When funding fails: Planetary exploration at NASA in an era of austerity, 1967–1976

Abstract

We can learn most about how science funding works when it stops working. Like moments of breakdown surfacing the inner workings of infrastructure, periodic fiscal crises reveal the social life of science funds at the level of everyday practice. Through a case study of NASA-funded planetary science in an era of austerity, the article explores how scientists navigate uncertain funding environments and articulate financially defensible projects. Examining the development of the Mariner 10 mission to Venus and Mercury in the aftermath of a significant downturn in science support, the article offers a middle path between the macro-politics of government funding and the micro-politics of doing science. In shaping how the mission was conceived and later operated, Mariner 10’s cost-driven paradigm translated the austerity of the period into the projectized work of robotic spaceflight missions.