While the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is widely perceived as a space agency, since its inception NASA has had a mission dedicated to the home planet. Initially, this mission involved using space to better observe and predict weather and to enable worldwide communication.

Meteorological and communication satellites showed the value of space for earthly endeavors in the 1960s. In 1972, NASA launched Landsat, and the era of earth-resource monitoring began.

At the same time, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the environmental movement swept throughout the United Sates and most industrialized countries. The first Earth Day event took place in 1970, and the government generally began to pay much more attention to issues of environmental quality.

Mitigating pollution became an overriding objective for many agencies. NASA’s existing mission to observe planet Earth was augmented in these years and directed more toward environmental quality.

An important policy stimulus in many respects, ozone depletion spawned the Montreal Protocol of 1987 (the most significant international environmental treaty then in existence). It also was an issue critical to NASA’s history that served as a bridge linking NASA’s weather and land-resource satellites to NASA’s concern for the global changes affecting the home planet. Significantly, as a global environmental problem, ozone depletion underscored the importance of NASA’s ability to observe Earth from space. Moreover, the NASA management team’s ability to apply large-scale research efforts and mobilize the talents of other agencies and the private sector illuminated its role as a “lead” agency capable of crossing organizational boundaries as well as the science-policy divide.

APPROACH:

In the analysis below, the approach used to examine the evolving relationship between an agency and a program focuses on decision-making. The decision-making process goes through a number of stages that can span many years.

Stage 1—Awareness. The first stage entails the emergence of a problem that needs public and government attention. Initially, there may be little activity by an agency with respect to the issue. No one is responsible for dealing with the problem at this point.

Stage 2—Trigger. Subsequently, some event occurs that triggers action. Government places the issue on its agenda. It is “framed” as a particular kind of problem or opportunity. Who is in charge of the issue or problem still remains unclear, and there may be numerous parties contesting for ownership.

Stage 3—Establishing a Program. Next, a decision is reached by appropriate government authorities to assign jurisdiction over the issue to an agency. Legislation is passed, which confers legitimacy and resources. The agency establishes a program to cope with the problem. In the case at hand, it is a research and development (R&D) program that is established.

Stage 4—Early Implementation. The agency plans, organizes, and executes a program of action. This stage can involve numerous substages. The nature of the program can change as progress is made, as can the organization.

Stage 5—Evaluation/Reorientation. At some point along the way, there is a pause and the program is evaluated. The evaluation can be formal or informal, scientific or political. The results of the evaluation may lead to various outcomes: a decision to continue the program as is, a plan to reorient it, or a decision to terminate it.

Stage 6—Amplification. This important stage is often overlooked in decision-making literature, perhaps because it does not always occur. When it does occur, it involves the expansion of the program into new areas, even as the existing program continues to be implemented. In other words, not only does the agency reorient the program, but the agency itself changes.

Stage 7—Later Implementation. In this stage, the agency reimplements the program, in a greatly modified organizational and policy context. Scientific progress is made, but so are mistakes.

The agency, perhaps carried along by the momentum of stages 5 and 6, overreaches and has to lower the program’s profile.

Stage 8—Institutionalization. In the eighth stage, the issue dims in the public’s perception and may even cease to be considered as a problem. The program becomes a routine, ongoing agency activity, but it is now one that operates at a lower priority than before.

The above decision-making model has a linear structure that does not exist in reality. However, it conveys, in a general way, the overall course of the decisions being made over time. The ozone depletion issue has moved through the first seven stages at NASA, and it is now advancing into the eighth. The ozone decision-making process began in the late 1960s. Along the way, NASA assumed a new role and developed new relationships with other agencies. It made key decisions in the program’s birth and development. While no longer acute, the ozone policy process continues, and there is increased scientific recognition of the link between ozone depletion and climate change.

That link, along with other issues remaining to be understood, has required constant attention. Ozone depletion thus represents an important case study in the history of NASA and environmental sciences. It is one from which many lessons can be learned about the management of science and technology and the application of knowledge to policy-making decisions.

In tracking NASA’s decision-making process, the author has made use of the various books on ozone policy—and it should be emphasized this paper’s orientation is on ozone policy and the NASA government program, not the history of environmental science. For other approaches, see the works of Benedick, Andersen and Sarma, Christie, and Parson.2 Benedick deals with the diplomatic story; Andersen and Sarma, the role of the United Nations; Christie, the scientific debate and consensus-building process in science; and Parson, most comprehensively, government policy and the evolution of scientific thought. None of these books focuses on NASA.

Download NASA and the Environment: The Case of Ozone Depletion

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NASA and the environment : the case of ozone depletion / by W. Henry Lambright.
Monographs in Aerospace History No. 38
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

W. Henry Lambright is professor of public administration and political science and director at the Center for Environmental Policy and Administration, the Maxwell School, Syracuse University. He is the author of a number of books and publications on public administration and science policy.

His works on space policy include Powering Apollo: James E. Webb of NASA (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), Space Policy in the Twenty-First Century (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), and Transforming Government: Dan Goldin and the Remaking of NASA (PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2001).

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