The Price of Prestige

122 chapter five

dollar science and technoscience projects in the face of such a political-

economic environment highlights the persistence and resilience of Big

Science: it maintains its political allure (Jacob and Hallonsten 2012 ).

Observers expected Big Science to decline following the end of the

Cold War (McLauchlan and Hooks 1995 ; Ross 1996 ). Indeed, American

cancelation of its superconducting supercollider project in 1993 and the

downsizing of NASA’s Mission to Planet Earth indicated a possible move

away from Big Science (Lambright 1998 ). Yet even in those early years

of readjustment, not all Big Science projects were abandoned. Funding

for the construction of the International Space Station, for example,

was maintained, and the shuttle program was allowed to continue. Two

decades later, Big Science is growing and attracting new actors: China, the

EU, India, and Brazil.

Big Science, therefore, provides an example of a luxury good that con-

tinues to attract old and new customers despite dramatic geopolitical

changes. We therefore need to identify uninterrupted underlying motiva-

tions that can account for this persistence in consumption patterns. Events

such as wars, technological innovations, or economic crises can affect the

primary utility of Big Science programs. Accordingly, primary- utility calcu-

lations are susceptible to change and cannot properly explain the continu-

ing allure of such programs. However, if we understand Big Science as an

exercise in conspicuous consumption, the consistency of demand becomes

more easily explainable. Indeed, Big Science bears all the hallmarks of con-

spicuous consumption: a preference for the extravagant, a staggering price

tag, copious deployment of the language of prestige, an explicit sense of

competition, emulation by smaller powers, and redirection of funds from

the inconspicuous basic research of “small science toward showy megaproj-

ects such as space travel, the Mohole Project, or multimillion- dollar particle

accelerators” (Capshew and Rader 1992 ; Weinberg 1961 ; Paul 1972 ; Green-

berg 1967 ; De Solla Price 1963 ).

Big Science projects are so often associated with claims of national

prestige that we rarely stop to question this connection — it seems common-

sensical. Yet science and prestige make strange bedfellows — the first sym-

bolizes rationality and modernity and the second manifests the emotional

and irrational workings of spirit (Lebow 2008 ). In this chapter I explore this

puzzling connection between expensive scientific projects and international

prestige. I analyze extravagant state- funded scientific megaprojects —

otherwise known as Big Science — such as space programs, giant particle

accelerators, and ambitious biomedical projects like the human genome