Space, energy, pollution-which?

Abstract

In its planning for a future space program, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has decided to place all its eggs in one basket: the space shuttle. Designed to go into earth orbit and land like an airplane, this program will cost us $5 billion to $15 billion to develop during the 1970's and another $35 billion to use during the 1980's. It is the largest civilian technological program now under development in the United States and is so grand in scale that other space priorities would have to be drastically cut back to make room for the shuttle. The most severely threatened areas are in space science and applications which are those parts of the space program that really count—they support planetary exploration, scientific experiments in earth orbit and on the moon, all weather forecasting and earth resources satellites and some communications satellites. The Nixon Administration's cuts of the annual NASA budget to about ...