The ‘U’ takes on a new era in space

On the afternoon of July 20, 1969, he listened to the radio broadcast as Apollo 11 touched down safely on the surface of the moon. Later that evening, he watched on TV as Neil Armstrong hopped out of the lunar module.

“I’d been following the earlier manned flights pretty closely,” Ruf said. “I was only 11 then, so maybe I was too young to understand how special the whole thing was. But I’ve never forgotten that day.”

On the University’s North Campus, Ruf now serves as director of the Space Physics Research Lab. His second-floor corner office overlooks the ongoing expansions across the other engineering departments, the medical campus and various other nearby labs.

The SPRL has undergone several expansions since its construction at the height of the Space Race — a period of rapid scientific innovation spanning from the mid-1950s to early-1970s that saw the two Cold War superpowers — the U.S. and the Soviet Union — battle for supremacy in all matters of space research and exploration. However, the building’s key characteristics have remained largely intact — in many ways a time capsule from a bygone era.

Covering the walls of each cinderblock corridor are faded black and white photos of a bygone era — scenes of students huddled around miniature rockets or typing away on now-outdated computer consoles. They are glimpses of an era quickly fading from memory as the SPRL copes with the changing scientific priorities.

That time we went to the moon

Forty-five years after Armstrong’s fateful steps, the face of American space research is changing. As the generation inspired by man’s capacity to explore the universe approaches retirement, questions linger about what the future holds for the nation’s once powerful research enterprise.

In the last 20 years, NASA has been targeted by policymakers looking to cut spending, resulting in an essentially stagnant budget. But beyond financial concerns, the U.S. space program has suffered from a shift in the culture value of scientific discovery.

“I was 14 when Sputnik went up — it was 1957,” said Lennard Fisk, the Thomas M. Donahue Distinguished University Professor of Space Science, sitting in his office in the SPRL.

“You almost had to be alive then to know the impact that had on science education and scientific careers in that time. There was quite a fervor in the country over the fact that the Soviets had launched the first satellite.”

In a very real sense, Fisk has been part of the space programs since the beginning. After a decades long career — during which he has served as the associate administrator for space science and applications at NASA, vice president for research and financial affairs at the University of New Hampshire and, most recently, president of the international Committee on Space Research, among numerous other positions — Fisk has experienced the full spectrum of U.S. space research policies and priorities.

Like many of the 400,000 scientists, machinists, engineers and crew who worked for the U.S. Apollo program at its peak in the late 1960s, Fisk was motivated by a sense of national urgency generated after the Soviet Union successfully launched the first manmade space satellite — Sputnik — in 1957.

“It very much alarmed people that somehow Communist society was beating us in technological ability — the country went ballistic on the subject,” said Fisk.

In 1958, Congress passed the National Aeronautics and Space Act “to provide for research into problems of flight within and outside the earth’s atmosphere, and for other purposes,” according to the original text.

For Fisk and his fellow researchers, this vaguely-worded call to arms was in reality a blank check allowing them an unparalleled level of scientific freedom. As control of space became a matter of national security, scientists were encouraged to take risks without fear of funding shortages.

Universities also reaped the rewards, as NASA began funding research labs across the nation. For institutions that were willing to cooperate with NASA, any and all areas of scientific inquiry were open for exploration.

“We basically said our technological prowess as a nation was being threatened and we have to build our technological capability,” said Fisk. “You really get the birth of the research university at that point.”

North of campus

The University entered the space science field in the late 1940s through two departments.

Following the capture of hundreds of V-2 rockets from the Germans at the end of WWII, two University researchers were awarded grants from the Air Force to develop and mount scientific instruments to be launched into the upper atmosphere — marking the beginning of the University’s commitment to space sciences.

William Dow served as the founder and original director of the SPRL, which grew out of the electrical engineering department. In a parallel effort, Emerson Conlon founded the High Altitude Engineering Laboratory out of the aeronautical engineering department.

Each lab employed unique approaches to study similar atmospheric phenomenon, leading to competition between scientists within the college. Around 1950, when Les Jones and Nelson Spencer took over at the HAEL and SPRL, respectively, the two labs were already locked in their own pseudo space race.

“(They) were almost enemies of each other, both competing to make Michigan a star in the space program,” said Engineering Prof. George Carignan, who served as director of the SPRL from 1962 to 1984.

The two labs functioned in tandem until Jones stepped down in 1968 due to a battle with leukemia. After that, Cargnan said the HAEL slowly decayed while the SPRL flourished.

By 1964, the University was granted federal funds to build a new home for the SPRL. The facility, still located at its original location on Hayward Street, was one of the University’s first facilities on the fledgling North Campus — set apart from other departments to ensure the security of its projects, many of which were highly classified at the time.

“This used to be out in the sticks, where it was safe to do this kind of stuff,” Director Christopher Ruf said.

Today, the lab still houses an array of specialized infrastructure, designed to allow researchers to prototype and test instrumentation to be placed on satellites.

Large shaker tables simulate the violent forces placed on items during launch into orbit. Specialized vacuum chambers subject instruments to the extremely harsh, cold environment they will experience in space. And clean rooms prevent even a single dust particle from entering, and potentially ruining, the myriad of sensors and electronics placed on these devices.

In addition to satellites, the University has historically had strong research relationships with NASA — and its renowned Goddard Space Flight Center — Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a small group of similar research universities.

Over the course of the manned space program, eight astronauts were University alums. Notably, the entire crew of the Apollo 15 lunar mission — James Irwin, David Scott and Alfred Worden — were University graduates.

Yet despite the its historical roots in space research and exploration, the University has been subject to the same challenges facing all facets of the U.S. space research enterprise, challenges which could result in lasting damage to the infrastructure so carefully built up over the last five decades.

Down the drain

“There are no bold initiatives,” Fisk said. “We stopped being bold in 1972.”

Two high-profile shuttle disasters — Challenger and Columbia — and the exorbitant cost of the International Space Station — estimated at about $150 billion to date — have led to the deterioration of public support for space research in recent years. Both the shuttle program and the space station have received criticism from members of the scientific community.

Because of the effects of federal sequestration, NASA’s proposed $17.5 billion budget for 2015 — which amounts to less than 0.5 percent of the overall federal budget — represents a 1 percent decrease from the previous year, a serious blow to universities that rely heavily on those funds for their research efforts.

In comparison, 4.5 percent of the 1966 federal budget was allocated to NASA. If the same portion of the budget was directed to NASA today, the agency would be set to receive around $167 billion next year.

After the last Apollo moon mission in 1972, NASA began the process of downsizing its workforce from about 30,000 civil servants to fewer than 20,000, according to Fisk. In simple terms, the administration ran out of things to do after reaching the moon, and the country shifted its focus to other priorities, such as the Vietnam War.

“It didn’t have a mission,” Fisk said. “It kept looking for a mission. When the President says, ‘Go to the moon and bring them back in ten years,’ you have a very clear mission.”

As the skilled workforce was forced to find jobs in other industries, they generally took with them the knowledge necessary to maintain NASA’s advanced space programs. As such, certain information has forever disappeared and must be reinvented — a more costly, time-consuming effort — if scientists require it today.

“There’s a huge loss of capability,” said Fisk. “No one can build the Saturn V today, we lost the keys.”

Even among the scientific community, there is a push to move away from manned spaceflight altogether. While the Apollo moon missions were a key national interest, many prominent researchers, including Fisk, question the need for continued use of the shuttle and International Space Station. In terms of scientific value, there most space researchers would agree that unmanned crafts deliver a greater ‘bang for the buck.’

Engineering Prof. Tamas Gombosi, who researches planetary weather and heliospheric physics, said NASA and the space research community has always wanted to do more research than there are funds available. He said the pool of scientists seeking funds has increased steadily over the last 30 years, while research funding has remained essentially stagnant.

“When I started in the U.S. about 30 years ago, the funding (acceptance) rate was about 1-in-2 or 1-in-3,” Gombosi said. “Today it’s 1-in-8, 1-in-10, so it’s much more difficult to get funding.”

Gombosi added the trend over the past several decades has been to shift research dollars away from universities. For years, there was an unspoken agreement that NASA would build the spacecraft and rely on the universities for instruments, but as funding becomes tighter, NASA has elected to keep more projects in-house to save money.

The funding shortfalls contribute to a cyclical decline in the research enterprise as it becomes harder for new researchers to get the needed funding and experience. While the SPRL has not seen any decline in the number of students, most professors acknowledge that the focus has shifted, for better or worse.

The next generation

“I remember being called into my guidance counselor at the time and basically being told, ‘You can add and subtract — your country needs you. You should become an engineer,’ ” Fisk recalled of his time in high school during the early days of the Space Race.

The 1960s saw a major transformation in STEM education across the country. In addition to unprecedented levels of scientific funding at universities, both the primary and secondary education systems were overhauled to prepare as many students as possible for careers in scientific fields.

During their education, Fisk and many of his colleagues were witness to the seminal events in U.S. space exploration and research. However, the current generation of young space science graduate and undergraduate trainees were several decades from birth the last time a man walked on the moon.

Yet students continue to pursue space sciences. More graduate students are working in the lab now than during the 1950s and ’60s, and they are coming from all over the nation and the world.

“Space research in general and the visuals that go with it are still a stimulus for those who want to go into science and engineering,” Fisk said.

At the SPRL, Ruf, the director of the Space Physics Research Lab, said he has observed significant changes in the students entering the field over his 25 years of teaching experience.

According to Ruf, students coming to the University used to enter with a base set of mechanical skills, whereas current applicants more often have developed skills in computer programming. While computer skills can help with modeling and analyzing data, mechanical skills are still necessary for a field that relies on building instruments to launch in space.

Tinkering projects, such as car tune-ups, ham radios and model airplanes, were valuable in teaching students basic skills that were applicable once they reached a laboratory setting.

“It’s still necessary,” Ruf said. “When you build real stuff you’ve got to get your hands on it and you’ve got to know how to use tools.”

Today, however, screws and soldering irons have been replaced with laptops and smartphones. Ruf said several of his students played around with coding smartphone apps in high school, building skills in computer science that can sometimes be helpful around the lab. But he said the “shift in culture” has also forced him to change his teaching methods.

“Almost none of them know how to use a screwdriver,” Ruf said.

The beginning of the end, or just the beginning?

In 2012, the NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory successfully landed Curiosity, a unmanned scientific rover, on the surface of Mars to perform a slew of experiments, in part to determine potential for human settlement of the planet and continue the search for life in the solar system.

The mission is estimated to cost about $2.5 billion. If manned exploration and settlement of the planet was ever pursued, the cost would be significantly higher — potentially $1 trillion, according to Gombosi.

But scientists — ever the pragmatists when concerned with funding cuts — will continue to support such efforts as long as the government keeps funding them.

“That’s the kind of stuff that catches public attention and sometimes we scientists prostitute ourselves by jumping on things which sell, but it gets you into trouble,” said Engineering Professor Emeritus Andrew Nagy.

Nagy has been at the University since 1959 studying Earth’s upper atmosphere while acting as both a University administrator and international scientific ambassador at various points in his career.

While a manned Mars mission may fulfill the human desire to explore, Nagy said there are plenty of unanswered questions in the field that could be accomplished for less money.

“A lot of stuff that we want to do can’t be done,” Nagy said. “Things are getting more expensive. The easy things have been done. There’s a lot of research that one wants to do … there’s no resources to do it.”

Nagy also noted that some discoveries, such as the transistor, were invented through research that emphasized “science for the sake of science,” asserting that researchers not lose sight of the possibility for real discovery.

But on the other side of the SPRL, it appears that pragmatism might be the decision maker, at least for the time being. In 2012, Ruf — along with two other University researchers — were awarded $151.7 million to fund the Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System — eight satellites that, when launched into orbit, will assist in the process of forecasting and monitoring hurricanes.

“These days there’s a lot more emphasis on practical, useful types of space science and less on answering the big questions just for the sake of answering them,” Ruf said.

“I think it’s a good thing to spend significant money on trying to understand what makes the universe tick — those are important questions,” he added. “But they don’t practically improve the day-to-day quality of life of anybody other than the scientists working on them.”

With advances in smartphones and miniaturization of electronic components, Ruf said space scientists have started to explore the idea of smaller satellites. Instead of launching a single $2 billion satellite each year, researchers are attempting to build a series of smaller $5 to $50 billion dollar satellites that could be launched by a smaller institution, such as a university, which historically have not played a large role in the development and construction of entire space systems.

The CGNSS could provide more accurate weather data, and in general provide “more science per dollar,” according to Ruf. At present, it appears policymakers are in support of this pragmatic approach, giving Ruf confidence that his research will continue for the foreseeable future.

But he also recognized that research funding is ultimately dictated by public opinion, which is always subject to change.

“I think there’s a mood in general in Washington that they’re trying to focus science research funds to more practical things,” Ruf said. “This is where the emphasis is going these days. But who knows, maybe it will swing back five or 10 years from now and I’ll be scrabbling for funding.”