(FORTUNE Magazine) – As Voyager II ended its stunningly successful 12-year grand tour of the outer planets with its flyby of Neptune and its moon Triton (shown above), funding for America's civilian space program seems headed, like the probe, into a void. Measured in constant dollars, NASA's budget appropriation, $10.9 billion in 1989, is less than half what it was in 1966. In July, President Bush called for a renewed national commitment to civilian space exploration. But the Administration's 1990 budget asks that Congress lift NASA spending a modest $2 billion, about $1 billion more than the House Appropriations Committee is ready to authorize. The U.S. can, and should, spend more on space. A reasonable goal would be to boost NASA funding to $15 billion next year. Few, if any, other federal programs yield such astronomical dividends. In a recent study, the Midwest Research Institute, a nonprofit think tank based in Kansas City, Missouri, calculated that each R&D dollar spent by NASA generates $9 in private spending. Those dollars would likely go further were NASA to tip its spending more toward cost-effective unmanned space probes instead of continuing to pour disproportionately large sums into manned space shuttle missions. NASA officials and the major contractors that profit from its $24 billion shuttle program defend manned space flight on the ground that it galvanizes public support for space exploration. But Voyager did more to advance human knowledge about the heavens and to fire public excitement -- all for a comparatively trifling $865 million. Similar giant leaps for science and popular enthusiasm are likely to result from successful launchings next year of the Hubble space telescope, which will search for the edge of the universe, and the upcoming Galileo mission to Jupiter. Smart spending on many more unmanned space probes will also advance the private commercialization of space. In August McDonnell Douglas successfully sent up a communications satellite, America's first commercial launch (shown at left) of an orbiting payload. The company has launch orders worth $400 million booked through 1991. General Dynamics and Martin Marietta are also ^ vying with state-funded European, Japanese, Soviet, and Chinese space programs for commercial launching contracts. The combination of an expanded NASA commitment to unmanned scientific exploration of space and a viable commercial space industry is America's best bet to reach a galaxy of useful technological breakthroughs.

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