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The preceding analysis does not necessarily lead to a single conclusion. It does, however, provide the basis for a number of observations concerning the place of NASA within federal science and technology policy, the agency’s future, and the overall status of the U.S. space program at the beginning of the 21st century. It is also possible to make one or two recommendations along the way, as well. Defense Conversion Redux Almost everyone involved—policymakers, scientists, members of the academic community, and the mass media—agrees that the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s represented a major turning point in the history of U.S. R&D policy. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the major American science- and technologybased organizations were faced with two major challenges: moving beyond the traditional national security justifications for federal sponsorship of their programs, and reorienting those programs to accommodate such new demands as economic growth and U.S. industrial competitiveness. Thus, the 1990s saw a number of major initiatives to develop new missions for the national laboratories, encourage the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop more “dual-use” technologies, and generally to “convert” defense-based R&D institutions into enterprises more compatible with the civilian global economy. Along the way, these efforts have generated hundreds of books, articles, government reports, congressional hearings, and scholarly 165 9 Concluding Thoughts conferences, almost all of which assume (at least implicitly) that this problem is a brand new one.1 To NASA and its supporters, however, the issue (although not the fanfare) ought to look quite familiar. As the preceding chapters have shown, the experience of the space agency from the 1970s forward represents an example, not just of an analogous situation, but of the very same phenomenon.2 During the late 1950s and most of the 1960s, NASA was just as deeply involved in “fighting” the Soviets as was DARPA or Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, or Sandia national laboratories. Unlike those institutions, however, it was (in the words of chapter 6) “retired” from the Cold War long before that conflict was over. In addition, virtually every strategy that has been proposed for (and, in some cases, enacted by) the defense establishment has already been tried by NASA sometime during the past 25 years. In other words, nearly a quarter century before defense conversion became a “recognized” issue, NASA was itself forced to “find a new role” and to “justify its existence” on grounds other than competition with the USSR. In doing so (or, as many see it, attempting to do so), it provided an almost exact preview of what the national laboratories and others would encounter during the 1990s. That this has not even been generally recognized, let alone widely discussed, is almost as significant as the fact itself. By 1991 (the year of the Soviet Union’s collapse), the U.S. government had already spent hundreds of billions of dollars developing the largest and most sophisticated R&D infrastructure in human history. The 30 national laboratories overseen by the Department of Energy, for example, employed more than 29,000 people in 16 states, and had a combined annual budget of nearly $6 billion (they had spent more than $100 billion in just the preceding 20 years alone).3 Their capital value was approximately $30 billion.4 Unfortunately (for them), their primary justification for their existence, the USSR, was now gone. Although a fair amount of activity at the labs was devoted to basic research (particularly in physics), almost half of their funding was devoted to weapons development. In fact, three of the larger laboratories—Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia—existed almost exclusively as weapons laboratories. Most policymakers felt that, with the Cold War over, this was at least two too many. Even so, these were state-of-the-art facilities, staffed by some of the most brilliant scientists in the world (58 Nobel Prize winners, according to DOE5 ). Thus, the question quickly became, in the words of one science policy specialist, “How can the vitality of these laboratories be sustained and their capabilities put to the best use?”6 Over the following decade, there emerged two major approaches for “using” the U.S. Cold War R&D infrastructure. The more straightforward was direct “defense conversion,” following the biblical adage to “beat their swords into plowshares” (or, as one newspaper article colorfully put it, “bombs into bulldozers”7 ). This was, of course, really the only option open (other than simply shutting down) to private firms that had...

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