Abstract
After almost two decades of spectacular successes in the US program of solar system exploration, 1981 was a year in which the program’s survival was literally very much in question. Initial Reagan administration budget cuts, the cancellation of a previously approved planetary mission, and the unsuccessful attempt to gain White House support for a US mission to Halley’s Comet eventually threatened the program with almost total termination.1
This chapter is a revision of an account originally prepared for the NASA History Office in 1989, but never before published. I want to thank James Beggs, Hans Mark, Bruce Murray, Louis Freidman, and Sylvia Fries for their comments on the original version of the chapter.
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Notes
For an account of attempts to gain approval for a mission to Comet Halley, see John M. Logsdon, “Missing Halley’s Comet: The Politics of Big Science,” ISIS 90 (June 1989): 254–80. Many of the conflicts described in this chapter were first manifested in the attempts to gain support for the Halley mission.
See, as an example of later program turbulence, Scott Hubbard, Exploring Mars: Chronicles from a Decade of Discovery (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2012).
Fred Whipple, “Discovering the Nature of Comets,” Mercury, January– February 1986, p. 5.
For accounts of early planning for lunar and planetary missions, see Edward Clinton Ezell and Linda Neumann Ezell, On Mars: Exploration of the Red Planet 1958–1978 (Washington, DC: NASA SP-4212, 1984).
Joseph N. Tatarewicz, “ ‘A Strange Plea’—The Campaign for Planetary Astronomy in Support of Solar System Exploration, 1959–1962,” in National Air and Space Museum, Research Report. 1985, p. 92.
For a discussion of the history of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) through the mid-1970s, see Clayton Koppes, JPL and the American Space Program (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). For JPL history from the time that Bruce Murray became its director in 1976, see Peter J. Westwick, Into the Black: JPL and the American Space Program, 1976–2004 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
Richard Kerr, “Planetary Science on the Brink Again,” Science, December 14, 1979, pp. 1288–89.
The COMPLEX strategy was spelled out in three separate reports: Committee on Planetary and Lunar Exploration, Space Science Board, Strategy for the Exploration on the Inner Planets. 1977–1987 (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1978); Strategy for Exploration of the Outer Planets, 1978–1988 (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1979); and Strategy for the Exploration of Primitive Solar System Bodies——Asteroids. Comets. and Meteorites, 1980–1990 (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1980).
For a personal account of the planetary program’s rise and fall, see Bruce Murray, Journey into Space: The First -Three Decades of Space Exploration (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989).
See Joan Johnson-Freese, “Canceling the U.S. Solar-Polar Spacecraft,” Space Policy, February 1987, for a discussion of this decision.
For Mark’s own account of his career, see Hans Mark, Space Station: A Personal Journey (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987).
Hans Mark, “New Enterprises in Space,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences XXVIII, no. 4 (January 1975), 19. In an April 2012 communication to the author, Mark noted that he had been correct in his judgment of scientific significance, pointing out that two Nobel Prizes had been awarded based on findings from NASA astrophysics missions.
Philip J. Hilts, “Science Board to Advise President Proposal,” Washington Post, December 9, 1981.
Alton K. Marsh, “Adviser Urges Shuttle Emphasis,” Aviation Week and Space Technology, December 14, 1981, pp. 16–17.
M. Mitchell Waldrop, “Planetary Science in extremis,” Science, December 18, 1981, p. 1322. Interview with George Keyworth.
Solar System Exploration Committee, NASA Advisory Council, Planetary Exploration through Year 2000: A Core Program (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1983), p. 65.
M. Mitchell Waldrop, “To the Planets, Cheaply,” Science, September 18, 1981, p. 1350.
John Noble Wilford, “Plans to Explore Planets Revived,” New York Times, February 20, 1983, p. A33.
For a discussion of this approach, see Howard McCurdy, Faster, Better, Cheaper: Low Cost Innovation in the U.S. Space Program (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).
NASA Advisory Council, Planetary Exploration through the Year 2000, pp. 15–16.
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© 2013 Roger D. Launius
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Logsdon, J.M. (2013). The Survival Crisis of the US Solar System Exploration Program in the 1980s. In: Launius, R.D. (eds) Exploring the Solar System. Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137273178_3
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