Review and Assessment of Planetary Protection Policy Development Processes

Protecting Earth’s environment and other solar system bodies from harmful contamination has been an important principle throughout the history of space exploration. For decades, the scientific, political, and economic conditions of space exploration converged in ways that contributed to effective development and implementation of planetary protection policies at national and international levels. Advances in scientific knowledge have, in general, permitted planetary protection requirements to be adapted or substantially simplified for certain solar system bodies (e.g., the Moon, Venus, and Mercury) so that only missions to those few bodies thought to be capable of harboring extinct or extant life, or processes relevant to prebiotic chemistry, needed to apply planetary protection measures beyond documentation. Whether or not this trend will continue as the exploration of Mars and the so-called Ocean Worlds of the outer solar system progresses remains to be seen. Only a few spacefaring nations and international organizations have engaged in solar system exploration, with the United States being the largest player and a key international leader in the development of planetary protection policies and procedures. From an economic perspective, spacefaring nations accepted the costs of planetary protection measures in government-sponsored space exploration, and private-sector enterprises did not undertake missions that implicated planetary protection. During the Apollo era, the NASA budget peaked at about 4 percent of the federal budget, and space exploration was a national security priority. Consequently, cost did not pose limitations to prudent planetary protection requirements. However, the future of space exploration will likely not see the same convergence of factors and will, instead, create serious challenges to the development and implementation of planetary protection policy. The most disruptive changes are associated with (1) sample return from, and human missions to, Mars and (2) missions to those bodies in the outer solar system possessing water oceans beneath their icy surfaces. In addition, by the mid-1970s, NASA lost its special national priority, and budgets have hovered around 0.5 percent of federal spending ever since. Space missions of ever-increasing complexity have to grapple with cost caps. In response to a request from NASA, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine established the Committee to Review the Planetary Protection Policy Development Processes to examine the history of planetary protection policy, assess the current policy development process, and recommend actions to improve the policy development process in the future. Readers interested in the specific aspects of the report are directed to the following chapters or to the more extensive guide at the end of Chapter 1: • Working definition of planetary protection and its goals—Chapter 1 • Historical context for planetary protection—Chapter 2 • Current policy development process—Chapter 3 • Challenges posed by future human and robotic missions to Mars—Chapters 4 and 5 • Challenges posed by private-sector activities in space—Chapter 6 • Future of the policy development process—Chapters 5 and 7 The committee concludes that the following fundamental elements of planetary protection policy remain relevant and vital: • The Outer Space Treaty (OST), as the policy and legal foundation for both government-sponsored and nongovernment planetary missions; • The role of the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) in fostering international cooperation in the development of planetary protection guidelines;¹ • The need for science-based decision making; • The involvement of a wide-range of scientific communities; and • U.S. leadership in planetary protection policy making. However, the current planetary protection policy development process is inadequate to respond to progressively more complex solar system exploration missions, especially in an environment of significant programmatic constraints.