I am not normally a very political animal and have never asked this group to take action on anything, but proposed congressional budget cuts threaten to seriously damage the future of space exploration. I urge you to write your Senators and Representatives immediately as they could begin discussion on this on the house floor as early as tomorrow. Here is a statement released by JPL today, followed by a copy of my letter to my Senator Feinstein. Feel free to use any of this material for your own letter.
Michael Shermer
The NASA budget submitted to the full House may result in an estimated loss of 10% to 40% of the space science community within the next few months, primarily the younger members of our profession.
This would result in a devastating and permanent loss to our nation's space exploration infrastructure.
This loss arises primarily from directed cuts to the Space Science budget in addition to the potential reduction or cancellation of research and analysis programs to satisfy Congressional earmarks (pork).
In addition the CONTOUR mission to three comets has been cancelled and budget cuts will require the cancellation of the two recently selected Discovery programs - Deep Impact to a comet and Messenger to Mercury - as well as future Explorer missions.
Planned missions to Pluto, Jupiter's moon Europa, and the Sun are also in danger of cancellation.
The loss of so many current and future missions will result in the necessary reduction of mission-related personnel, with the consequence of degrading our nation's ability to mount such missions in the future.
Congress is interpreting the present lack of protest as evidence that the current cuts are now acceptable to the space science community. The DPS Committee calls on our membership and all other Americans to call on their Representatives and Senators to restore the NASA budget. There is no time to lose! The House of Representatives will be voting on this matter sometime after September 8.
You can identify your Representative and Senators at
http://www.vote-smart.org/
Contact information is also available at
http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/
Further information and points to be made to your Representative and Senators may be found at
http://www.treefort.org/~sykes/DPS/budget00.html
http://www.aas.org/policy/NASABUDGET.html
September 7, 1999
Dear Senator Feinstein:
I am the publisher of a science magazine called Skeptic, the host of a public lecture series at the California institute of Technology, and the host of the NPR weekly radio show called "Science Talk" on Wednesdays from 6-7pm, in Los Angeles. My guest last week was Dr. Edward Stone, the Director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, run by NASA and Caltech. The topic of our discussion was the threatened budget cuts of between 10% to 40%, resulting in a devastating loss of some of the most important scientific and space exploration projects of the last 50 years. This loss arises primarily from directed cuts to the Space Science budget in addition to the potential reduction or cancellation of research and analysis programs to satisfy Congressional earmarks (pork). Consider what else is on the chopping block:
The CONTOUR mission to three comets has been canceled and budget cuts will require the cancellation of the two recently selected Discovery programs - Deep Impact to a comet and Messenger to Mercury - as well as future Explorer missions. Planned missions to Pluto, Jupiter's moon Europa, and the Sun are also in danger of cancellation.
The loss of so many current and future missions will result in the necessary reduction of mission-related personnel, with the consequence of degrading our nation's ability to mount such missions in the future.
Congress is interpreting the present lack of protest as evidence that the current cuts are now acceptable to the space science community. As one of your constituents I urge you to vote against these cuts. In addition to the loss of thousands of jobs in our community, there is a deeper reason why these cuts are so potentially harmful to the entire nation, indeed, for all people.
Humans are an exploratory species. For the last millennium we have explored every nook and cranny of the planet. For the past half century we have explored the moon directly and all the other planets and their moons of our solar system indirectly with robotic spacecraft designed and built by our own JPL. It is true that in the early days of space exploration the spacecraft were expensive and projects were relatively inefficient. But like all industries, JPL has learned from experience and now, just when they have figured out how to explore cheaply and efficiently, they are being told that their services are no longer wanted.
Something similar happened in the last half millennium. Just before Europeans began their exploration of the rest of the planet, the Chinese were by far and away the greatest seafaring nation in history. But government officials decided that it was a waste of money to explore any further, so they cut their budgets, dismantled the fleet, and terminated their projects of research and exploration. The result was an economic and cultural disaster for their nation. But nature abhors a vacuum, so the Europeans went where the Chinese refused to go. The rest is history.
America has been the leader of space science and exploration for 50 years. If these budget cuts are passed, our fleet will be dismantled, our projects of research and exploration terminated, with the ensuing result of an economic and cultural disaster. I am not exaggerating. This is very serious. On the eve of a new millennium--a millennium in which humans should colonize the solar system and begin interstellar space travel--do we want to go down in history as the nation who gave up exploring and turned inward, only to allow someone else to fill the void? More to the point, do you want this Congress to go down in history as the least visionary Congress of the 20th century? When Congress gave Kennedy its support to "go to the moon and back before the decade is out," we did it. Please restore Kennedy's vision with a vote against these proposed budget cuts.
Michael Shermer, Ph.D.
Publisher, Skeptic magazine
Host, "Science Talk" on NPR's KPCC