Integrating Public Deliberation into Engineering Systems: Participatory Technology Assessment of NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission

ABSTRACT

We discuss an experiment employing participatory technology assessment (pTA), a public deliberation method for eliciting lay citizen input prior to making decisions about science and technology to inform upstream engineering decisions concerning technical aspects of NASA’s Asteroid Initiative. In partnership with NASA, the Expert and Citizen Assessment of Science and Technology network conducted a pTA forum on NASA’s Asteroid Initiative in 2014. The goal of the exercise was to assess citizens’ values and preferences about potential asteroid detection, asteroid mitigation, and exploration-based technologies associated with NASA’s Initiative. This article discusses the portion of the forum that focused on the Asteroid Redirect Mission, an effort to redirect an asteroid into lunar orbit that astronauts can study. The forum sought public input on two options for performing the mission that NASA included in technical assessments to make a down select decision: Option A to capture a 10-meter-diameter asteroid; or Option B to redirect a several-meters-diameter boulder from the surface of a larger asteroid. We describe the values and perceptions participants had about Option A and B, how these results were used by NASA managers, and the impact the results of the pTA had on the down select.

Acknowledgments

Informing NASA’s Asteroid Initiative: A Citzen’s Forum was a very large project that could not have been accomplished without the help of many people from many different organizations. We would like to thank Eric O’Dea, Molly Pike Eckard, Joe Rivers, and Talia Sepersky at the Museum of Science Boston; Sari Custer and Mike George at the Arizona Science Center; April Khaing, Lori Hidinger, Bonnie Lawless, and Andra Williams at Arizona State University; Justin Dent at Dent Digital; John Guidi, Jenn Gustetic, and Lindley Johnson at NASA; and Darlene Cavalier and Steve Gano at SciStarter.

Funding

This project was supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under agreement NNX14AF95A and by Arizona State University’s Office of Knowledge Enterprise Development.

Notes

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24. For more details on the entire forum, see D. Tomblin, R. Worthington, G. L. Gano, M. Farooque, D. Sittenfeld, and J. Lloyd, Informing NASA’s Asteroid Initiative: A Citizen’s Forum (Full Report) (Washington, DC: ECAST, 2015), https://ecastnetwork.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/nasa-asteroid-initiative-citizen-forum-full-report.pdf. (accessed June 6, 2017). This report was condensed in summary form as D. R. Tomblin, et al., Informing NASA’s Asteroid Initiative—A Citizens’ Forum: Summary Report (Washington, DC: ECAST, 2015), http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/ecast-informing-nasa-asteroid-initiative_tagged.pdf. (accessed February 25, 2016).

25. B. Muirhead, “Asteroid Redirect Robotic Mission (ARRM) Concept Overview: Briefing to SBAG,” 11th Meeting of the Small Bodies Assessment Group, 30 July 2014, Washington, DC, http://www.lpi.usra.edu/sbag/meetings/jul2014/presentations/1030_Wed_Muirhead_ARM_OptionA.pdf. (accessed February 25, 2016).

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27. D. Mazanek, “Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) Robotic Boulder Capture Option (Option B),” 11th Meeting of the Small Bodies Assessment Group, 30 July 2014, Washington, DC, http://www.lpi.usra.edu/sbag/meetings/jul2014/presentations/1030_Wed_Mazanek_ARM_OptionB.pdf. (accessed February 25, 2016).

28. For more information on gravity tractor technology, see Tomblin in note 24.

29. In March 2015, NASA announced that it chose Option B for the Asteroid Redirect Mission. See http://www.nasa.gov/feature/innovative-study-supports-asteroid-initiative-journey-to-mars (accessed October 10, 2016).

30. Different voting patterns did occur between the Phoenix and Boston sites, but at both sites a significant majority chose Option B (significantly more participants chose Option A at the Phoenix site than in Boston). However, since the main goal of the experiment, and this article, was to explore participant values and rationales for their choices rather than an affirmation of one technological choice over another, we do not explore here why this happened. See Tomblin in note 24 for potential explanations.

31. E. Frow and J. Calvert, “Opening Up the Future(s) of Synthetic Biology,” Futures 48 (2013): 32–43.

32. For example, B. Latour, Science in Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).

33. If more than one of these words showed up in the same statement, the statement was only counted once.

34. See Chilvers from note 13.

35. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, “Innovative Study Supports Asteroid Initiative, Journey to Mars,” https://www.nasa.gov/feature/innovative-study-supports-asteroid-initiative-journey-to-mars. (accessed February 25, 2016).

36. The timing of the ARM decision and the pTA results are described here, though it is not essential to the final results. As discussed, during 2014 and the first part of 2015, NASA was actively considering a down select to focus on one of two options to achieve ARM: Option A, to capture a 10 m diameter asteroid, direct it to the Moon and then send astronauts to do research on it, and Option B, to capture a 3–5 m diameter boulder from the surface of a much larger asteroid, direct it to the Moon, and then send astronauts to it. A NASA analysis meeting on the two ARM options was planned for 16 December 2014 to help inform the decision, at which point NASA decided that more time and analysis were needed to make the decision. NASA announced the final down-select decision in March 2015: the agency selected Option B as its chosen approach for implementing the mission (see note 30). NASA received results in December 2014 and made a final decision in March 2015. During this time frame, the pTA deliberations, which had been held in November 2014, were considered by NASA management during ARM down-select meetings. On 1 December 2014, soon after the forums, ECAST provided NASA with an interim report summarizing the ARM pTA results, including an earlier draft of some of the analysis detailed earlier. Prior to the down-select decision, NASA analysts assessed the data and briefed a summary of the results to NASA ARM down-select management team on 10 December 2014. Internal briefing discussions prior to the December 16 analysis meeting focused on the diversity of values that participants discussed in their voting rationales and what they saw as the goals for ARM (see Table 2).

37. Z. Pirtle, M. Farooque, G. Gano, D. Guston, J. Kessler, A. Kaminski, E. Mahoney, D. Sittenfeld, D. Tomblin, and R. Worthington, “The Public Informing Upstream Engineering: A Participatory Technology Assessment of NASA’s Asteroid Initiative,” paper presented at AIAA SPACE 2015, Conference and Exposition, August 2015, Pasadena, California, http://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/6.2015-4651 (accessed February 25, 2016).

38. See Tomblin et al. summary in note 24.

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40. See Emery et al. in note 2, as well as J. Delborne, J. Schneider, R. Bal, S. Cozzens, and R. Worthington, “Policy Pathways, Policy Networks, and Citizen Deliberation: Disseminating the Results of World Wide Views on Global Warming in the USA,” Science and Public Policy 40, no. 3 (2013): 378–392.

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Additional information

Funding

This project was supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under agreement NNX14AF95A and by Arizona State University’s Office of Knowledge Enterprise Development.