AIAA San Francisco Section Newsletter February 1995 Politicizing Technology: Undermining Our Future by Brenda Forman Technology is so slippery. Think up something absolutely sexy, sink a mint into developing it and guess what? Someone crawls out of the woodwork with something just as nifty, plus cheaper and faster and easier. Nifty, cheap and fast as it may be, though, there's no guarantee that it will come out on top in the ensuing competition. Its subsequent history will instead tend more to illuminate the quirky, capricious paths by which we progress technologically -- or don't. A current example illustrates the point. Some half dozen companies are currently collectively committing billions of dollars to build and launch mega-constellations of smallsats for seemingly every kind of human communication. Elsewhere, a consortium of giants headed by the "Big Three" auto makers has sunk major dollars into developing its "Clean Car." Meanwhile, researchers working on the "Raptor" program at Lawrence Livermore National Labs (LLNL) in California have come up with a technology that could well have significant relevance to both undertakings -- but which may die aborning for lack of available development funding. The LLNL researchers have invented a "reversible fuel cell" energy storage system that could make it possible for a solar rechargeable aircraft to stay aloft, without refueling, for weeks or even months. Put some sensors or transponders on board and such an aircraft might serve very nicely as a "surrogate satellite" -- and do so at a fraction of the cost of a conventional satellite. Adapted to an electric vehicle, the system could allow a zero emission vehicle to travel more than 300 miles before requiring recharge. Unless and until the technology is fully developed, of course, nobody can truly say whether or not it's the best candidate in the field. The example is instead illustrative of the fact that technologies are brought to fruition or sink into oblivion for reasons often unrelated to their intrinsic merit. Technological progress, indeed, is a far more complex process -- and a substantially less rational one -- than we generally recognize. Take the matter of timing. In technology, as in life itself, timing can be everything. Arrive on the scene just a little too late, and the available investment dollars for developing a promising technology into a real, producible, readily available widget may already be committed elsewhere. This is precisely where the Raptor program's energy storage technology find itself today. The program's governmental sponsors have abandoned it in shrinking budget times and the available private investment capital is committed elsewhere. "If we had this idea 18 months ago," notes one of the LLNL researchers, "People might have jumped at it. Now, though we're on the outside looking in." The difficulty of fielding a new technology becomes even greater if it seeks to enter a field already well colonized by existing technologies and the institutions, both governmental and private, whose interests those technologies support. Once significant money is committed, technologies attract political constituencies. They become many things, few of which are necessarily related to the purposes their inventors envisions. They become the nuclei of organizational turf, the foundations of individual careers, the producers of jobs and contracts, the preservers of bureaucratic head-counts. Most worrisome of all, this cluster of interests will increasingly resist innovation -- because innovation, by definition, threatens the status quo. A new technology appearing on the scene will thereby find itself competing in a world where its relative merit or efficacy becomes secondary to the strength of the political and institutional constituency it can muster. The result is a dangerous politicization of the nation's scientific and technological agenda. As budgets have tightened, this disturbing trend has become more and more visible in the process by which we allocate science and technology funding. As the political competition for available research funds has grown fiercer, programs that produce jobs and pork increasingly win out over programs whose primary product is knowledge. I believe this represents a growing peril to this nation's future. Political criteria -- jobs, pork and institutional prestige -- are wholly unfitted for ensuring that the country's resources are wisely invested where true technological promise is to be found. These, however, are the criteria we are increasingly choosing to apply. In 1945, Vannevar Bush, the framer of the national policy that guided our scientific and technological choices for decades thereafter, wrote that "Science is a proper concern of government," and that "scientific progress is, and must be, of vital interest to Government." At the same time, however, he warned that the government should never be in charge of framing the research agenda, should not own its own labs, or evaluate research by any but the strictest scientific criteria. These days, we are honoring these principles more in the breach than the observance. If we continue on that path, the price will be an America that is less strong, less rich, less accomplished and less confident in the coming century. It's time to decide whether in all conscience we can continue so perilous a defection.