by Playfuls Staff |
3rd March 2006
It seems that there’s a dark cloud looming over NASA’s future, or at least over the future of its small-scale (yet crucial) scientific experiments, and that dark cloud is none other than the Bush administration budget.[more]
Thus, the fact that the Bush administration is focusing on big, expensive space missions leaves just some budgetary crumbs for NASA's most productive small-scale science programs, astronomers told the U.S. Congress on Thursday, according to a report by Deborah Zabarenko for Reuters.
"The 2007 budget is tilted to an unhealthy extent to large missions," said Joseph Taylor, who helped craft a U.S. 10-year survey for astrophysics.
Taylor and others who help chart the course of U.S. space science told the U.S. House of Representatives Science Committee that cutting or scrapping some smaller NASA programs will cut into an already shrinking pool of talented young scientists who work for the U.S. space agency.
The Bush budget request for fiscal 2007 gives NASA an overall increase of 3.2 percent to $16.8 billion, but much of that is meant to fund the space shuttle, to finish building the International Space Station and to get a successor to the shuttle aloft.
By contrast, science programs in NASA would increase 1.5 percent to about $5.3 billion. This latest budget request, which must be approved or amended by Congress, means that NASA's science programs would get $3.1 billion less than previously projected for the years from 2006 through 2010.
This is in line with President George W. Bush's Vision for Space Exploration, which aims to send astronauts to the Moon by 2020 and an eventual human mission to Mars. These voyages are far in the future, as the space agency struggles to return the shuttle to regular flight after the 2003 Columbia disaster.
Mary Cleave, who heads NASA's science mission directorate, said, "We did try very hard to protect the smaller missions. We understand a lot of people think we got it wrong."
A NASA panel to set priorities is being established, Cleave said, and should meet sometime before June.
But Rep. Bart Gordon, a Tennessee Democrat, said this kind of guidance is needed before then, since Congress is considering NASA's budget now.
