The End of NASA Science

Continued from page 1

The proposed $16.8 billion for NASA in 2007 showed no net losses (accounting for inflation) with a 3.2 percent increase over 2006. But during the next four years, approximately $3 billion from planetary exploration and basic science will go toward the 17 remaining shuttle missions -– mostly to complete the space station -- before the fleet is grounded in 2010.

NASA's priorities are off kilter, says Robert Park, a physicist at the University of Maryland. The manned missions have not been nearly as successful as the science missions, and money will be cut from the NASA projects that have been most beneficial, says Park. While the ISS and Space Shuttle have produced few scientific or technological gems, he notes, NASA's science missions have given rise to useful technology, including satellites for climate, global positioning, and communication. "The pity," says Park, "is [NASA science is] what's really been working."

The agency's space science may suffer the most from a thousand little cuts to small programs, data analysis, and basic research, says Michael Brown, professor of planetary astronomy at the California Institute of Technology. "The fact that they're cutting the research budget means that I'm not going to be able to fund students," he says.

These students, many of whom use NASA data to write PhD theses, pour over mountains of numbers to make sense of all of the information collected by roughly 50 spacecraft dispersed throughout the solar system. "We're out there flying around Saturn, collected data at some incredible rate," Brown says, "and most of it goes and sits in an archive."

Without funding for students and post-doctoral researchers, he says, the unprocessed data that has been collected in past and current missions will not be analyzed for decades. Cuts to research funding will hit the science community especially hard, Brown adds, when data starts pouring back from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a spacecraft that entered Mars' orbit last week and is designed to send back 10 times more information than all other space missions combined.

Scientists say these NASA cuts will affect the development of future research missions and the analysis of data collected from past, current, and future probes, rovers, and satellites. Small research projects, in particular, help to train scientists who join the technology sector and work on non-space-related research and development, scientists say.

Many scientists whose research is funded by the agency are clearly disheartened. "The morale of scientists at NASA has never been anything like this low," says Park. Moreover, Friedman of The Planetary Society predicts that over the next few years, while research results will dribble in, many scientists will move to other fields.