Shutdown! Big Science in an Era of Crisis

• In Event: Innovation Outside Markets: Government and/in Technoscientific Innovation

Abstract

Government sponsorship of big science suggests a stable arrangement of actors and assurances of funding in the long term. Not so in the twenty-teens, when US-government funded research has been subject to extraordinary political and economic uncertainties: from the financial crisis of 2008, through government shutdowns and budgetary continuing resolutions. This paper follows the activities of one innovation-oriented scientific project, NASA's upcoming mission to Jupiter's moon Europa, to examine what happens to innovative technoscience under conditions of uncertainty. First selected in early 2009 only to face an imminent axe due to the loss of federal funds, the mission has been on the front line of fiscal ebbs and flows since its inception. Examining a long-term scientific project under such conditions reveals, on the one hand, the threats to innovation posed by fiscal instability. On the other hand, it reveals the micro-innovations essential to producing stability from the bottom up, despite the slings and arrows of political-economic fortune. Ethnographic detail from the early days of mission planning ultimately reveals the importance of our sustained attention, in STS, to both funding mechanisms and the relational, interactional work of securing funds in order to achieve the goals of innovation in technoscience.

Author

• Janet Vertesi, Princeton University