Pricing the Priceless Spacecraft: The Social Life of Money in Robotic Planetary Exploration

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The recent economic crisis has created havoc for public funding of big science projects, especially those that rely on long term support. Yet it is often difficult to determine the effects of this fiscal uncertainty on the technologies, communities, and scientific findings that such funding is meant to support. This project uses the case study of NASA spacecraft mission teams to examine how scientists secure, maintain, and compete for funding during moments of financial crisis, with an eye to how these activities affect scientific and technical results. The research offers policy implications for public funding. During times of greater fiscal scrutiny and austerity, federal agencies and policy-makers require data-driven understanding of the consequences for long-term scientific and technical innovation that are associated with trade-offs in funding levels and priority-setting. This project accumulates archival, interview, and budgetary data across three periods of fiscal uncertainty endured by six spacecraft missions: the late 1960s and early 70s (Mariner 10 and Viking), the "lost" 1980s (Galileo and Mars Observer), and the "faster, better, cheaper" era of the 1990s (Cassini and Pathfinder). The research assembles as comprehensive a dataset as possible on the specific technical and scientific changes on the ground due to budgetary crises, combining oral history interviews with project managers and cost estimators with hard numbers accumulated in reports. Planetary science is accustomed to budgetary upheavals and has developed many strategies to mitigate the impact of fiscal uncertainty. The fiscal backdrop for each of these missions illuminates the social and interactional mechanisms for securing funding as well as the ultimate effects of financial decision-making upon scientific work. Thus unlike studies of technology or science that frame funding as an external affair, or that examine science and politics as separate fields, this case demonstrates how science funding is a continual process woven through scientific work, requiring many layered relationships between individuals and institutions. The project therefore unites many social science fields including history and sociology of science, economic sociology, historical sociology and the science of team science, to investigate the impact of fiscal challenges on scientific collaboration, integration and dissemination.