EXPERTS say 1990 will probably be considered a turning point in the history of the Federal Government's support of big science, with decades of enthusiasm giving way to wariness as costs soared, budgets tightened and major endeavors turned out to have serious flaws.
At the heart of the shift was the 12-ton, 43-foot-long, $1.5 billion Hubble Space Telescope, which, after 45 years as a dream and 13 years of planning, promised a new era in astronomy from its post hundreds of miles from Earth. Instead, it produced fuzzy images from a flawed mirror.
"There's a sense of disenchantment with the promise of big science," said Representative George E. Brown Jr., a California Democrat who has served on the House Science Committee for a quarter-century and is now its chairman.
Several Federal programs meant to build large instruments for advancing the frontiers of science had their budgets substantially cut in the 1991 budget. And the biggest project of them all, the proposed 500-foot-long, $37 billion space station, was ordered by Congress to undergo a complete redesign to cut costs and complexity.
Experts predict larger cuts in the future because of the tightening Federal budget squeeze and the agreement hammered out by White House and Congressional budget negotiators in October for no real growth in discretionary domestic spending over the next three years.Continue reading the main story
"It's a looming disaster" for the big projects, said Dr. Robert L. Park, a physicist at the University of Maryland who directs the Washington office of the American Physical Society, the nation's pre-eminent professional association of physicists.
Before the budget turmoil, large new projects planned for completion in the 1990's numbered nearly two dozen. They were to cost more than $60 billion to build and more than $100 billion to operate over their lifetimes, placing a heavy mortgage on the nation's research spending well into the future.
Representative Brown said a consensus was forming in Congress to scale big projects down or, for ones too far along to change, to stretch out their construction timetables.
He also noted that after several lean years, Government support was growing for small science, in which researchers work alone or in small groups rather than in vast teams. The budgets for the Government's two leading agencies that pay for small-scale science, the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, both rose in the 1991 fiscal year, the foundation by 11 percent and the institutes by 9 percent.
Experts have recently warned that big science projects were becoming so numerous and expensive that, in a time of budget austerity, they were starting to impinge upon small endeavors.
By definition, small science is relatively cheap. Its fruits -- antibiotics, transistors, lasers -- tend to have everyday applications. Big science uses huge instruments like giant telescopes, atom smashers and planetary probes to explore some of science's most fundamental questions or to open new realms of inquiry. Its scale is big because in some fields the easy things have already been done, and futher progress demands larger, more powerful scientific tools.
The most dramatic upset this year among the big science projects involved the space station Freedom, an orbiting outpost from which up to eight astronauts would fashion new materials, study the physics of fluids, grow crystals, perform medical experiments and scan the stars. Design work started in 1984, with completion set for the mid- to late 1990's, after about 30 shuttle flights. In designing Freedom, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration rejected the idea of putting up small self-contained units that could be linked and could achieve limited operation step by step. Instead it planned a single large unit that would function only when fully assembled.
But early this year, space agency investigators found that the giant structure was so delicate that it would need thousands of hours of external repairs and maintenance every year -- an unacceptably high number, the investigators said, since the maintenance would require space-suited astronauts to walk outside the craft, a risky operation.
The original maintenance goal had been 130 hours of space walks a year; in July, the NASA investigators estimated that 6,200 hours of maintenance would be needed even before the station was permanently manned, raising the knotty question of who would do the work. A Simpler Space Station
This and other setbacks prompted Congress to trim the $2.45 billion budget request for the station by $550 million in October and to demand that it be redesigned so it could be built in self-contained stages rather than as a single entity.
On Dec. 10, a White House panel echoed that message. "We believe the space station Freedom can be simplified and constructed on a more evolutionary, modular basis," said the 12-member panel, whose head is Norman R. Augustine, chairman of the Martin Marietta Corporation.
Representative Brown said the recommendations, which NASA has generally endorsed and begun to carry out, would delay the station's completion into the 21st century.
Another big science project fared somewhat better. The Earth Observing System, a $30 billion array of six large satellites that NASA wants to orbit starting in 1997 or 1998, saw Congress trim its 1991 budget request from $235 million to $191 million.
The costliest environmental research project ever, it aims at learning how the global environment works and is altered by human activity. Critics say NASA's bureaucratic ambitions have made the plan overly grandiose, delaying the system's completion and the gathering of vital data.
This criticism was buttressed in August when a panel of the National Research Council, a Washington-based group that advises the Federal Government, found that smaller, simpler satellites could begin monitoring the climate sooner and recommended that they take priority over the Earth Observing System.
Responding to the critics, Dr. Greg Wilson, an official in NASA's earth science program, said the agency had broadened its effort, taking a number of steps to loft small satellites sooner. "We're seriously working options," he said. Cutting the Collider
The largest budget cut for big science, measured as a percentage of the 1991 request, went to the Superconducting Supercollider, a huge particle accelerator planned for the plains of Texas. Its 54-mile race-track-shaped tunnel would be fitted with 10,000 superconducting magnets, each about 100 feet long. By speeding subatomic particles through the magnetic prison and smashing them together, the machine would give scientists a deeper understanding of the fundamental forces and particles that are the building blocks of all matter.
The proposed machine came under criticism this year over its sharply rising costs and over vexing problems in the design of its giant magnets. It started out in 1987 as a $4.4 billion venture, but the estimate rose to $8 billion this year, and one Federal panel said it could cost as much as $11.7 billion.
Amid growing debate over the machine's merit, Congress cut the $318 million budget request for the collider by $75 million, or 24 percent, in October. Russell L. Wilie, a spokesman for the project, said the situation was not as grim as it appeared, since Congress also allowed the use of $25 million in construction funds left over from 1990 and Texas will release $60 million of the $1 billion in promised state money for the project.
Congress put some big science projects on hold this year, including a $190 million observatory to study gravitational waves, and President Bush's proposal to establish Moon bases and explore Mars. Citing "severe budgetary constraints," Congress deleted virtually the entire amount requested for preliminary research on the exploration plan, whose lifetime cost is estimated at up to $500 billion. A Cap That Will Pinch
Federal and private experts say budget pressures on big science are about to get even worse, and sharply so, as the three-year cap on domestic discretionary spending limits growth to the rate of inflation. For science and technology, this means that any real increases will have to come at the expense of other parts of the discretionary budget, like education and housing.
"Many of the programs that will be competing with science and technology have very highly organized, vociferous constituencies," Dr. D. Allan Bromley, President Bush's science adviser, recently told a White House audience of scientists. If the nation's science program gets no better political support than in the past, he said, it will face "very real danger."
Some experts foresee a bloodbath. "It's going to be very, very messy," said John E. Pike, head of space policy for the Federation of American Scientists, a private group based in Washington. "A lot of these projects are going to be asking for big bucks, and there's no place for it to come from."
Dr. Park of the American Physical Society said stretching out large projects was not necessarily a good thing. "Total costs go up," he said. "Plus, the problems the device was intended to solve might not be relevant anymore."
Representative Brown said the crisis would probably force the projects to find foreign partners with whom to cooperate and share costs, as some have already done. A Time of Opportunity?
Some experts see the looming changes as a time of opportunity to bring the Federal science effort into better balance by increasing the emphasis on small science projects, especially those that promise to aid industrial competitiveness. They say Federal policy makers generally failed to foresee how the most ambitious array of big science projects in the nation's history would squeeze little science and each other. A new balance is critical, they say, since small science, despite its name, is the largest and most important part of the American scientific enterprise, its health vital to that of the economy.
"This year could be a turning point," said Erich Bloch, who recently stepped down after six years as director of the National Science Foundation. "I think we have to make it a turning point. These things don't happen by themselves."Continue reading the main story