If you ever wondered why NASA should have employed Hansen, who was such an eco-activist that I understand he was arrested six times, this incredibly revealing document, from NASA’s “Societal Impact of Spaceflight” (2007) explains why. In part NASA used the environment to justify massive funding for itself, in part as NASA itself says:
NASA realized that it needed to research environmental-atmospheric impacts of the shuttle to defend itself, if necessary, against possible opposition more positively, Fletcher sought to align his agency with environmental values. In 1973, he told congress that NASA should be considered “an environmental agency.” he declared: “everything we do …helps in some practical way to improve the environment of our planet and helps us understand the forces that affect it. Perhaps that is our essential task, to study and understand the earth and its environment.”
That’s right! It was no accident that NASA brought in eco-activists. Indeed, it appears to have been part of a deliberate policy to align itself with the environmental movement and to use environmentalism to create alarm thereby justifying its own budgets to the politicians and public.
That is why NASA climte could fabricate the data apparently with impunity – the policy of egging the data to fit an environmentalist agenda was sanctioned at the highest level within NASA
NASA and the Environment: Science in a Political context
W. Henry Lambright
The advent of the space age has paralleled the rise of the environmental movement. NASA was born in 1958 and Rachael Carson wrote silent spring in 1962; that book is generally seen as marking the onset of modern environmentalism. NASA has intersected with the environmental movement—a set of values and interest groups concerned about the need to protect our natural setting for the current and future generations—in many ways over the years. How did NASA do so? How did it evolve an environmental mission? What did it do with that mission? What were the consequences for society—and NASA—of its environmental role? To answer these questions, this paper will discuss two of the most important ways NASA and the environmental movement related.
First, NASA has had direct impacts through the images of earth taken by Apollo astronauts as well as by satellites in earth orbit. Those satellite images and theories about earth as a system evolved into an organized NASA program, initially called mission to planet earth (MTPE), later the earth sciences program. Second, there was an indirect relation through NASA’s mission from earth. comparative planetology came into existence as a new field; learning about other planets stimulated better understanding of earth.
There are many other issues in the NASA–environment relation, such as space debris and the contamination of other planets, but these two themes—earth monitoring and comparative planetology—are especially salient in NASA’s history, present, and likely future. The first theme focused on the use of space-based remote sensing and became the dominant emphasis in NASA’s environmental history.
There evolved a set of satellites that can be seen as environmental satellites. They are the centerpiece of NASA’s mission to earth. That mission has had an uncertain, somewhat uneasy relationship with other parts of NASA and other agencies. Some people think it is NASA’s most societally relevant mission whereas others think it is extraneous to NASA and belongs somewhere else—the national oceanic and atmospheric administration (NOAA) is the usual candidate. Virtually every observer has found it a controversial mission, one in need of high-level policy attention and improvement for the sake of NASA, the nation, and the world.
The second theme, comparative planetology, has indirectly influenced the main debate—a reminder of the fact that earth is an island home in the vast sea of space and is the only planet (so far) supporting life. NASA’s long association with the environmental and earth sciences has been fruitful but it has also been contested and even tortuous. The history of NASA and its environmental mission is one of science in a political context.
Beginnings in the Apollo Years
In the 1960s,as NASA concentrated on the moon project and environmentalism emerged as a conscious political and philosophical movement, NASA began to monitor aspects of the environment in the name of an “applications” program, part of NASA’s office of space science and applications (OSSA). its chief activity was initially weather satellites. Early on, NASA negotiated a relationship with the predecessor of NOAA, the weather bureau, such that NASA developed weather satellite technology and then transferred it to the weather forecasting agency for operational use. The weather satellite program was clearly one of the great successes of the 1960s. It was obvious to all that weather satellites improved forecasts and aided early warnings of approaching hurricanes. There was a technology push from NASA and a pull from a user agency.
Comparative planetology also began in the 1960s, with the mariner spacecraft flybys of Venus and mars. Venus revealed a runaway greenhouse effect that heated it into an inferno, providing an early example to some scientists of what could happen here. Mars also seemed inhospitable to life. But the most important impacts on the environmental movement of the early space program were pictures of earth taken by Apollo astronauts, beginning with Apollo 8 in 1968—the Christmas eve flight around the moon. For the first time, humanity saw a blue earth in the desolate blackness of space. As the environmental movement emerged, it used these images of our planet as a symbol for the first earth day in 1970. Without A doubt, the space program helped catalyze the environmental movement, especially insofar as getting it to think about the global environment.
NASA in the 1970
The 1970s are often called an environmental decade. One reason is that environmental protection agency (EPA) was born in 1970 and congress enacted a sequence of laws to deal with water, air, and other forms of pollution. Another Reason was the energy crisis of the decade, and writings on “limits to growth.” the carter administration, in particular, integrated environment and energy conservation and conveyed the notion that “small is beautiful.”this notion was applied to technology, which environmentalists argued had to be “appropriate” to the user.
The space program in the 1970s mirrored the decade’s political setting. NASA devolved from Apollo, whose moon flights ended in 1972, to the space shuttle. NASA diminished in size and exploratory capacity. The NASA administrator, James Fletcher, who served from 1972 to 1977 (the first of two terms at NASA’s helm) was personally interested in environmental stewardship, a characteristic Launius has linked in part to his Mormon roots. however, the situation he faced was problematic. the environmental movement of the early 1970s had a distinctly anti-technological flavor. It contributed to the termination of the supersonic transport (SST) in 1971. there were concerns in NASA that environmentalists might attack the space shuttle as they had attacked SST, on environmental factors. NASA realized that it needed to research environmental-atmospheric impacts of the shuttle to defend itself, if necessary, against possible opposition more positively, Fletcher sought to align his agency with environmental values. In 1973, he told congress that NASA should be considered“an environmental agency.” He declared: “everything we do …helps in some practical way to improve the environment of our planet and helps us understand the forces that affect it. Perhaps that is our essential task, to study and understand the earth and its environment.”
Fletcher promoted a new earth-oriented satellite, called landsat, launched in 1972, that was capable of helping to forecast world food harvests and other resource issues. Conscious of environmentalist concern about pollution of the stratosphere from high-flying planes that could extend to the shuttle, he sought legislation to undergird NASA’s emergent environmental (and shuttle) interests. In 1975 congress authorized NASA “to conduct a comprehensive program of research, technology, and monitoring of the phenomena of the upper atmosphere.” In 1977, congress required NASA to issue biennial reports to congress on the status of ozone depletion, an issue beginning to worry some scientists and environmentalists. This legislation (1975 and 1977) was important; it gave NASA legitimacy not only to do environmental research but also to link it with policy. It was not a “given” that NASA would have this mission rather than another agency. It reflected NASA’s administrative entrepreneurship and congressional support relative to that of potential rivals.
The 1970s also featured the growth of comparative planetology, as a field, energized by the 1976 Viking mission to Mars and James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis. Lovelock, who published his ideas in 1974, held that earth was a living system in which physical and biological components worked together to enable life. As it developed, the Gaia hypothesis drew on studies of other planets, including Viking’s apparent failure to find life on Mars it made a number of scientists and environmentalists better appreciate earth as a precious and vulnerable home and the role of human beings in altering it. There even were those such as Gerard O’Neill, a Princeton physicist, who speculated that man might need to migrate beyond earth and establish colonies in space—a new, better place, a utopia where a more ecofriendly existence could be practiced.
The Rise of NASA’s Environmental Role in the 1980s
The 1970s produced a set of ideas about earth as an interacting system. Also, some scientists felt that techniques used to study Mars could be applied on earth. The decade also gave rise to NASA’s thinking more strategically about crafting an environmental mission and how better to use the legislation it had obtained for its atmospheric research. In the 1980s, NASA charted a larger and broader earth observation program that built on its work in weather, land satellite monitoring,
And initial attempts at ocean surveys. What NASA contributed, through its satellites and comparative planetology studies, was a perspective different in scale from other agencies—literally a global view. There were certain environmental issues that were indeed global in scale and NASA, in the view of some of its officials and external supporters, was particularly suited to address these.
In 1982, NASA administrator James Beggs, responding to overtures from OSSA, went to the united nations conference on the peaceful uses of outer space, where he called for “an international cooperative project to use space technology to address natural and man-made changes affecting habitability of earth.” The reaction to his “global habitability” overture was overwhelmingly negative—not to the idea of global habitability but to NASA as leader.“it came across like NASA was trying to take over the world,” Burton Edelson, associate administrator of OSSA, recalled. there had been no spadework ahead of time to build a coalition of support for the proposed endeavor. Beggs told edelson to build that support base with other agencies, the White house, the scientific community, and the public before surfacing the proposal again.
This he began to do, starting in 1983 with a broad-gauged earth system science committee. Edelson worked outside and inside NASA—outside with the scientific community, the national science foundation (NSF), and the national oceanic and atmospheric administration (NOAA) in particular, and inside by establishing an earth sciences and applications division within OSSA to augment the earth science personnel and presence within NASA in 1985, Edelson wrote an editorial in science magazine. Dropping the “global habitability” name, he proclaimed the need for a new “mission to planet earth.” While this planning and support-building was underway, events provided NASA an opportunity to demonstrate how it could lead in a new global environmental mission.
The issue was ozone depletion. It had risen and declined as an issue in the 1970s but in the mid-1980s had returned with a vengeance. in 1985, British scientists using ground-based studies discovered extraordinary and shocking ozone depletion over Antarctica NASA quickly followed-up with satellite observations confirming what became known as the “ozone hole.”
The media, using NASA satellite images, conveyed an eerie and graphic display of a gigantic hole that seemed to grow like an organism over antarctica. The images alarmed the public, as they were accompanied with reports of how skin cancer could be caused by ozone depletion if the hole spread to more populated places. Scientists, media, environmentalists and politicians sounded the alarm. industry defended itself against over-hasty regulations, but was on the defensive.
NASA seized the initiative. It had the legislation from the 1970s that gave it legitimacy to take a “lead agency” role on the science side of this issue. it organized a scientific expedition to Antarctica enlisting NOAA, NSF, academic scientists from the united states and abroad, and even industry researchers, NASA and its allies sought to determine the cause of the hole. Robert Watson, an energetic OSSA manager, was the prime mover in the Antarctic expedition. he struck a close alliance with a key scientist-administrator of NOAA, dan Albritton, and practiced what Albritton called “ecumenical” leadership. One Antarctic expedition was soon followed by another, more extensive one. It became increasingly clear to the scientists that the prime suspects behind the hole were common chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, found in a host of everyday products. This growing consensus extended to industry scientists involved in the expedition and was endorsed by an independent group of scientists Watson set up to review the expeditions’ findings.
Watson and Albritton played dual roles—scientist-administrators of two agencies collaborating in an ad hoc program to determine causality in ozone depletion, and science advisors to the state department and the EPA. These “policy agencies” were users,in real time,of information from the science agencies. There was again a push and pull on the part of providers and users. The technical information—what was known and what was not known—was conveyed to diplomats in the field. The diplomats were meeting under international political pressure to act, and did so in 1987, producing the pathbreaking Montreal protocol, an agreement which set deadlines for replacing CFCs with less harmful chemicals. The Montreal protocol was remarkable in calling for amendments as science produced more precise knowledge. ozone depletion in many ways became the model for subsequent international environmental policy.
It was also seen as a potential model for NASA NASA leaders contemplated ozone depletion as the first step in the broader global environmental initiative it had sought since 1982. The ozone experience, highly positive for NASA in a public relations sense, took place in a period when the agency otherwise suffered severe criticism for the Challenger Space shuttle disaster. That disaster,in 1986,had brought James Fletcher back to the agency. While presiding over NASA’s return to flight, he also looked ahead to new missions. He asked sally ride, America’s first woman in space, to study possible initiatives beyond the space station, NASA’s existing flagship project, that would give long-term direction to the agency. Her 1987 report listed four options, without giving any priority. The first she listed, however, was a mission to planet earth. calling the mission of “fundamental importance to humanity’s future,” ride said NASA was “uniquely suited to lead the effort.” In the wake of the ozone experience, NASA was now in a far better position to make the case politically for a new mission than it had been in 1982
Achieving Policy Adoption
Advocates of the new mission, largely in OSSA, began pushing harder for policy adoption of a new program. drawing on the work of the earth system science committee, which completed its studies in 1986, NASA set as the new program’s centerpiece an earth observation system (EOS). EOS would feature two 13-ton, bus-sized platforms launched by the space shuttle and linked with the space station freedom. They would have multiple sensors, enough to permit comprehensive and simultaneous views of land, atmosphere, and sea interactions. The estimated cost of a system that delivered 15 years of observations was $30 billion. The full system would be launched by 2001. A series of specialized “precursory” missions in the 1990s would lead up to the main event, an operational two-platform EOS replete with an unprecedented data-handling and disbursing system. The EOS vision included potential additional systems contributed by other nations.
A program this big could only be justified if applied to a very big problem. the problem that had emerged over the 1980s in parallel with EOS planning was called “global change.” Global change included, but was not limited to, climate change. climate change was a politically neutral way of referring to global warming. Global warming was controversial among scientists and even more so among politicians. Climate change was a much more complicated problem than ozone, both scientifically and politically. Climate change had even been connected with scientific opposition to the Reagan administration’s nuclear weapons policy. Scientists, led by space scientist Carl Sagan, warned against a “nuclear winter” if atomic weapons were ever used. Whether Hot or cold, earth’s climate was complex and many scientists felt it premature to forecast a dire future, for whatever reason, given existing understanding. moreover, there was not an ozone hole to focus scientific work and trigger policy action. Instead, there was a slow accumulation of contentious scientific information. Although NASA’s lead role in investigating ozone depletion might be seen by the agency to be a model for a mission to planet earth, the transfer of the model to climate and global change would not be straightforward. NASA had no special legislation that gave it legitimacy to assert its claims, but at least one man within NASA was asserting his own views.
In 1988, James Hansen, director of NASA’s institute for space studies, proclaimed before congress that global warming was almost certainly a reality now. He declared to reporters afterward that it was time to “stop waffling and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.” His view was not popular with the Reagan white house. the Reagan administration established an interagency committee, whose dominant members were NASA, NOAA, and NSF, to get at the facts. From this committee, initially called committee on earth sciences (CES), came the proposal for a U.S. Global change research program (USGCRP). When George H. W. Bush became president in 1989, CES had a report waiting for him and his science advisor, Alan Bromley Bush said he wished to be “the environmental president” and, on the advice of Bromley, made global change his first “presidential priority” in science and technology. Such a designation slated global change for policy adoption and budget support. The USGCRP combined space and ground-based observations. the largest single item in the interagency effort would be EOS, but NASA was not a “lead” agency. Leadership was vested in the USGCRP interagency committee, whose name was broadened, along with its membership, to committee on earth and environmental sciences (CEES. in 1990, bush officially adopted mission to planet earth as a NASA priority. congress provided endorsements and an initial appropriation to start eos. The advocates of a greater NASA role in global environmental monitoring thereby achieved a victory after almost a decade of planning and strategizing. NASA was poised to use space technology in a grand effort to develop an “earth system science.” Such a science would pave the way for a “predictive capability” in global change that would guide policy makers, and thereby protect planet earth.
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