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Cautionary Words about NASA’s Future

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From One Who Knows

My friend Alan Stern (formerly the associate administrator for science at NASA until earlier this year) has a very pointed, harsh, and ultimately truthful opinion piece in the New York Times today. In it he says “A cancer is overtaking our space agency: the routine acquiescence to immense cost increases in projects.” He goes on to explain just how and why NASA’s budget processes aren’t working and why HUGE cost overruns on the few programs NASA is planning to do in the future may well be threatening that future. These are important missions, but they are running way over budget, threatening the existence of the agency at a time when it can’t afford to have its budget slashed (but, instead, needs guidance from an honest administration about how best to run its budget to the best science at affordable costs (and no, I’m not suggesting the failed “faster, better, cheaper” approach)).

There are, of course, many factors that affect mission costs, as Alan points out. Some can’t be helped, others can. But, there remains the issue of political will to do the right thing. In that regard, one paragraph of his piece really stood out:

As a scientist in charge of space sensors and entire space missions before I was at NASA, I myself was involved in projects that overran. But that’s no excuse for remaining silent about this growing problem, or failing to champion reform. And when I articulated this problem as the NASA executive in charge of its science program and consistently curtailed cost increases, I found myself eventually admonished and then neutered by still higher ups, precipitating my resignation earlier this year.

It turns out that the politics of the outgoing administration played into many NASA decisions that affect the science and technology advances that NASA routinely delivers. On the one hand, the Bush administration put people in charge who had little knowledge of science, and fostered a poisonouse atmosphere at the top.  Money was sluiced in by pork barrel politics in order to help Congresscritters and Senate folk who have NASA bases in their districts. There are countless other examples of mismanagement and bad decision-making by folks at the top of NASA.

Of course such politics has always infested NASA decision-making at some levels, but it seems that the worst political interference has come in the past eight years, done by anti-science zealots who were determined to gut one of the few government agencies that has (for the most part) routinely done good things for our culture, our economy, and U.S. technology dominance. I have many friends who work for (and with) NASA and they are good, solid folks who want to do the best science they can. The processes that threaten NASA’s overall budget will almost certainly affect them and the work that they do. I want to see that they get what they need to do the best job they can, unaffected by the political horseplay that has inflicted that cancer that Alan refers to.

I am hoping that a new administration and a morally courageous Congress and Senate can see their way clear to stop playing politics with NASA and help the agency grow back to do what it does best. As I’ve said in other places, screwing with NASA is like eating your seed corn. Once you’ve done that, you have nothing left to grow. Alan Stern gets that — the rest of us who support NASA and space exploration should make sure our Congresscritters and Senatorial folk understand it, too.

politics, politics and science

Science and Politics

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Why Whine about Discussing Science and Politics?

Why, when I (or any blogger) writes a science blog and we comment on political issues (like the recent and incendiary Planetarium Overhead Projector Gambit), do commenters show up whining about how we should be talking about science ONLY and forget this political stuff?

I am puzzled. To take a simple action that people do every day to illustrate how everything can be political, you can’t spit in some places without it being political. You do so and you have the anti-spit faction complaining that such things should be made illegal because they affect the march of progress and mess up the sidewalks. You have the pro-spit faction complaining that barring spitting in public would ruin the rural character of the town (or village or hamlet or big city or whatever place they call home).  For all I know, you could have the Holy Spit faction whining about how spitting should only be done between one man and one woman or in church or behind closed doors or after six hours of prayer or in conjunction with a donation to the church or whatever it is that helps them think that they are the spiritual arbiters of spitting.  And so it goes.  Everybody has an opinion about how everybody else should spit. And it’s all political. All that from something as simple as getting rid of saliva.

When it comes to science, it’s a whole lot more complex. And, science gets political because it’s part of our culture and society.  Science is a way of understanding the natural world. To do science, you have to ask questions about cause and effect, the physics of an event, the processes that cause things to happen in the natural world.  If you’re asking questions about physics, nobody gets too excited because, let’s face it, to paraphrase Barbie Dolls, “physics is haaarddd…”  But, let physics (or any other science) intersect some belief system or political viewpoint, and suddenly science is evil or good or out of touch or elitist or useful or anti-this or anti-that or pro-this or pro-that, or whatever else that our increasingly pluralistic societies want to say about it.

So, to those who bring their fine whines to the science blogs when it comes to politics, I say the following:  deal with it. Science and politics often cannot be separated, and in fact, at times should not be. If you don’t like to talk about politics and science together, talking about science alone is going to limit the conversations quite a bit.  So, stop complaining about how “politics” is sullying science and look at how the two co-exist and accept that sometimes you have to talk about both when it comes to issues of science and society.