[extropy-chat] Proxmire has gone to the Golden Fleece in the sky

[Damien Broderick]

A Letter from Louis Friedman
Executive Director of The Planetary Society

On December 15 former Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin died
at the age of 90.  Proxmire was no friend of the space program,
and in 1979 he gave one his famous "golden fleece" awards for
wasteful government spending to NASA for its research in the
search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). A few years
later he was instrumental in stopping government support for
SETI.

But Proxmire also provided The Planetary Society with one of its
greatest victories, and consequently earned the respect of Carl
Sagan and the organization for his willingness to listen.

In the early 1980s NASA's SETI program, known as the Microwave
Observing Project (MOP), was gaining momentum. NASA Ames was
preparing a targeted search, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
was conducting preliminary work towards an all-sky survey. It
all came to a sudden stop in 1982, when Proxmire led the Senate
to discontinue all federal funding for SETI. The ban took effect
just as a group of American scientists, led by SETI pioneers
Frank Drake and Bernard Oliver, were about to set out to what
was to be a seminal international conference in Tallinn,
Estonia. Without the funds they could not go. Sagan said the
newly-formed Planetary Society would help.

Sagan contacted the Sloan Foundation and arranged for The
Planetary Society to apply for a grant. The Society got the
grant and saved American participation and funding for the
conference. We also began raising funds from our members to
support private SETI research, a practice we continue to this
day.

But at the same time, we began a series of meetings with Senator
Proxmire's staff, which culminated in a couple of meetings
between Sagan and the Senator. I was fortunate enough to have
been a participant in one of them. Sagan explained SETI as a
scientific topic and the radio astronomy techniques of listening
for possible signals from an extraterrestrial civilization. He
presented the Senator with the scientific rationale for SETI and
the basis for the experimental approach. Proxmire never became
totally convinced of the value of SETI, but he did admit it was
not a "golden fleece." Most importantly, he agreed to look the
other way when the next request for NASA funding for SETI came
before the Congress. He did. NASA's SETI program was restored in
1983 and continued for another decade.

The restoration of NASA's SETI program in the early 1980s
allowed the Ames Research Center and the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory to build radio receivers and conduct SETI research.
  In October 1992 NASA launched the High Resolution Microwave
Survey (HRMS) -- a full-time SETI observation program. Less than
a year later, the project was killed by a different Senator, who
again initiated a Congressional ban on federal funding for SETI.
This time the ban stuck, and all SETI activity became private.

The restoration of NASA SETI in the 1980s was the Society's
first political victory, which helped establish us both in
Washington and in the space community. It was due in a large
part to Carl Sagan's personal leadership and his ability to
explain science. But it was also due to the willingness of a
very skeptical Senator to listen to reason. I was impressed by
Proxmire personally and by his willingness (rare for a
politician) to back down in the face of an intellectual
argument.