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

最近的经济危机对大型科学项目的公共资金造成了严重破坏，特别是那些依赖长期支持的项目。然而，通常很难确定这种财政不确定性对此类资金旨在支持的技术、社区和科学发现的影响。该项目使用NASA航天器任务团队的案例研究来检查科学家在金融危机时期如何获得、维持和竞争资金，并着眼于这些活动如何影响科学和技术成果。这项研究为公共资金提供了政策含义。在更严格的财政审查和紧缩时期，联邦机构和政策制定者需要以数据为导向，了解长期科技创新的后果，这些后果与资金水平和优先事项设定的权衡有关。这个项目收集了六个航天器任务经历的三个财政不确定时期的档案、访谈和预算数据：20世纪60年代末和70年代初(水手10号和海盗号)，“失落”的80年代(伽利略号和火星观察者)，以及20世纪90年代的“更快、更好、更便宜”的时代(卡西尼和探路者)。这项研究收集了尽可能全面的数据集，说明由于预算危机而在实地发生的具体技术和科学变化，并结合了对项目经理和成本估算员的口述历史访谈以及报告中积累的硬数字。行星科学习惯于预算剧变，并制定了许多战略来减轻财政不确定性的影响。这些任务的财政背景说明了确保资金的社会和相互作用机制，以及财政决策对科学工作的最终影响。因此，与将资助视为外部事务或将科学和政治视为独立领域的技术或科学研究不同，这一案例表明，科学资助是一个通过科学工作编织的持续过程，需要个人和机构之间的许多分层关系。因此，该项目联合了许多社会科学领域，包括科学史和科学社会学、经济社会学、历史社会学和团队科学，以调查财政挑战对科学协作、整合和传播的影响。

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.