ABSTRACT
National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NASA) Office of Space Science and Applications (OSSA) plans to launch some 40 scientific payloads. These include a number of long-awaited, large missions, such as the Gamma Ray Observatory, the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, and the TOPEX oceanography mission. The problems began in the 1970s with NASA's vision of a space science program tied to a transportation system built around Shuttle and a variety of orbital transfer vehicles. The Strategic Plan assumes that OSSA will be able to work with a budget that will remain at roughly its current 20% share of the total NASA budget, and that the total NASA budget will continue to grow throughout the 1990s with an average annual increment of roughly 10% inflation. The productivity of NASA's Space Science program is threatened by: the concentration of resources in large missions; the culture of technical risk avoidance and programmatic risk taking; and non-resilient budget planning.
