MY INTRODUCTION TO THE RELATIONSHIP OF SCIENCE & POLITICS

Arthur Kantrowitz
Dartmouth College

The Soviet Union had scored a great propaganda coup with Sputnik on 4 Oct. 1957. Before Sputnik, Pres. Eisenhower had prohibited launching a U.S. satellite using the military rockets we had available since the early 1950s. The Soviets however had not shared his aspiration to avoid the militarization of space. Nevertheless the U.S. was leaning toward responding to Sputnik with a space spectacular which could be persuasively labeled "civilian".

Before sputnik almost all US work in rocketry was done by the Department of Defense or its contractors. Labeling our space program "civilian" consisted of selecting a 40 yr. old aeronautical research agency, NACA, changing its name to NASA and transferring Werner von Braun and the German group who had, during WORLD WAR 2, developed the V2 rocket, from US Army supervision to NASA. .

In the fall of 1960 the Air Force was still competing with NASA to acquire a larger role in the rapidly growing space program. As part of that competition Lt. Gen. Bernard A. Schriever, who had led the successful development of the US Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, created a committee led by a former Asst. Secretary of the Air Force, the late Trevor Gardiner, to aid the Air Force in advising the incoming President on a space program for the U.S. My appointment to the Gardiner committee began a decisive part of my education on the relationship between science and politics which I want to share with you.

Soviet Rockets were larger than US rockets and could launch larger payloads into orbit. The media came to believe that matching the Soviet's bigger boosters was the key to reestablishing US prestige. The Apollo mission, designed for this purpose, required the injection into earth orbit of rocket propellant and equipment weighing about 250,000 lb. The Atlas and Titan rockets which had been developed for the ICBM program could launch only a few thousand pounds. One obvious answer was to build a much bigger booster (e.g. the Saturn V). There was a great slogan trumpeted in the media that "the only thing we lacked was bigger boosters".

An alternative approach which, von Braun had described to the committee, was to assemble payloads in earth orbit. The Atlas and Titan boosters which the Air Force then had coming off production lines in California and Maryland could in this way launch any load. By assembling payloads in earth orbit we could not only go to the moon but we could utilize America's tremendous production capabilities to outmatch any booster the Soviets could build. Further we estimated that earth orbital assembly (EOA) would be 10 times cheaper than the big booster approach. But EOA required that we depend on the successful development of the technologies of rendezvous and assembly in orbit. After much argument and after hearing many presentations the Gardiner committee was still divided on which approach to recommend. I was convinced that EOA was the better strategy. Our unclassified report (Report of the Air Force Space Study Committee 20 March 1961)recommended that both approaches be pursued for the time being.

The next thing I heard was not from the Air Force but from the National Space Council which was headed by the Vice President Lyndon Johnson. The Space Council exercised the Presidents authority over all space matters. I was informed by telephone that our report had been classified TOP SECRET. that only 25 copies would be printed, and that all of them would be stored in Lyndon Johnson's safe. Since our meetings and the information we used had been unclassified, I was flabbergasted. The report was Top Secret until 1996 when it was released by a Freedom of Information Request still bearing the word unclassified on its title page.

I sought out those members of the President's Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) whom I knew. I persuaded many of them that suppression of the EOA option was an important mistake. A panel under Prof. Frank Long of Cornell was tasked with examining the matter. The panel held a meeting at which a NASA representative laid out the bigger booster plan. I then put forward evidence that EOA would be at least ten times cheaper. Long turned to the NASA representative and asked what was wrong with what I had said. His total reply was - "If you decide in favor of EOA it will be very embarrassing to us."

Some weeks later Jerome Wiesner, Pres. Kennedy's Science Advisor asked me to discuss the matter with him. For about two hours we went over the arithmetic and he too was convinced that we were making a big mistake. Several years afterward he told me that during his tenure as Science Advisor nobody had caused him as much trouble as I did. He had taken the matter to Kennedy. The President told him that it was none of his business and that he should stay out of it.

The national policy would be to build the biggest booster, regardless of its cost. We would close down the production lines for Atlas and Titan, and the U.S. would not develop EOA. The Apollo mission was successful and restored US prestige. However it was the most expensive mission the US had undertaken and the culture of disregard for costs would mean that for a long time space operations would be frustratingly expensive.

The expensive new start allowed the center of space activity to be set in Texas and the deep south, Lyndon Johnson's constituency. The inconvenience of the existing production lines in California and Maryland had been disposed of. However the key measure of technical progress - the cost of launching a pound into low earth orbit has not fallen as would be expected in a healthy young industry. It now costs at least twice as much in inflation adjusted dollars, about $10.000 a pound, as it did in 1960.The suppression of scientific information for political purposes has delayed the start of what one day will be an important part of the world economy. As far as I know this consideration of Earth Orbital Assembly is not mentioned in official historical accounts of NASA's early years. It will be developed now for assembly of the Space Station.

(Three years later secrecy was again abused to manipulate facts to suit Johnson's political purposes and to secure the passage of the notorious Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Secrecy cleared the way for our disastrous Vietnam war.)

The way the decision had been made was unacceptable to me.

My generation grew up with unbounded faith in progress.

The expansion of humanity's horizons by natural science was one great source of the that faith.

A second great source was the dramatic extension of life expectancy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries achieved by , science applied in technology and medicine.

A third great source was the beginning of the liberation of mankind from slavery and from its successor - economically forced routine labor.

An important source of support for secrecy in technology is the ancient confusion between magic and science. In many communications addressed to laymen the terms are used almost interchangeably. Magic depends on secrecy to maintain its illusions while the advance of science depends on openness for the encouragement of initiatives and for the elimination of its errors. A major part of the "educated" public and the media have not adequately understood this profound difference between magic and science. This important failure of our educational system is one source of the lack of general appreciation of openness as a source of strength.

Reliable transmission to the public of information needed for the democratic control of technology is essential to the faith in progress. I had witnessed the suppression of scientific information by powerful people for political purposes. This abuse of authority, if sufficiently widespread, would destroy that faith. Since that experience, I have devoted a considerable fraction of my time to means for improving the ability of science, now dependent on journalists, politicians and financiers, to communicate what it knows, and especially what it does not know, to the public.

This collection of essays and talks records what I have learned.