U.S. Astronomers Are Furious At Federal Funding 'Failures'

After years of passivity, the astronomy community is protesting telescope closings, cramped quarters, and scanty maintenance Like some ill solar wind, word is radiating through the galaxy of United States astronomers that they’ll have to shut down more of their small telescopes before plans to build a new one are approved. For many, this is the final straw. Throughout the past decade, U.S. astronomers suffered in silence as the National Science Foundation retargeted money to areas of science likely to produce more practical payoffs. Most bit their tongues for example, during four years of flat funding, amounting to an annual budget reduction after inflation of 5%. Few protested frozen salaries, curtailments in observing time, breakups of effective research teams, deteriorating facilities, and cancellations of projects deemed critical to keep the U.S. astronomy program competitive. But this spring, when Sidney Wolff, director of the National Optical Astronomy Observatories (NOAO), drew up contingency plans for operating with an additional 10% cut, the mood began to turn rebellious. Gripes about the low funding level are now common in the corridors of universities and national observatories, while congressmen and NSF officials have received complaint letters in unusual numbers. Even Sky and Telescope has run articles with titles such as “U.S. Astronomy in Crisis”—articles invoking the specter of high-tech telescopes swaddled in cobwebs behind padlocked doors. All this is happening while astronomers in Europe, Japan, and even the Soviet Union are constructing lushly equipped laboratories to house state-of-the-art 8-, 15-, and even 25-meter scopes. Who’s to blame? Administration officials blame Congress, which has balked at President Reagan’s call for doubling the NSF budget in five years. Congressmen blame Reaganomics, which produced the massive deficits requiring them to resist spending increases. Many astronomers think that it doesn’t matter who’s at fault. To them, their field was doomed from the start. “The Reagan administration,” says Harlan Smith, director of McDonald Observatory in Texas, “has pressured the NSF to put a higher proportion of its resources in engineering and product-oriented research. It has also allowed the military to soak up a much higher percentage of the federal support for research and development.” But astronomy has always been a quirky field, as dependent on the largess of private donors as on the benevolence of federal funding agencies. Few other branches of science appeal so directly and emotionally to the general public. While astronomy does not bear tangible fruits that enhance the standard of living, the kinds of questions it asks and the answers it receives are readily comprehensible to—and strike deep resonances in—the lay person. For this reason, astronomers have long been able to attract significant amounts of private money for their projects. The Rockefeller Foundation, for instance, funded Caltech’s great five-meter (200- inch) Mt. Palomar telescope, while the Ford Foundation put up half the money for the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. Then there’s the Keck Foundation, established with money from Superior Oil. it is providing $70 million of the $90 million needed for another Caltech telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii—a scope that will soon be this country’s largest. But private funding has had its dark side. A 7.5-meter (300-inch) telescope to be built with private funds by the McDonald Observatory in Texas was a casualty of the 1983 oil crunch. Moreover, telescopes supplied by the private sector are nearly always earmarked for specific institutions and are unavailable to the community at large. Perhaps most dangerous of all, private funding may, in part, be responsible for both the willingness of the government to cut back on its funding and the slowness of the astronomy community to fight back. Nevertheless, private funding has kept U.S. astronomy highly competitive at a relatively low cost—$85 million a year—to the NSF. High-energy physics, by contrast, next year will receive $42 million from the NSF and $606 million from the DOE. In fact, more money, $100 million, is earmarked for the superconducting super-collider than for all of astronomy. Stargazing thus has been a relative bargain for the tax payer. The few federal dollars it does get, though, have to go a long way. Radio telescopes—far less glamorous than optical instruments—attract almost no private funds and are virtually all NSF- supported. And even the glamor of optical telescopes extends only to mirrors and mounts and not to the instruments needed to analyze and process the data. Such instruments, without which the telescopes are just light buckets, typically cost as much or more than the actual telescope, a cost borne by the NSF. But the largest part—about two-thirds—of the NSF budget goes to operating and maintaining the three main national observatories, open to any U.S. astronomer with a worthy project. These are: the NOAO, for optical and infrared astronomy, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO); and a radio facility in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, run for the commu nity by Cornell Unversity. Most of the U.S.’s 3,000 astronomers depend on these facilities, for they come from institutions without adequate telescopes; the NOAO, for instance, hosts about 700 astronomers annually, 80% of whom have no access to other facilities. In the 1960s and 1970s, these national observatories were lavishly stocked with well-functioning research teams, innovative ideas, and such ambitious goals as constructing a large radio antenna for identifying new complex molecules deep in interstellar space and building the largest feasible ground-based optical telescope—one that would require a 25-meter (82-foot) mirror. In the early 1960s, a 10-year plan was formulated and nearly all the projects on its agenda completed, in a similar 10-year plan for the 1970s, many of the items came to fruition. But during the 1970s, the growth rate of U.S. astronomy fell. Funds shrunk even as the cost of new astronomical instruments jumped. An unexpected blow was the Mansfield Amendment in 1971, which forced the military to drop its $1 billion support for pure research. The slack was supposed to be taken up by the NSF, but no funds materialized. U.S. astronomers sud denly found themselves having to pick up the tab, for, among other things, the entire Sac Peak solar observatory abandoned by the Air Force. To survive, the planned 25-meter telescope was scaled down to 15 meters, while the antenna to locate interstellar molecules was scrapped. Still, astronomers kept silent, hoping for better times. “The money spent during the 1950s and 1960s, when science was strongly supported, wasn’t wasted,” says McDonald director Smith. “It enriched the country, established U.S. dominance in science and technology, and allowed us to coast when our budget was massacred— during the Nixon administration.” But the ax really fell in the 1980s, when the Reagan administration reordered the priorities of the NSF. While the NSF budget has risen modestly—about 6%— each year, the amount going to astronomy has remained flat. Joel Widder, NSF’s congressional liaison and an ardent defender of his organization’s priorities, frankly admits, “Astronomy has not done as well as some other sciences. The biggest increases have gone to those disciplines that we perceive are important, for instance, the improving of economic competitiveness.” The result: Of the major items on the 10-year agenda for the 1980s (see chart) practically nothing has been realized, while the national observatories cannot even afford to support existing facilities. The NOAO turns down about two-thirds of the applications that it receives for observing time; many people who would dearly love access to the sky don’t even bother to apply. Even the lucky ones are rewarded with three or four nights every six months—and with tough luck if it’s cloudy. And the lucky ones had better publish a paper based on that small amount of work if they ever want sky time again. According to Wolff, this has forced significant changes in the work that astronomers do. “You tend to write and select proposals that can test some hypotheses in two nights,” she says. “This makes for low-risk astronomy. The important questions, requiring weeks or months of observing— such as the questions about, say, the distribution of galaxies in the universe—don’t get done.” Indeed, most long-range projects are effectively dead—including the 25-turned-15-meter telescope. Upgrading of existing facilities has stopped. “The system here is becoming obsolete,” warns Ray Velez, chief telescope operator at Arecibo, “and if we don’t upgrade it soon, we’ll have to shut it down.” Salaries have been frozen and support for individual researchers has severely fallen off. And this adds to an already egregious problem. “Today’s astronomer typically needs straight A’s just to get into a program,” Smith says. “Then, because it’s a tough field, they put in six to seven years to get a Ph.D. Then, if they are very good, they get two to four years of postdoctoral experience at somewhere between $18,000 and $24,000 a year. That’s now 15 years after entering college, and you’ve maybe got children entering high school, and your salary is in the low twenties. Then if you are very, very lucky, you get an assistant professorship at $28,000 or $30,000 a year, and it’s six more years before you are considered for tenure.” “When I tell this to doctor and lawyer types,” Smith adds, “they look at me as if I and all other astronomers are insane. When, after all that sacrifice, you now find there’s not enough equipment for you to do the research for which you were trained—well, something like bitterness sets in.” Meanwhile, it’s not as if the work conditions are stellar. Astronomers at NRAO facilities in Arizona sleep in mobile homes that were envisioned as temporary quarters when they were brought in. “But of course they’d rather have telescopes than a decent place to sleep,” says NRAO director Paul Vanden Bout. At Arecibo, some visitors have actually asked about the possibility of camping in tents. Further, preventive maintenance is almost unheard of. At NRAO’s Very Large Array in New Mexico, the largest radio telescope in the world, no money remains to fix the deteriorating railroad track on which the movable telescopes are mounted. Rotting ties make it risky to reconfigure the antennas and a light snowfall shuts down the operation. And one of Arecibo’s prize telescopes is in serious danger of collapsing into the surrounding marsh in a strong wind. For Wolff, the worst effect is loss of morale. ‘The erosion of our budget has been going on for a decade or more now, and in something like seven of the past 11 years we’ve had to lay off people. That, coupled with the fact that no major projects are on the horizon, makes the future cloudy. Everybody sits around waiting to see who’s next.” In fact, about half of those who receive an astronomy Ph.D. soon leave the field, many going into aerospace or computer software companies. And in the meantime, foreign programs forge ahead, and U.S. astronomers in some fields— in particular, X-ray and gamma ray astronomy—are having to go abroad to do forefront research. Germany, for example, has a world-class radio telescope in Bonn and advanced optical telescopes in southern Spain. The most striking contrast between the U.S. and European programs, however, is revealed by their respective observatories in South America, the NOAO-run Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, and the European Southern Observatory in Lasilla, Chile. “They’ve got 17 telescopes to our six, spend twice as much per telescope, and have a wider range of instrumentation,” says Wolff. The contrast extends to the future prospects for each lab. The Cerro Tololo station is cutting back—and even thinking of selling a telescope or two to raise money— while the Europeans are planning to build a series of four eight-meter telescopes together on a single platform. Meanwhile, the Japanese have adopted the design for the McDonald Observatory’s canceled 7.5-meter telescope and embarked on a project to build it in Hawaii. Last April, Wolff wrote a letter to U.S. astronomers asking them to ponder several scenarios for the future, some of which involved shutting down important existing facilities. “There is not enough money to stay the course in this year and the next,” she wrote. U.S. astrono mers already have had to shut down telescopes—Indiana University and LSU have each had to mothball their one-meter scopes, while Kitt Peak, which closed two 16-inch scopes, plans to retire its one-meter scope next summer. Wolff’s letter provoked protests that may have been heard in Congress; the fiscal 1989 budget earmarks about $90 million for astronomy. The 4.7% increase marks the first time in five years that the astronomy budget has come close to covering inflation. Still, this only means that existing facilities will not close, while the possibility of future shutdowns continues. NSF officials have a few suggestions, one of which is that astronomers seek more private funds—a step difficult for national observatories. As Vanden Bout says, “When you’ve got ‘national’ in your title, it’s hard to get private donors excited. Who wants to bail out the government?” As for the suggestion to close more existing scopes—the way high-energy physicists, for instance, often shut smaller particle accelerators when scaling up— Smith opines, “That argument has two colossal flaws. The first is that there are nowhere near enough facilities to go around as it is. The second is that astronomy is very different from physics, where each more powerful accelerator renders smaller ones obsolete. Indeed, a study done a few years ago by Helmut Apt of Kitt Peak showed that work performed at small telescopes receives almost as many citations in the literature as that done at the large ones—and the cost-effectiveness of the work was vastly superior. Many astronomers think that more money is the only solution and hope to hold out for a few years to see whether the new administration is friendlier to basic research. If it isn’t, they think, U.S. astronomers will have to destroy important parts of their programs to save the rest. “I read a historical novel many years ago,” Smith says, “in which the heroine is given a dagger to use for committing suicide if rape is threatened by the villain. But she’s cautioned to beware that ‘many have chosen this fate too soon.’ That’s the sort of danger we’ll be running killing our precious facilities prematurely.” For Smith, keeping the whole program intact and running is vital, for it cannot be jump-started later when and if money becomes available. “It’s a question of momentum,” Smith says, “which is extremely important in science. You can’t just wave a wand and say, ‘Hey, it’s time we built a telescope bigger than the Russians.' First you have to prime your young astronomers to talk up their innovative ideas until somebody listens. Then you’ve got to have a first-class engineering program to develop and work out bugs and a truly outstanding technical and scientific staff to think through the severe problems you’ll find doing prototypes and so forth. “The bottom line is, if you don’t make that kind of effort, you won’t be ready to do the big things when it’s time. You’ve got to keep that field fertilized before you start growing your crop. If we don’t keep up the whole of our program, we can wave goodbye to the 100-year supremacy of U.S. astronomy.” Robert P.Crease is a Science writer in New York City. With Charles C. Mann, he is co-author of The Second Creation, a history of particle physics.

U.S. Astronomers Are Furious At Federal Funding 'Failures'

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