The Bush administration’s focus on big, expensive space missions is starving budgets for some of NASA’s most productive small-scale science programs, astronomers told the U.S. Congress on Thursday.
“The 2007 budget is tilted to an unhealthy extent to large missions,” said Joseph Taylor, who helped craft a 10-year survey for astrophysics.
Taylor and others who help chart the course of U.S. space science told the House 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 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 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.
‘Most productive’ missions hurt
Fran Bagenal of the University of Colorado, who worked on a 10-year survey for solar system exploration, said the small scientific missions were also essential to NASA.
Citing a current student-built instrument flying aboard a space probe headed for Pluto, Bagenal said, “This is precisely the kind of project that is jeopardized under the new budget: smaller science-led missions and educational outreach.
“It makes little sense to attack what is both popular with the public and working well,” she said. “It particularly doesn’t make sense to cut the smallest and most productive stuff.”
The projected budget cuts and the resulting program cancellations and delays have depressed morale at NASA and at universities with science projects tied to it, said Berrian Moore of the University of New Hampshire, who worked on the 10-year survey for Earth sciences.
“From personal conversations, the sense of gloom and discouragement is widespread,” Moore told the committee.
Panel to set priorities
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.