The decade of Halley

Abstract

By the end of the 1970s the American program of solar system exploration was in disarray. After the success of Viking, and with the Voyager and Pioneer Venus missions underway, it appeared to some that planetary exploration had achieved its goals and, consequently, there was little left to do. In addition, many other factors conspired against launching further missions. Chief among them was the fact that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) spent so much of its budget on human spaceflight, and in particular the Space Shuttle, which the agency had ‘sold’ to Congress by promising that the high development cost (projected at about $5 billion) would be offset in service by partial re-usability and the high rate of flights (as many as 60 per year). In fact, the Shuttle cost almost twice as much to develop and proved to be capable of at most a dozen flights per year, and the actual degree of re-usability and turn-around time left a great deal to be desired. To cover the Shuttle overruns, NASA cut into the budgets of its scientific programs, creating such havoc that these took almost a decade to recover. Another reason for the crisis in the planetary exploration program was America’s détente with the Soviet Union, which fostered cooperation rather than competition in space. But planetary science gained little if any advantage from it, and the rapprochement declined in the early 1980s. In the meantime, NASA shifted its scientific focus away from planetary exploration towards terrestrial studies and astronomy, in particular approving the development of the Large Space Telescope, which would later become the Hubble Space Telescope, as the first in a series of space-based ‘Great Observatories’ that would, between them, cover the electromagnetic spectrum from the far infrared to gamma-ray wavelengths.