Clouds over the Cosmos

Budgetary cuts could destroy U.S. planetary program

Aluminous pink sunset on the planet Mars. The unexpected eruption of volcanoes on the tiny Jovian moon lo. Swirling storms on Jupiter. A continent-size landmass hidden under the thick, sulfurous clouds of Venus. The astonishingly beautiful and complex rings of Saturn.

These are only some of the spellbinding vistas opened up by the U.S. program of planetary exploration. In the past two decades, technologically gifted robots, acting as electronic eyes and ears, have flown by and inspected every planet known to the ancients, from sunbaked Mercury, the innermost planet, to distant Jupiter and Saturn.

Now, threatened by the Reagan Administration's budget cutters, this scientific assault on the cosmos may come to a halt. At a meeting in Pittsburgh last week, astronomers warned that the cuts will mean "extinction" for the planetary program. These words were echoed by Bruce Murray, director of Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who asked: "Are we so obsessed with our present difficulties that we would give up investing in our future?"

Though the space agency's budget has already been reduced by 7.5% for fiscal 1982, the White House now is asking for another $367 million in cutbacks, melting down the total budget to $5.7 billion. To make matters worse, the Administration is talking of slashing an additional $1 billion in each of the next two fiscal years. At the same time, it is forbidding any major cuts in the $2.2 billion-a-year space shuttle program. That leaves NASA with one option: more cuts in space science.

The space agency has already canceled its half of a collaborative effort with the Western Europeans called the Inter national Solar Polar Mission (ISPM). Two unmanned spacecraft were to be sent in great, looping orbits over the unexplored poles of the sun. Last week J.P.L. officials gloomily conceded that they had finally given up hope of launching a once-in-a-lifetime mission to intercept Halley's comet. This primordial chunk of matter, which returns to the sun's vicinity in early 1986 after an absence of 76 years, could provide invaluable clues to understanding our solar system's origins. Now it will be examined only by less sophisticated European, Soviet and Japanese probes.

More drastic still is the imminent dismantling of Project Galileo, a $500 million enterprise that would place an unmanned spacecraft in orbit around Jupiter and drop a probe directly into the giant planet's atmosphere. More than $200 million has already been spent, including several million dollars by the West Germans.

Also seriously threatened: VOIR (for Venus Orbiting Imaging Radar), a scheme to place a radar-equipped robot in orbit around Venus and map its cloud-covered surface. NASA officials are even talking about mothballing the Deep Space Network, a globe-girdling array of antennas that acts as a vital communications "downlink" with all U.S. unmanned planetary spacecraft. One effect of such a move would be to silence the transmissions of the Voyager 2 spacecraft, which is scheduled to pass by Uranus in 1986.

Some space scientists hope that the Reagan Administration or Congress will be persuaded to reconsider. But Murray is taking no chances. In a message to J.P.L.'s 4,000 worried employees last week, he announced he would seek other contracts--mainly military and energy--to keep the world-famed facility in business.

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