Abstract: Claims about the enormous costs of Big Science blame public sector inefficiencies, insufficiencies, and folk psychologies that presumably produce high costs and late deliveries. In this talk, I bring together long term ethnography and archival work with NASA missions, with insights from relational economic sociology and science and technology studies, to reveal the organizational root cause of cost escalation in the Big Sciences. My study of the Europa Clipper project began during the economic crash of 2009, endured through the political uncertainty of the twenty-teens and the Covid-19 crisis. During this time, I observed how planetary scientists and space engineers were driven by a combination of funding uncertainties, austerity economics, and neoliberal pressures toward outsourcing to enroll increasing numbers of stakeholders in their projects in an effort to keep costs low. However, these same efforts frustrated costing mechanisms, delivered unequal effects upon minority scientists, and left government employees with fiscal egg on their face. Through this case I develop a sensibility toward "technosocioeconomics” that recovers the simultaneous social construction of science, technology, and money through mutually interdependent, dynamic, and intersecting social processes. This perspective not only applies to private and public sector projects, it holds especial weight in an era in which extreme budgetary pressures affect our knowledge making institutions today.
Dubbed “Margaret Mead among the Starfleet” in the Times Literary Supplement, Janet Vertesi is associate professor of sociology at Princeton University, where she is also Associate Director of the Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education. Her past decade of research, largely funded by the National Science Foundation, examines how distributed robotic spacecraft teams work together effectively to produce scientific and technical results. She is the author of Seeing Like a Rover: How robots, teams and images craft knowledge of Mars (Chicago, 2015) and Shaping Science: Organizations, Decisions, and Culture on NASA’s Teams (Chicago, 2020), as well as co-editor with David Ribes and others of digitalSTS (Princeton, 2019). A longstanding contributor to literatures in Science and Technology Studies, in Critical Computing, and in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, she is currently building a societally-responsible Design program at Princeton and serves as an advisory board member for the Data & Society Institute and the Electronic Privacy Information Center.