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Beyond the Atmosphere:
Early Years of Space Science
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- CHAPTER 2
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- THE CONTEXT
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- [16] To divorce modern
science, including space science, from other pursuits of society
is impossible. What scientists do obviously and pervasively
affects the rest of society. Reciprocally, the complex activities
of society, its motivations and changing objectives, what it
chooses to develop and use of technology, as well as the specific
support that society-for a variety of reasons-provides to science,
determines in large measure what researches scientists undertake.
A properly rounded history of space science should treat of more
than the technical subject matter of the science itself.
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- As might be supposed, scientists are
usually moved to take up their researches by a curiosity that
impels them to find out how nature works. The scientist is likely
to be driven by his personal fascination with his profession. He
is willing to devote long, physically and mentally taxing hours to
his work and to endure hardships and danger-like the astronomer in
the small hours of the night at the mountain top observatory, or
the atmospheric scientist wintering over through the long
Antarctic darkness, or the undersea explorer-if only he be given
the necessary resources for pursuing his researches.
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- But why should society support an
individual in what so often appears to be a highly personal
endeavor, particularly when the price tag today can run into
millions or hundreds of millions of dollars? Those seeking support
for science have to wrestle with this fundamental question
constantly. The answer for science often can be quite simplistic.
From the knowledge acquired through scientific investigations, it
is argued, come eventually many of the technologies and their
practical applications that people want and will pay for in the
marketplace (like radio, television, home appliances, modern
textiles, better automobiles, and boats) or need and must pay for
(like improved agriculture, health care, modern communications,
and transportation of food, materials, and supplies). That is the
principal reason why society finds it profitable to support a
considerable amount of science.
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- But the simplistic answer gives no hint of
the complexity of the vexing questions that arise when government
and industry are asked to foot the bill, particularly for what is
sometimes called pure science. What applications [17] will result? How
long will it take? How much scientific research will be needed?
What kind of research would be best for an optimum practical
return on the investment? Where should the research be done-in
industry, the universities, government laboratories, or research
institutes? Who should decide what research to do?
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- There is no absolute answer to any of
these questions, and circumstances can make some of them
exceedingly perplexing. The literature on the subject is
overwhelming, and any discussion of such matters demonstrates
quickly that science has many aspects and complex relationships
with other human endeavors. It becomes important, for example, to
distinguish among science, technology, and application.
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- Technology is not science, nor is science
technology, but there are important relationships between them.
Technology is technical know-how, the knowledge and ability to do
things of a technical or engineering nature, including the field
of industrial arts. On the basis of considerable know-how, or
technology, the Babylonians built and operated a remarkable
irrigation system; equally remarkable was the technology of the
ancients in construction. But neither technology derived from
science as we know it. On the other hand a tremendous amount of
technology does flow from the results of scientific research.
Examples are to be found in electronics, synthetic materials,
transportation, and medicine.
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- Technology also supports science.
Electronics provides invaluable service to science in detection
and measurement; the technology of materials is important in
radiation-detection instruments; computer technology is a great
boon to the theorist; and modern engineering is fundamental to the
design and construction of modern astronomical telescopes, huge
particle accelerators, and nuclear reactors. Rocket technology
made space science possible; that technology in its turn rests on
the results of considerable scientific research.
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- Application is the last step in the chain
from technical know-how to actual use. Thus, the use of
meteorological satellites for weather observations is an
application of both scientific knowledge (of the atmosphere) and
technology (of spacecraft construction, instrumentation, and
operation).
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- The intimate relationships among science,
technology, and applications give rise to many questions like
those cited earlier. Some sort of rational response must be made
to such questions when the public is asked to spend billions of
dollars of tax money a year for scientific research and many more
billions of dollars a year on civilian and military technical
development. The need to respond to such queries has been a
continuing requirement throughout the space science program, and
most certainly will continue. These issues should be examined,
therefore, in enough depth to understand how they influenced the
space science program.1
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- Take, for example, the question: What
applications will result? If the question is asked about applied
research that is intentionally directed [18] toward a specific
application already in the minds of the researcher and his
supporters, then that specific application will be the end result
if it turns out to be at all possible and economically sensible.
For, as the researcher pursues his investigations, he will always
be oriented toward the prescribed end. New scientific results that
appear to lead in the direction of the desired application will be
pursued, while avenues that appear to lead in some other direction
will not be followed-though they may hold promise of answering
very fundamental questions about nature, the answers to which
might prove of more practical benefit than those the applied
researcher feels constrained by his assignment to
investigate.
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- Here is the crux of the matter. The
uncommitted scientist will pursue the avenues that appear to offer
the greatest promise of answering the most fundamental questions
about the nature of matter, energy, physical laws, the universe;
the committed orientation of the applied researcher will keep him
always working toward the planned application. To the industrial
manager, the legislator, the government administrator, the latter
goal might seem preferable to get a specific job done-and very
often it is. To invest funds in support of research that holds
greatest promise of a specific desired application is the most
easily justified and patently wise course of action.
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- Yet there is a pitfall. Time and again
invaluable practical benefits have come from uncommitted research
and could not have been foreseen or predicted. Pure science,
almost by definition, precludes a clear prediction of results. It
is the search for new knowledge. If the knowledge were known ahead
of time, it would not be new.
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- The classical example, often cited, is the
discovery of x-rays by Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen in 1895. Within a
year of their discovery, x-rays were being put to practical use in
medicine, and in time became of enormous value in medicine,
industry, and scientific research. Roentgen's discovery resulted
from experimenting with electron beams in evacuated tubes. Had he
been directly seeking something of value for the medical
profession, he would most likely have put away his electron beams
and taken up some more "practical" line of investigation, and the
discovery of x-rays would have been postponed.
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- Examples of practical returns from pure
science can be multiplied almost ad infinitum; for example, James
Clerk Maxwell's work on the theory of electricity and magnetism
and the whole train of subsequent electromagnetic applications;
Heinrich Rudolf Hertz's propagation experiments and radio; John
Dalton's work on combining weights and modern chemistry;
Christiaan Huygen's work on optics and the optical industry; and
the years of purely scientific investigation into the atom and its
nucleus that furnished the basis for the Manhattan Project, which
in turn led to modern nuclear applications.2
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- The uncommitted researcher, while he
cannot point to the future and say that his researches will
produce this or that specific application as a [19] payoff, can look
back and point to use after use that was eventually made of the
results of his kind of nonprogrammatic, nonapplied, uncommitted
research. Many have argued the historical record to justify
support of pure science, including support of enough researchers
free from the constraints of programmatic or applied research to
provide the uncommitted frame of mind that is most likely to
follow up interesting new discoveries wherever they might
lead.3
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- The importance of uncommitted research
goes even deeper. Even the applied researcher relies on the
scientific paradigms that he has inherited from decades and
centuries of research, and these are based on data and results, a
large part of which came from uncommitted research. The truth of
this assertion was borne out by a series of studies supported by
the National Science Foundation and published as Technology in Retrospect and Critical Events in
Science
("Traces").4 Several technologies or technological
applications* were reviewed historically to identify scientific
results that had been "key to the progress of research towards the
innovation" under study. Without going too far afield, some of the
Traces conclusions should be noted. The study found for
each case that about a decade before the application-that is,
about the time one was finally in a position to discern and define
technically the potential application or technology-almost all of
the basic research needed for the potential application had been
done. **
What was most significant,
however, was that all applications depended vitally, critically,
on a long history of basic research, a substantial part of which
was nonmission, uncommitted research; in the cases studied more
than 70 percent of the key scientific results stemmed from such
research. Moreover, the sources of the critical information were
international in scope, and universities, industry, government,
and private activities made significant contributions.
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- This kind of story the defenders of the
space science program had to convey to the administration and the
Congress to obtain funding. There was a narrow path to tread.
Space science was largely pure science, and researchers were by
and large uncommitted to specific practical applications, although
many of them showed a keen interest in applications of their
results to such purposes as meteorology, geodesy, and
earth-resources surveys. To retain a free hand for the
investigator was important, but if the research appeared too
irrelevant to the immediate needs of society or, more
[20]
narrowly, to the interests of the legislator's constituency,
support would be hard to come by. So a substantial effort was made
to point to the potential usefulness of the space science research
that was in need of support, 5 at times to such an extent as to distress members
of the scientific community. The pressure to produce useful
results quickly was always there, and the scientists were mindful
of Vannevar Bush's caution that "applied research always drives
out the pure." 6
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- The hazard was real, for if the importance
of pure science for future practical uses was not communicated to
the legislators funding could be difficult to obtain. On the other
hand overselling could generate great expectations of immediate
practical returns, with a day of accounting but a few years down
the road in some future budget hearings. In general, the practical
returns from pure science must be reckoned as being well into the
future, 7 leaving the proponents of pure science with a very
tricky selling job. An appropriate scale seems to be that the time
from basic research result to its substantial, continuing use in
practical applications is two or more decades. The author's view
is that new knowledge begins to be applied extensively only when
it has become second nature to the appliers and springs more or
less readily to mind as needed. The time lag, then, is related to
the period required for the new knowledge to diffuse through the
field, become accepted, and enter textbooks, courses, and
handbooks-to become a familiar element of the shared paradigm of
the field.
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- In contrast, to develop a difficult,
complex technology once the essential concept and underlying
principles are known, a decade appears to be about the right time
needed, while the final development of an actual application, once
the basic research has been done and the pertinent technologies
worked out, is a matter of some years. Examples of the development
of applications in the space field are the meteorological and
communications satellites which, relying on the research and
technological development of previous decades, could be built and
put into orbit in the first few years of NASA's history.
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- In the 19th century the time for new
results to diffuse through the field and become accepted into the
paradigm-in fields with developed paradigms-was about 50
years.8 Today, with the more rapid flow of information,
constantly changing study courses, and frequent revision of
textbooks and handbooks, the interval is down to perhaps 20 years,
with many examples of applications of new results sooner than
that. It would seem, however, that some practical minimum time
must remain for new knowledge to flow throughout a field, gain
acceptance, and become second nature to sizable numbers of
practitioners. If so, the most effective way of speeding up the
realization of practical returns from newly acquired information
is to speed up the process of making it second nature to potential
appliers of the information. Is not this what, on a small scale,
industrial research groups and applied research institutes try to
do?
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- [21] Space science was
in the main pure science, and its researchers were uncommitted to
the development of practical uses of the results they obtained.
But administrations and congresses were committed intellectually
and politically to the realization of genuine practical returns
from investment of public money. Those who managed the program,
therefore, had to strive to preserve and protect its pure science
character, while making plain its ultimate practical worth, and to
do this without undercutting the one aspect or overselling the
other.
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* Magnetic
ferrites, the video tape recorder, the oral contraceptive, the
electron microscope and matrix isolation.
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- **
Traces dealt with a critical point raised by C. W. Sherwin
and R. S. Isenson, "First Interim Report on Project Hindsight
(Summary)," Dept. of Defense, Office of the Dir. of Defense
Research and Engineering, 1966. The Hindsight report caused quite
a stir among scientists and gave the National Science Foundation,
NASA, and other government agencies supporting basic research
trouble in the administration and on the Hill, because
superficially the report appeared to show that only applied
research was important for supporting the development and
application of technology- in this case, military
application.
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