A Mission Close to Home

By Jerome Cramer/Washington

America's space program has spent billions of dollars and years of effort to produce detailed studies of the clouds of Venus and the craters of Mars. But in the future, NASA's researchers will need to pay closer attention to their home planet. As the earth's air, land and seas become ever more threatened by human overpopulation and industrial pollution, measuring the extent of the damage has become one of the most urgent missions of science.

This week the space shuttle Discovery is scheduled to deploy the first satellite in the Mission to Planet Earth, an ambitious, long-range program to monitor the planet's pulse. This particular satellite carries four instruments to gather information about the atmosphere's vital ozone layer. The most important goal is to measure how badly this fragile band, which protects the earth from the harmful ultraviolet rays in sunlight, is being depleted by the industrial chemicals known as CFCs.

Much more is on the drawing boards. During the next 15 years, NASA hopes to ( spend $30 billion to $40 billion to launch satellites containing dozens of instruments for the Earth Observing System (EOS), the centerpiece of Mission to Planet Earth. They will study the impact of such forces as global warming, deforestation and desertification. NASA will also use satellites from other nations and ground monitors to develop a baseline of information against which global change can be measured.

Despite its importance, the mission has not escaped criticism. When it was unveiled, detractors complained that, like the controversial space station Freedom, it could turn into a huge, unmanageable boondoggle. "NASA is obsessed with giantism," contends Robert Park, director of the Washington office of the American Physical Society. "They want to accomplish good, solid environmental science," he says, but have proposed to do it with complex, untested hardware. The mammoth price tag is also a concern. Richard Darman, head of the Office of Management and Budget, reportedly quipped, "I didn't know we needed a $30 billion thermometer."

NASA's plan called not only for a series of small satellites but also for two large space platforms that would wind up holding the majority of the earth-sensing equipment. These could not be launched before the end of the decade. Scientists objected that locking many of the instruments aboard just two craft would make the program inflexible. If new discoveries were made during the mission, how could the platforms be redesigned to accommodate unplanned research? Moreover, a Hubble-like glitch or catastrophic accident could wipe out a major portion of the project. Says Tom Donahue, a University of Michigan professor of planetary science: "NASA didn't seem to realize that it was putting too many eggs into one basket."

Another question is how to gather, store, translate and distribute the raw data developed during the project. NASA critics contend that the agency now has reams of information from space missions that no one ever examines, and the Earth Observing System could require major new storage facilities consuming about 60% of the mission's budget. "Creating a library is a huge task in itself," says Congressman Bob Traxler of Michigan, in whose district part of the library is to be built.

In response to the criticisms, Congress and the White House have put pressure on NASA to improve its proposal, perhaps by launching six smaller space platforms instead of two large ones. Admits agency spokesman Gregory Wilson: "There is a lot of heat on NASA to accomplish EOS more quickly using smaller missions." NASA has set up an "engineering review panel" to study suggestions for the mission. It will release its report within the next few weeks, and NASA is expected to go along with any proposed changes. Says Edward Frieman, chairman of the panel: "We found ways to do it faster and make it more flexible, but not cheaper."

Cheaper ways might be found if the project's budget were not partly the product of pork-barrel politics. For example, Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland will track and coordinate a large portion of the project. Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski is chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee handling NASA funding. Major contracts have been spread out among aerospace firms in the politically important states of California, Pennsylvania and New York. NASA has learned a lesson from the Pentagon: a program will fly politically if it involves a popular cause, promises to spread lots of money through key congressional districts and guarantees contracts to companies with strong lobbying clout in Washington.

In this case, NASA appears to have picked a winner. The agency needs to refine its plans, but Congress will eventually come up with $30 billion or more, if that's what it takes. "It's a small price to pay to help save the planet," says John Logsdon, a space-policy expert at George Washington University. After the disasters with the shuttle program, the Hubble telescope and the Galileo probe to Jupiter, the Mission to Planet Earth gives NASA a chance to take a flight back to respectability.