NATIONAL OCEANOGRAPHIC PROGRAM—1965 707 
vessels cost around 1,000 to 2,500 per day at sea, and the annual ship operating 
budget of Scripps Institution of Oceanography alone is 2.5 million dollars. 
These costs include maintenance, but cost of operating ships does account for a 
large part of the national oceanographic budget. Yet the total budget is not 
very large. Just how it will work out for 196 is uncertain, but it will proba- 
‘bly be around $10,000,000. This is of course the Federal budget, and includes 
the share of the Navy, the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries and Coast and Geodetic 
Survey, Atomic Energy Commission and National Science Foundation. It does not 
include the money from states and private industry, but this is a small fraction 
of the total anyhow. It is difficult to estimate the total world wide budget for 
oceanography, but it seems to be in the order of perhaps '!250,000, 000 per year. 
Even without expansion of effort, oceanography is not going to get less 
expensive. The cost of operating ships increases steadily -- despite the care- 
less statements of one local oceanographic entrepreneur, universities do not use 
students as crew to operate research vessels, but unionization of crews on re- 
Search vessels will produce difficult financial problems. Oceanographic instru- 
mentation is becoming more expensive as the instruments become more complicated 
-- or sophisticated, and we have now reached the stage where no major oceanographic 
institution feels properiy equipped unless it has a computer. Indeed, one of the 
latest major research vessels has a computer on board to process results under 
way. All that is now needed is an attachment that will produce the finished 
progress reports for distribution when the ship docks. Somebody attempted to 
reduce the costs of oceanography to specific details and came up with the esti- 
mate that each figure, such as a temperature measurement, cost about $7 a number, 
and a sample of sea water captured in a bottle cost $11 a fifth. Loss of gear 
is inevitable, and instruments must be replaced. When one remembers that oceanog- 
raphic vessels often must be at sea in rather rough weather (although of course 
observations are impossible in heavy seas), it is remarkable that no major ocea- 
nographic vessel has been lost at sea in the last twenty five years, and only two 
since 1929. The French exploring vessel Pourquoi Pas?, a veteran of Antarctic 
exploration, was wrecked on the shore of Iceland in 1936 with the loss of all but 
one of her crew, including the commander, Captain Charcot, and the non-magnetic 
research vessel Carnegie was destroyed in 1929 by fire in Apia harbor, Samoa, 
with the loss of her captain and a cabin boy. Im view of the hazards involved, 
the safety record of oceanography is much better than driving down the highway. 
The most disastrous loss to oceanography is recent years was the airplane accident 
in Mexico which took the lives of Townsend Cromwell and Bell Shimada while en 
route to join an oceanographic cruise in 1958. A few years ago a vessel from the 
University of Tokyo was destroyed by a volcano, with the loss of all on board, 
including some well known students of volcanos, but this is not a usual hazard 
of research vessels. 
The estimated world oceanographic budget of approximately 250 million a year 
may sound like a lot of money to some people, but it is infinitesimal along side 
the $5 billion approved for space projects by Congress for fiscal 6. The 
National Academy of Sciences committee on oceanography recommends an annual bud- 
get of 600 million for USA by 1970. While a large part of the oceanorraphy money 
may be spent for engineering and keeping ships going, a still larger percentage 
of our space budget is not strictly speaking science -- it is hardware. And there 
is no comparison of the practical benefits to be obtained by a fuller knowledge 
of the ocean as compared with finding whether or not there is really life on Mars. 
Let us say we do find that life is constructed of something other than DNA on 
Mars -- very interesting, but so what? We still. have to live on earth, and the 
ocean is the largest part of our earth. 
