Don't let Ted Cruz's 'angertainment' wreck NASA

A Democrat Abroad in France explains the threat re-electing Cruz poses to weather forecasting and understanding our planet

This is a guest post from Max Dunitz, a Democrat Abroad I met while talking to DA’s Michigan team. Please let all Americans overseas know there’s a very good chance they can still register and vote until Election Day. But sooner is better. Find out more at www.votefromabroad.org.

In last week’s US Senate debate, Colin Allred described Ted Cruz’s political style as follows: 

He has introduced this new kind of ‘angertaiment’ where you just get people upset and then you podcast about it, and you write a book about it, and you make some money on it. But you’re not actually there when people need you.

Angertainment is a curious mode in which to exercise oversight of science policy–especially when it comes to NASA, where time is measured in decades and mistakes cost billions of dollars. But it is one Ted Cruz introduced into hearings on NASA, breaking sharply with Republican Party tradition by turning critical programs into culture war fodder. It is in no small part Reagan’s strong support for NASA's earth sciences satellites that fueled the dramatic improvement in weather and hurricane forecasts in the last 30 years. 

If Sen. Cruz wins, he will likely claim the gavel of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation and oversee critical safety and science agencies, including NASA and NOAA. That could mean that critical programs, like Ted Cruz, might not be there when most needed.

Cruz got his start in this committee with a Tea Party revolt over NASA’s budget. This rupture with longstanding bipartisan consensus prompted the Republican chair to say, “It surprises me to be bringing a sour note into a NASA reauthorization bill.” 

When Republicans took control of the Senate in 2015, Cruz claimed a subcommittee gavel just as he was launching his presidential bid. At the same time he was innovating new campaign strategies–such as a numbered sequence of SuperPACs each controlled by individual billionaire donors, including “Keep the Promise III” funded by the Wilks brothers fracking magnates–he pioneered the use of angertainment in NASA hearings (which certainly did not hurt his fundraising efforts). In one hearing, he advanced a bizarre argument that NASA scientists were ignoring the agency’s own satellite data to push climate “dogma.”

That year, he outlined his vision for the agency in a budget hearing with a poster titled “Focus Inward or Focus Outward?” This chart lied with statistics, accounting gimmicks, and misclassification to make the case for brutal cuts in earth sciences missions, which he dismissed as soft sciences and uninspiring to young scientists and engineers.

When the NASA Administrator explained how Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP), the first of the 15 essential earth science missions prioritized during the Bush Administration to launch, would assist with water management and agriculture in Texas, Cruz and his Tea Party allies interrupted with a series of one-liners: “Are we focusing on the heavens in NASA or dirt in Texas?” “[‘I get your drift’ is a] good point. It seems NASA has drifted away from its core mission.” (These are from Sen. Gardner, whose barbs were pithier than Cruz’s.)

Cruz’s hearings provide clippable moments and entertainment. Had Cruz prepared for his hearings by studying the scientific literature instead of zingers, he might have known that SMAP is a critical weather satellite that is helping protect and inform Texans this hurricane season.

The name of a satellite mission cannot cover every application that scrappy scientists can find for its data. The SMAP instrument does not measure "soil moisture" but the intensity of radiation emitted by Earth’s surface in a protected portion of the L-band. In these frequencies, situated between the operating frequencies of commercial and consumer microwave ovens, the hydrogen bond networks in surface water are particularly adept at absorbing–and emitting–energy. Crucially, the atmosphere is essentially transparent to this band: these emissions pass through storms intact. (This frequency-varying opacity of the atmosphere is the basis for the greenhouse effect, which Cruz erroneously suggests is unfalsifiable.)

Over land, L-band radiation emitted by a patch of Earth is tightly correlated with its soil moisture. It is not just resource management and agriculture applications that these data advance. They give key, timely information about the global water cycle (and coupled carbon and energy cycles). This global picture of soil moisture is crucial for numerical weather prediction: soil moisture evaporates and becomes rain. SMAP’s data have been assimilated into major numerical weather prediction systems, such as the ECMWF. 

Over the oceans, L-band intensity is related to sea surface salinity. These data are used to understand patterns in ocean currents, which are closely tied to weather and climate phenomena, and also fluxes in the environment due to major storms. A 2015 Texas flood and riverine discharge from later flooding led to the coral mortality event in the Flower Garden Banks in 2016; SMAP data can be used to track these freshwater eddies.

Moreover, windy seas expose more surface and emit more L-band radiation. Since the atmosphere is essentially transparent in the L-band, this radiation is observed through even the strongest hurricanes. Thus, SMAP is a key component of assessing sea winds for hurricane forecasting. SMAP passed over Beryl when it was south of Puerto Rico, just before it battered Jamaica, giving forecasters important indications of its future path. Wind fields estimated from SMAP are also useful for pinpointing the center of disorganized storms, before they intensify into hurricanes. Even though it only passes a given spot once every three days, SMAP also happens to pass over the North Atlantic when other satellites are not there, dramatically improving the temporal resolution of the wind field products used in forecasting hurricanes. 

Investing in a high-resolution successor instrument would give forecasters a much closer look into the wind structure near the eye, giving more insight into the increasingly common phenomenon of rapid intensification. Observation of smaller-scale eddies would give insight into circulation near ecologically sensitive or productive regions, such as shelves and coastlines, helping scientists quantify freshwater flux more precisely, understand nutrient transport, track movement of dead zones, monitor coral health, etc. Over land, a successor mission could more precisely map flood risk ahead of storms and better serve agriculture, drought monitoring, and hydrology.

The idea for a satellite like SMAP was conceived by NASA's Earth Resources Survey Program and the oceanography department of Texas A&M in the 1960s. Using an instrument capable of measuring L-band radiation aboard a NASA plane, researchers observed sea surface salinity changes due to freshwater discharge from the Mississippi river using L-band. The potential mission at the time was called "the space oceanography project." Similar feats were replicated in space, aboard Skylab in the 70s, but with particular attention to soil moisture applications and weather forecasts. The emerging demand for a global map of soil moisture in the developing field of numerical weather prediction led to the shift in name.

It took 45 years to get this satellite in orbit. And that was before Ted Cruz broke the bipartisan consensus on Earth Science missions. With SMAP operating far beyond its initial lifespan and limited Earth Sciences budgets, simply avoiding the fallout from a potential break in the SMAP data is scientists’ hope.

In denouncing the SMAP mission as a pivot toward the soft sciences, Cruz speculated about the motivation of young scientists and engineers: 

[I]f NASA ever becomes a place to study Texas soil, you're going to lose a whole lot of bright new engineers.

In fact, a successor mission to SMAP would likely require the same math (in technical jargon, “aperture synthesis” by “inverting the Van Cittert-Zernike theorem”) that was used by Dr. Katie Bouman to produce the first image of a black hole. You may remember the viral image of her hands clasped over her face the moment her algorithm worked. With a fully funded NASA Earth Sciences program, a young researcher could experience a similar moment, unlocking the mysteries of the wind structure of the eye of a hurricane rather than a black hole.

But if NASA’s budget remains under the influence of Ted Cruz, not only are we going to lose a whole lot of bright new engineers, we will struggle to hold on to the existing data that power our weather and hurricane forecasting and fail to advance the understanding of our planet.

Here’s Max telling Americans in France about votefromabroad.org.