NASA Policy: Questioning “The Vision” and Funding a Sidelined Project

President Bush’s “Vision for Space Exploration,” unveiled in 2004, outlined new plans for the country’s space program. The Vision calls for retiring the space shuttle, paving the way for the Crew Exploration Vehicle, a new manned spacecraft that will carry humans back to the moon by the year 2020. Returning to the moon is part of a grander scheme to construct a lunar base that will serve as a future launch-pad for missions to “Mars and to worlds beyond.” Four years later, some in the science and space community feel the current vision is “blurred” and in need of a new “prescription” for the future of United States-funded space exploration and science.

On Feb. 12th, leaders of the space industry—from planetary scientists to former NASA division heads—will convene at Stanford University to formulate an alternative to the Vision. Those attending the meeting express concern that lunar missions will cost too much while reaping little benefit and possibly lead to delays in a Mars mission. According to Aviation Week, some involved in the meeting claim not only that is there little public support for the lunar missions, but that the Administration has failed to back up their bold plan with the necessary funding.

The proposed alternative vision would include manned trips to asteroids and visits to Langragian points in space—locations were the gravitational pull of the Earth and Sun cancel out, which would allow space vehicles and telescopes to remain “parked.”

In his recent article for Science Progress, Drew Baden explored the tension between politics and space science policy. He argues that misguided forces in the Federal government are proposing unnecessary NASA missions dressed up in “political pageantry” that are hindering the agency’s ability to foster potentially groundbreaking work in the physical sciences.

Congress recently required NASA to commit funds of nearly $60 million for the Space Interferometry Mission, for which it originally earmarked $22 million. The SIM project, managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA, is intended to search nearby galaxies for an earth-like planet. The project’s budget has ballooned in recent years and NASA moved it to the back burner by reducing funding last year. Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA), who represents Pasadena and is on the subcommittee responsible for NASA funding, pushed the funding increase. NASA director Michael Griffin suggests that lobbying on the part of the California Institute of Technology was successful in garnering the money. According to Nature:

SIM is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, which, as a NASA research centre, is forbidden from directly lobbying Congress. But the lab’s operator, the California Institute of Technology, also in Pasadena, can.

The rebirth of SIM may jeopardize the James Webb Space Telescope, which is to succeed the Hubble telescope, and missions planned to study various astronomical phenomena like dark energy. Academic lobbying has grown in recent years as many colleges have either hired lobbyists or opened offices in Washington in hopes of getting a slice of the budget pie. This trend may cause long-term damage to “general advocacy efforts to boost science funding as a whole,” according to James Savage, also quoted in the Nature coverage, and who studies such instances of academic “pork-barrelling.”

Tags: funding, Space

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