Bush budget imperils NASA’s key science missions

By Deborah Zabarenko

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – 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 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.

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.

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.