significant expansion of that search. The growing recognition of that hazard has been a major development in planetary science over the last thirty years. Once the Apollo missions established that the Moon's surface features had been shaped primarily by impact events, and Mariner and Voyager missions showed this applied throughout the Solar System, it was recognised that the dynamic surface of the Earth had concealed most of the evidence of what happened here. But once it was looked for, it was found.
226
Thirty years ago, the only meteorite crater recognised was Barringer's in Arizona. But there are other intact craters in Australia; photography from orbit helped to identify still more, and every year the count goes up. Dr Steel begins with the example of Lake Acraman in South Australia, a 90-km ring formed 600 million years ago and recognised as an impact feature only in 1986. Although the exact mechanism by which the dinosaurs died out is disputed, it's now certain that the iridium-bearing layer found at the Cretaceous-Tertiary b o u n d a r y came from an even bigger impact off the coast of Yucutan, and very recently two buried craters have been found by Space Shuttle radar, in Chad, coinciding with an earlier mass extinction 360 million years ago.l Each time another object is detected which might strike the Earth, there's a wave of discussion about means of detecting and preventing such events, but it quickly dies down again. Comet Swift-Tuttle provided an example in 1982 and again in 1992, but is now thought unlikely to hit us before 3044. The danger is that we could
be struck at any time by some object not previously detected. Dr Steel estimates there are about two thousand objects, of over 1 kilometre diameter, able to cause global disaster if their orbits evolve to cross the Earth's. But already the urgency has increased: a survey using new technology indicates that current estimates of the numbers of threatening bodies in the inner Solar System are a great deal too lowfl Smaller objects, like the 60-metre one which exploded over Siberia in 1908, strike the Earth every 50 years on average, and a 10-metre one did the same over the Western Pacific in February 1994; so I was surprised not to find an update of Dr Steel's own hypothesis, that a similar event over New Zealand caused the extinction of the moa. 3 In his novel Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke imagined an event like this, in Italy, giving rise to a s y s t e m a t i c h a z a r d watch called 'Spaceguard'. The name has been attached to a suggested programme with six dedicated 2-metre telescopes, spread around the world, costing US$300 million over 25 years, to chart all current hazards. At the present rate of detection, Steel estimates, it will be five hundred years before all hazards are known.
Russian Roulette One common argument for inaction is that the chances of a major impact are insignificant, and Steel correctly compares this to playing Russian Roulette - a comparison which could be taken further, since incoming asteroids never have misfires. So many people would die in a major impact that statisically an individual's chance of dying in one is comparable to the risks of domestic electrocution, or dying in a plane crash - and we do insure against those. Working with the statistics, Steel calculates an annual value for the risk of US$2 billion per year, by comparison with which Spaceguard's cost would be like buying car insurance for a dollar. By no stretch of the imagination could this approach to the problem be called 'alarmist': the scariest thing about the book is the Bob Eggleton
SPACE POLICY August 1996
Krieger Publishing, Malabar Florida USA, 276 pp, 1994, $20.35 This recent small-format book forms part of the Anvil series of historical studies by Florida-based Krieger Publishing, and consists of three parts: a brief introduction to the early history of rocketry; a fairly straightforward c h r o n o l o g i c a l n a r r a t i v e of space events, with an emphasis on NASA programs, from 1957 to 1993; and a collection of source documents on US legislation policies and initiatives in respect of civil space exploration. Launius, chief historian at NASA, treads the narrow line between scholar and employee as he examines the highs and lows of a remarkable American institution which, paradoxically, owes its existence and much of its success to Russia. Although most of the world hailed the 4 October 1957 launch of humanity's first artificial satellite, Sputnik, as a remarkable feat of engineering, science and vision, the event was seen differently by Cold War America. Launius devotes a chapter to what large sections of the US population viewed as 'the Sputnik crisis' - the presumed national security and world leadership downside of the Russian space spectacular. Organisational reaction was swift, with President Eisenhower's administration creating a National Aeronautics and Space Council and an executing arm, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, within a year with much behind the scenes help from Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, whose immense influence on American space efforts is revealed in Launius' book. N A S A was fleshed from the skeleton of an existing research and engineering body - the
SPACE POLICY August 1996
National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics - helping to give NASA a culture of achievement and hardheadedness. Interestingly, in reaction to the perceived Russian space challenge for world leadership, the US effectively adopted the same organisational instrument - the massive, topdown, centralised space program dedicated to a national political agenda which emphasised international visibility, and for which cost was no obj ect. NASA initially set about its business in a measured fashion, taking over facilities and space projects from universities, the Navy and the Army, concentrating on the Explorer unmann e d scientific satellite p r o g r a m . However, these conservative plans were upset on 12 April 1961 when the Soviet Union's Yuri Gagarin became the first human being in space, and Russia once again rewrote the American space agenda. Having asked his space, science and budget advisors how America could trump what he represented as a communist challenge to winning the hearts and minds of humanity, on 25 May 1961 President John F. Kennedy made one of the most dramatic political promises of all time - to send an American to the Moon, and return him, before the end of the decade. This extraordinary challenge - for at the time, no one really knew if it could be affordably and safely done - defined the 'Space Race' in popular imagination, and was to become both a blessing and a curse for the fledgling space agency. The presidential-mandated commitment to reach the Moon resulted in t h e e x p e n d i t u r e , a c c o r d i n g to Launius, of US$20 billion, worth about US$150 billion in current day terms. At the height of the one sided race, NASA was responsible for over 5% of the Federal budget and about 1% of Gross Domestic Product; by 1965, over 376,000 Americans worked
on the Apollo program, and Launius notes that during the 1960s, one in every 50 Americans worked for a time on some aspect of the national effort to make the 'Man on the Moon' an American. In the face of concern that the space race would rob other high technology areas of skilled personnel, NASA invested heavily in university programs and t r a i n i n g schemes. The size, dynamism and glamour of the Apollo program drew talented, idealistic and dedicated administrators, engineers and scientists to NASA, which rapidly became a byword for getting things done and for devising new management paradigms - such as the concepts of program management, in which 'headquarter' staff remained firmly at the reigns of large-scale enterprises involving distributed work teams, often comprising the leading exponents of their art. However, when the Apollo challenge was met and growth stopped, what could keep the brightest and the best? And how then would NASA's budget and plans be protected in the face of competing needs for social programs and winning an expensive and demoralising war? I n f i r m foundation L a u n i u s shows how unusual were the historical conditions under which Kennedy announced the decision to go to the Moon, and how infirm this foundation was to prove for a long-term commitment to space exploration. America was confronting the Soviet U n i o n , b u t was not yet overtly embroiled in the southeast Asian wars. Post-war prosperity was widespread, and the racial and political dissension which was to become a feature of the late 1960s had not yet become evident. In this brief and false summer, everything seemed possible. By the decade's end, nothing seemed possible: neither peace in Vietnam, nor racial reconciliation, nor bridging the Generation Gap. It took a resurrection of the menace of 'the Evil E m p i r e ' , under the Presidency of
225
Book reviews Ronald Reagan, to enable NASA to undertake its next great budgetary leap forward, the still unfinished task of building a permanent orbiting space station - the Free World's answer to the Russian station, Mir, first inhabited in 1984. Launius looks frankly at some of NASA's best and worst moments, including the Voyager planetary probes, the aborted promise of Skylab, the deaths of the Apollo astronauts Grissore, White and Chaffee in the 1967 capsule fire, and the explosion of Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986, with the deaths of the crew of five men and two women. At times Launius' retelling is frustratingly brief, although the reprinting of extracts from topical documents at least allows for reading b e t w e e n the lines. O n e of the strengths of the work is the insight into the political and administrative deci-
sion making, revealed by the contemporary sources. I was surprised at the omission from the extensive bibliography of Homer Newell's epic study of early A m e r i c a n space science at NASA, Beyond the Atmosphere, and Launius' brief coverage does not allow for in-depth exploration of themes (for example, there is little on the role of the US space program in promoting international scientific collaboration). However, these are quibbles about an entertainingly-written, honest and well-produced monograph about one of the most daring and achievementoriented bureaucracies of modern times.
Jeff Kingwell CSIRO Office of Space Science and Applications Canberra, ACT 2601 Australia
Hazardous impacts ROGUE ASTEROIDS AND DOOMSDAY COMETS by Duncan Steel John Wiley, Chichester, 1995, 308 pp, £16.99 Duncan Steel is a research astronomer at the Anglo-Australian Observatory and much quoted as an authority on the hazards of asteroid and cometary impact with the Earth. He is a major participant in the southern hemisphere component of the watch for such hazards, and advocates a significant expansion of that search. The growing recognition of that hazard has been a major development in planetary science over the last thirty years. Once the Apollo missions established that the Moon's surface features had been shaped primarily by impact events, and Mariner and Voyager missions showed this applied throughout the Solar System, it was recognised that the dynamic surface of the Earth had concealed most of the evidence of what happened here. But once it was looked for, it was found.
226
Thirty years ago, the only meteorite crater recognised was Barringer's in Arizona. But there are other intact craters in Australia; photography from orbit helped to identify still more, and every year the count goes up. Dr Steel begins with the example of Lake Acraman in South Australia, a 90-km ring formed 600 million years ago and recognised as an impact feature only in 1986. Although the exact mechanism by which the dinosaurs died out is disputed, it's now certain that the iridium-bearing layer found at the Cretaceous-Tertiary b o u n d a r y came from an even bigger impact off the coast of Yucutan, and very recently two buried craters have been found by Space Shuttle radar, in Chad, coinciding with an earlier mass extinction 360 million years ago.l Each time another object is detected which might strike the Earth, there's a wave of discussion about means of detecting and preventing such events, but it quickly dies down again. Comet Swift-Tuttle provided an example in 1982 and again in 1992, but is now thought unlikely to hit us before 3044. The danger is that we could
be struck at any time by some object not previously detected. Dr Steel estimates there are about two thousand objects, of over 1 kilometre diameter, able to cause global disaster if their orbits evolve to cross the Earth's. But already the urgency has increased: a survey using new technology indicates that current estimates of the numbers of threatening bodies in the inner Solar System are a great deal too lowfl Smaller objects, like the 60-metre one which exploded over Siberia in 1908, strike the Earth every 50 years on average, and a 10-metre one did the same over the Western Pacific in February 1994; so I was surprised not to find an update of Dr Steel's own hypothesis, that a similar event over New Zealand caused the extinction of the moa. 3 In his novel Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke imagined an event like this, in Italy, giving rise to a s y s t e m a t i c h a z a r d watch called 'Spaceguard'. The name has been attached to a suggested programme with six dedicated 2-metre telescopes, spread around the world, costing US$300 million over 25 years, to chart all current hazards. At the present rate of detection, Steel estimates, it will be five hundred years before all hazards are known.
Russian Roulette One common argument for inaction is that the chances of a major impact are insignificant, and Steel correctly compares this to playing Russian Roulette - a comparison which could be taken further, since incoming asteroids never have misfires. So many people would die in a major impact that statisically an individual's chance of dying in one is comparable to the risks of domestic electrocution, or dying in a plane crash - and we do insure against those. Working with the statistics, Steel calculates an annual value for the risk of US$2 billion per year, by comparison with which Spaceguard's cost would be like buying car insurance for a dollar. By no stretch of the imagination could this approach to the problem be called 'alarmist': the scariest thing about the book is the Bob Eggleton
SPACE POLICY August 1996