[X] My Assistant

[elakdawalla]

The Planetary Society has issued a call to action, for people to contact House Science Committee Chairman Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) to demand that NASA not cut their 2006 spending on science priorities like Europa before their 2007 budget has even taken effect; and to demand that they reconsider their priorities in the 2007 budget. Go to our Space Advocacy page for more on how to participate in this campaign. Please participate!

--Emily

[Stephen]

All the complaints about shuttles taking money from space science and grumbles about how there would be more for science if only Griffin would retire a shuttle strike me as naive. NASA's new mandate to send people to the Moon & Mars is also consuming money. Why not cut that back instead, or delay its schedule?

The real problem is that NASA is underfunded for what it wants/needs/has to be able to do. The shortage of money for space science is merely a symptom of that. These sort of shortages are not new and the present shortages are not likely to be the last. (Indeed, I cannot help thinking that this present situation is partly an inevitable consequence of the generous tax cuts Bush persuaded Congress to make a few years back. If you cut back the amount of money a government has available to spend then inevitably there will be less in the kitty to spend.)

What we should be hearing are calls for NASA to be given more money in general. Trying to take money from one NASA pot to give to another is merely a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Manned moon missions and manned Mars missions are going to be even more expensive even if the CEV itself is cheaper than the shuttle. What happens a decade from now when inevitably the budget cutters strike again? The shuttle will no longer be around to act as whipping boy. Will we instead be hearing calls from this board for fewer manned missions to the moon and/or delays in the manned Mars program, not to mention complaints about what a bottomless pit the CEV is and how we ought to have less of them to free up funding so they can start planning for that nice Triton orbiter everyone is talking about?

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Stephen

[dvandorn]

...What we should be hearing are calls for NASA to be given more money in general. Trying to take money from one NASA pot to give to another is merely a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul...

To give him credit, that's exactly what Griffin tried to do last year. In an appearance before a Congressional committee, he said that he cannot accomplish everything on NASA's plate without significant funding increases.

I'm assuming that the White House changed the message they gave to Griffin, at first telling him that VSE would get the political support to get funded independently of the unmanned side. But the new Bush budget proposal shows that the White House hasn't kept its word -- instead of providing the ramp-up funding levels needed to begin the VSE development, Griffin is now being told to do exactly what he told Congress last year he cannot do: maintain both sides of the house, with the necessarily rising VSE development costs, on a fixed budget.

I would have to think that, if Griffin was telling that to Congress, he was also telling it to the White House. So, all I can say is, it ain't Griffin's fault he had to change his tune.

Let's all hope Congress can bring themselves to give NASA the money it needs to accomplish *everything* it's been tasked to do. In spite of the Administration's inability to try and do so.

-the other Doug