Space: Abandoning the Planets to Russia

Squeezed by rising costs of the Viet Nam war, still troubled by the fatal Apollo fire and influenced by polls reporting slipping public interest in space flight, congressional economizers have been slicing away at NASA’s space budget. Their efforts have been so successful that the U.S., while still committed to landing men on the moon by 1970, has virtually scrapped its once ambitious planetary exploration program. Alarmed by the trend, an eminent U.S. space scientist has forcefully spoken out, warning that the U.S. is in effect abandoning the planets to Russia. In a signed editorial in Science, University of Iowa Physicist James Van Allen contrasted the “ambitious and increasingly competent” Soviet planetary program to U.S. plans, which now include only two more flights to the planets: a pair of photographic flybys of Mars in 1969. Criticizing both Congress and the reluctance of NASA “to forcefully request adequate funding,” Van Allen also warned that the U.S. “is now allowing its own high competence in planetary exploration to decay.”

Rash of Shots. That competence has been dramatically demonstrated in the past five years. Of the five Mariner shots launched during that period, Van Allen noted, three were notably successful. Mariners 2 and 5 flew past Venus, returning vast quantities of information about the planet’s atmosphere, temperature and thermal and magnetic properties. Mariner 4 successfully transmitted pictures of the Martian surface and continued to operate for more than three years, sending information from distances as great as 200 million miles as it went on into orbit around the sun. Yet all this was accomplished, Van Allen points out, at a cost of less than 2% of the NASA budget.

By contrast, the Soviet Union has scored only one success in 18 or 19 launches of probes to Mars and Venus. But that success was the apparent soft landing of a working, instrumented capsule on the surface of Venus last October, a feat indicating that the quality of Russian planetary probes is beginning to catch up to the quantity. U.S. experts expect a rash of additional Russian planetary shots in 1969 and the early 1970s, including a Martian soft-landing attempt as early as 1969.

Trend to Layoffs. NASA Administrator James Webb has asked Congress to authorize a corresponding series of U.S. shots. He has proposed rescheduling a modified 1971 Mariner shot to Mars, now scrapped because of the lack of funds, and following it with five additional Mariner-type flights to Mars and Venus by 1976. In addition, he has asked for the revival of a relatively modest Voyager program that would place two sophisticated craft in orbit around Mars in 1973 and send two additional orbiters and two soft-landers to the same planet aboard a single Saturn 5 rocket in 1975. Time is already beginning to run out for some of the scientific teams so painstakingly assembled for the U.S. space program. On the day that Saturn 5 made its successful flight (TIME, Nov. 17), 700 NASA employees who had helped build the giant rocket were laid off at the Marshall Space Flight Center. They were victims of budgetary cuts in the Apollo Applications Program, which will use hardware left over from the Apollo flights for a variety of earth-orbital missions.

At Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where the most important U.S. unmanned flights are planned and controlled, 250 staff members have already been laid off. Another 300 staffers will be released by next July. The situation may get worse. Last week it was rumored that President Johnson would request the smallest civilian space budget in six years.

“Surely this trend must be reversed,” says Van Allen, “if we are to regard intellectual leadership as one of the most central of our national objectives.” Congress might do well to heed his words. In 1956, after learning about a successful suborbital flight of the Army’s Jupiter C, Van Allen took the lead in urging that the rocket be used to place an Explorer satellite in orbit. The suggestion was turned down by the Eisenhower Administration, which for political reasons wanted the nonmilitary but still unperfected Vanguard rocket to do the job. More than a year later, after Russia launched the Space Age with Sputnik 1, a Jupiter C was belatedly used to push Explorer 1 into America’s first orbital flight.