WESLY HUNTRESS must be pinching himself fairly regularly these days. He is
the head of the Office of Space Science at NASA. As the agency鈥檚 budget was cut
back by Congress and the Clinton administration, science projects became more
and more squeezed in order to protect that most sacred of sacred cows, the
International Space Station. Earth observation programmes, planetary probes, the
search for extraterrestrial intelligence all faced cuts or elimination.
And then suddenly, miraculously, to Huntress鈥檚 delight and amazement, space
science became the number one national priority. Everyone from President Clinton
on down was suddenly clamouring for NASA to do more planetary exploration. NASA
administrator Daniel Goldin proclaimed his agency was only too happy to oblige,
provided of course that NASA received a budget appropriate to the task.
So, what prompted this change in national space goals? A highly speculative
paper in the journal Science, suggesting that the existence of
polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, carbonate rock, and strange microscopic ovoid
structures in a meteorite discovered in Antarctica, all of which taken together
hinted, according to the authors, that life once existed on Mars
(This Week, 17 August, p 4).
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Never mind that most experts instantly dismissed the paper鈥檚 evidence as
preliminary and speculative, never mind that the journal Nature had
published a paper as long ago as 1989 describing organic molecules in a similar
meteorite of Martian origin, so the news wasn鈥檛 all that new, and never mind
that just the month before Nature published a paper on the same
meteorite saying that the carbonate rock had formed at a temperature that was
too high for life to have possibly formed. No, the Science paper was hailed by
politicians and the media as proof that life once existed on Mars, and by jingo
it was America鈥檚 job to find out all about the creatures which, had they
survived, might one day have been crushed in Olympic competition by American
athletes, just like everyone else. The country may yet awaken from its Martian
fantasies. Huntress is hoping it won鈥檛.
SENATOR and presidential hopeful Bob Dole has promised to do the good
Republican thing and trim the Federal bureaucracy if he鈥檚 elected. First up for
elimination: the Department of Energy.
The DOE鈥檚 budget is regularly hacked; apparently research on solar energy and
coal furnaces does not set the mind racing. A thousand paper cuts behind it,
though, and the DOE still stands. So will Dole roll in the ultimate shredder?
Two recent events suggest not.
In July, electrical power suddenly shut down across the western US. The
outage didn鈥檛 last more than a few hours. But it was followed by a much larger
shutdown this month. Four million people lost power on a sweltering day in nine
states. Hair dryers in Hollywood, air conditioners in Salt Lake City, cash
registers in Portland and streetcars in San Francisco went down. It took days to
pin down the cause鈥攈eat-softened power lines had sagged too close to trees
in the northwest, source of most of the west鈥檚 electricity. Trunk lines failed
and power rerouted through local grids simply overloaded them. Turbines stopped
spinning and a nuclear power plant shut down.
It took days, but eventually the truth sank in. Like a celestial black hole,
California has been sucking in energy as fast as it can be produced鈥攖oo
fast for the western power grid to deliver it reliably. The incident also
revealed to a blithe public the interesting fact that the companies that profit
from operating the grid also regulate it.
All this has now been laid at the feet of the DOE. The system is badly
damaged and it鈥檚 the DOE鈥檚 job to make sure it gets fixed. In the words of one
irate DOE official, the whole thing is 鈥渋nexcusable鈥�. In the meantime,
California may have to cut its electric consumption by one-quarter. That鈥檚 where
Bob Dole鈥檚 electoral future comes in. Dole probably needs to win California, the
country鈥檚 most populous state, to take the White House. Suggesting a DOE-less
world might not go down well in the sunshine state.
And there鈥檚 the eco-voter to worry about too. The longer it takes the DOE to
rewire the grid, the more endangered Chinook salmon die. This fish, a
northwestern icon, swims upstream to spawn, bypassing dams via special
spillways. But the dams can鈥檛 spare the water for the spillways now without
cutting off California鈥檚 electric toothbrushes. So thousands of salmon may be
swimming through turbines over the next few weeks. Not a pretty picture.