The Birth of NASA’s Global Change Program in the 1980s
Understanding Global Change: The Importance of Earth System Science
Hollywood to the White House: The Performative Politics of Ronald Reagan
In the late 1970s, a strong conservative movement emerged within the Republican Party in the United States. This movement, partly a reaction to the Democratic dominance since 1932, gained momentum with Barry Goldwater’s 1964 candidacy, which marked the dawn of modern conservatism. Although Goldwater's views might not seem so extreme today, they set the stage for a significant political shift. Following his loss to LBJ, a new conservative coalition formed, comprising business leaders, middle-class voters, disaffected Democrats, and fundamentalist Christians. Wealthy donors started pouring funds into think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, universities, and media outlets to challenge the perceived establishment.
Meanwhile, the 1970s saw the discrediting of Keynesian macroeconomics due to a combination of high unemployment and inflation. At the same time, arbitrary price controls, diminishing company profits, slow productivity growth, and the poor performance of nationalised industries led to the collapse of what many viewed as an unworkable interventionist approach to the economy. This set the stage for the “Reagan-Thatcher counterrevolution,” introduced by Ronald Reagan, who became US president in 1980, and Margaret Thatcher, who was elected UK prime minister in 1979.
The oil crisis of 1979, primarily caused by a drop in oil production in the wake of the Iranian Revolution, triggered economic recessions worldwide. In the United States, stagflation began to afflict its economy. During the first years of 1980, inflation reached a startling 13.5% and unemployment rose to double digits higher than at any time in the post-war era.
In 1976, Ronald Reagan lost the Republican nomination. He was dismissed as too ideological and too old to be president (he was 65 years old). But in 1980, with the support of the Movement Conservatives and the NRA (the first time NRA endorsed a presidential candidate), Reagan won the Republican presidential nomination and in November 1980, he was elected President of the United States. His motto was to get "the government off the backs of the American people."
When President Reagan took office, a new era in American politics began, dominated by Movement Conservatives. Reagan set out to revitalise the US economy by combining his anti-union and anti-communism beliefs with Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker’s economic strategies. Known as 'Reaganomics,' these policies focused on reducing taxes for the wealthy, cutting government spending, and deregulating the economy. Despite these intentions, federal spending and debt soared, largely due to tax cuts, increased defence spending[1], and the continuation of entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare. Reagan's administration ultimately left a $1.4 trillion deficit.
Reagan’s rhetorical skill allowed him to shape public perception, creating an illusion of progress even when substantive actions were lacking. As Joan Didion astutely observed, "rhetoric was soon understood to be interchangeable with action." [2] A former Hollywood actor turned beloved president, Reagan epitomized and encouraged the blurring between fiction and reality in politics. This notion of politics, as a performative act, has been emulated by many subsequent politicians in the later part of the 20th century and the early decades of the 21st century, with Donald Trump being one of the most prominent examples.
NASA's Strategic Shift: From Space Missions to Earth Observations
Reagan, a supporter of NASA’s space exploration program, has been envisioning a permanent human presence in space. Three months into his presidency, on April 12, 1981, the Space Shuttle Columbia launched on its maiden voyage, launching a new era of space exploration. This milestone event marked the beginning of Reagan’s ambitious vision for NASA and the American space program. On January 25, 1984, President Ronald Reagan delivered his State of the Union address, where he announced a major goal for the United States' space program: the development of a permanently manned space station within a decade. With his usual rhetorical flair, Reagan emphasized that this space station would enable significant developments in science, technology, and communications, amongst other fields, as well as being a beacon of hope, prosperity, freedom, and international collaboration.
“A space station will permit quantum leaps in our research in science, communications, in metals, and in lifesaving medicines which could be manufactured only in space. We want our friends to help us meet these challenges and share in their benefits. NASA will invite other countries to participate so we can strengthen peace, build prosperity, and expand freedom for all who share our goals.”
After a six-year hiatus, Americans were back in space to stay. However, the political and economic situation had an effect on NASA. To safeguard against Reagan’s budget cuts, the agency needed to think more strategically. James Beggs, NASA’s new administrator, was a strong supporter of the development of the space station and wanted to expand the shuttle missions. While sharing Beggs' enthusiasm for space exploration, Hans Mark, NASA's associate administrator, emphasized the importance of satellites. Hans felt that NASA’s Earth Program had no sense of direction and believed that strengthening NASA's satellite capabilities was crucial for the agency's future success. (Uri, 2021)
Hans Mark asked for the guidance of Richard Goody, a geophysics professor at Harvard University, with whom Mark had worked when he was Director of the Ames Research Centre. Richard Goody recalls that Mark took him aside (in an unused Xerox room, as Richard Goody recalls) and explained to him NASA’s idea about an ambitious global climate programme. It included a large space mission to observe the earth’s system and explore the links and the interactions between the major system components of the earth, how they have evolved, function, and how they may be expected to evolve on all time scales.
The central aspect of the concept was the Earth System science: the Earth as a system of interacting components, with an emphasis on Global Change as a threat to humanity. The idea of the Earth as a global, interconnected and interactive system that needs to be investigated and understood, has been around for a while. It gained scientific attention with James Lovelock's 1979 book, "Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth," which brought the Gaia Hypothesis into prominence, and elicited a range of reactions from admiration to opposition within the scientific community.
Global Habitability
So, in the early 1980s, NASA recognised the pressing need to understand the integrated systems of the ocean, atmosphere, and biosphere from a global perspective. To assess the feasibility of such an ambitious endeavour, the agency assembled an interdisciplinary committee of 50 scientists, from a wide range of scientific disciplines, such as chemistry, biology, physics and space science, chaired by Richerd Goody, to participate in a workshop, on July 7, 1982, at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Among the participant scientists were: Wallace Broecker, Paul Crutzen, James Hansen, Lynn Margulis, V. Ramanathan and others.
The catalyst for this initiative was growing evidence that humans’ interference with the natural process of climate had reached a point that could affect every aspect of human habitability on the planet. Bruce Murray, director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which had already developed an experimental earth observation satellite called SEASAT to test oceanographic sensors, warned that the atmospheric carbon dioxide balance that governs temperature and, in the long run, the melting of the ice caps and the rise in sea levels were perilously close to responding to human activity. (Smith, 1982) Burton Edelson, head of the Office of Space Sciences and Applications (OSSA), echoed these concerns, asserting that “global monitoring” by satellites was an idea whose time has come. Such observations could provide scientists and policymakers with crucial insights into climate change, the undergoing changes, and their far-reaching impacts on life on Earth. (Smith, 1982)
In a statement on behalf of the committee, Richard Goody affirmed that while significant climate research has been conducted in the past few years, NASA’s programme “would establish a more coherent, directed approach to observe and monitor long-term changes in the atmosphere and how they affect the habitability of the globe.”
The outcome of the workshop at Woods Hole was a report titled “Global Change: Impacts on Habitability – A Scientific Basis for Assessment” or the “Goody Report” for short. It starts:
“The earth is a planet characterized by change and has entered a unique epoch (we now call it Anthropocene) when one species, the human race, has achieved the ability to alter its environment on a global scale. This report outlines a scientific strategy that would offer a basis for the difficult choices that lie ahead and for the complex decision that must be made now to protect the integrity of the earth.” [3]
The report emphasizes that humans are able to change the environment and the chemical composition of the atmosphere, and “do so within the lifetime of an individual species member,” affecting “the ability of the planet to support communities of plants and animals, to produce adequate supplies of food, and to sustain and renew the quality of air and water and the integrity of the chemical cycle essential for life.”
The scientists stressed the urgency of the problem, pointing out that the conditions that contribute to global change have already been created. They highlighted the necessity of monitoring and assessing the rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, soil erosion, desertification, the diversion of freshwater resources and air pollution. They proposed a ten-year international interdisciplinary research programme that would depend extensively on space-based technology, to study the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere, land, sun, and the interactions between them. The committee emphasized the programme’s rationale and feasibility, suggesting that NASA, with its expertise in space observational systems, and interdisciplinary, complex programmes, was the most qualified agency to successfully carry out such a programme. So, that happened, and NASA positioned itself in the forefront of climate science.
Footnotes
[1] The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), often dubbed "Star Wars," was a program initiated by U.S. President Ronald Reagan in 1983. The SDI was designed to develop a sophisticated anti-ballistic missile system to prevent missile attacks from the Soviet Union and other potential adversaries. It faced significant technical, financial, and political challenges, but its legacy continues to influence missile defense policies and technologies today.
Sources and References:
Edwards, L. (2020, February 26). How Ronald Reagan Won the Cold War. Retrieved from https://www.heritage.org: https://www.heritage.org/conservatism/commentary/how-ronald-reagan-won-the-cold-war
Goody, R. (1982). Global Change: Impacts on Habitability, A Scientific Basis for Assessment. In J. Logsdom, Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in the History of the U.S. Civil Space Program. Volume VI: Space and Earth Science.
Karaagac, J. (2001). Between Promise and Policy: Ronald Reagan and Conservative Reformism. Lexington Book.
Niskanen, W. A. (1988). Reaganomics: An insider's account of the policies and the people. Oxford University Press.
Ronald Reagan, Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union . (1984, January 25). Retrieved from Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum: https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/address-joint-session-congress-state-union-january-1984
Smith, B. A. (1982, May 10). NASA considers Programme to watch Global Climate. (Aviation Week and Space Technology, pp. 52-53.
Uri, J. (2021, July 9). 40 Years Ago: James Beggs Sworn in as NASA Administrator. Retrieved from NASA: https://www.nasa.gov/history/40-years-ago-james-beggs-sworn-in-as-nasa-administrator/
Westcott, D. N., & Bednarzik, R. W. (n.d.). Employment and unemployment: a report on 1980 . Retrieved from https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/1981/02/art1full.pdf