In September, I presented a paper at the 68th International Astronomical Congress, the annual gathering of the world's space community. This year Adelaide, Australia hosted the event, at which the national government announced their plan to form an Australian space agency. The Planetary Society's Space Policy & Advocacy Program has been working with the Australian Embassy in Washington, D.C., to help the government determine how a new space agency could contribute to Australia's—and the world's—interests in space, and we were very excited to hear about this fantastic development.

One of the functions of our program is to conduct original research on policy-related topics involving space science and the workforce that engages in it. This post is a summary of the presentation I delivered in Adelaide based on original research sponsored by the Society.

Last year, I provided historical cost data to a curator at the National Air and Space Museum who was writing a paper on the history of the low-cost Discovery program at NASA. The curator, Dr. Michael Neufeld, went on to write an excellent journal article and a chapter in a forthcoming book on the Discovery program dealing primarily with NASA and its centers, their interactions with other White House organizations, and the actions of Congress in establishing the program. I am also interested in how the rest of the scientific community—particularly researchers housed within research universities rather than at NASA—contributed to this story.

For those not familiar with the Discovery program, I refer you to Dr. Neufeld's article or a brief (and somewhat outdated) blog post I wrote on the selection process for NASA's newest Discovery missions, Lucy and Psyche.

Introduction

In 1992, NASA Administrator Dan Goldin authorized the start of a small mission program for planetary science called Discovery. The Discovery program provides NASA with a method to fund comparatively small planetary science flight missions or participation in science missions sponsored by other organizations without the necessity of approval for a new project start from Congress or the White House. The projects cannot exceed a given life cycle cost or they will be canceled under normal circumstances. NASA selects Discovery projects through a competitive process using external proposal reviewers rather than exclusively NASA employees. Anyone may submit a Discovery proposal. Under the original program guidelines, NASA proposed to fly a Discovery mission every two years, a significantly more rapid cadence of launches than had been typical for planetary science missions to that point.

The Discovery program was not the first time the planetary science community in the United States had tried to establish a small missions program. In fact, NASA previously instituted two other such programs: the Planetary Explorers program in the late 1960s and the Planetary Observers program in the early 1980s. So why did Discovery succeed when the others had not? And did the program accomplish the goals of all of its stakeholders? I want to examine the larger context in which Discovery began, in terms of NASA, the greater scientific community largely housed in academia, and the federal government. Understanding this context helps us to consider why the goals of various stakeholders often differed, sometimes significantly, and how the exogenous political and fiscal environment set the stage for the scientific community to embrace a small mission program.