NASA Priorities Out of Whack?

amerinese writes "Just last week, we saw a story on NASA reconsidering the fate of the DAWN mission, another reminder of the space agency's budget woes. Gregg Easterbrook over at Slate.com argues not only is the budget a little short, but NASA's priorities are all wrong. From the article: 'For at least a decade, it's been clear that the space shuttle program is a clunker. Nonetheless, NASA's funding remains heavy on the shuttle and the space station, while usually slighting science. This year's proposed budget for fiscal 2007 takes the cosmic cake.' Is NASA just not thinking creatively enough?"

Comments

Re:I mostly agree

[Daniel_Staal]

There is one good reason to build a Moonbase: Telescopes on the far side of the Moon are as insulated as you can get from interference from human sources. A good set of telescopes, in all spectrums, on the far side of the Moon should be an eventual goal of NASA. (Not that we need people there to run them...)

The only other reason for a base on the Moon is turism: It's a place where a person can walk on the surface of another major body and be back within a few months.

Neither of these should make a Moonbase top priority.

Congress controls their budget

[gr8_phk]

The US congress controls NASAs budget. No, they don't just tell them how much money they're going to get. They have control down to the line items. Shuttle boosters and whatnot are made in certain peoples home states and you'll have a really hard time reallocating that money, even if the folks at NASA want to do so from top to bottom.

Here's an experiment: Find out what state NASAs big dollar items come from. Then look at who is on the committe that controls the NASA budget and what state they are from. Look for correlations. After that, we can talk about priorities at NASA.

On JWST and TPF

[Trapezium Artist]

As someone who is closely involved in the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), I find the way that Easterbrook chooses to pitch it against Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) quite peculiar. He thinks that looking for the first galaxies that formed in the Universe with JWST is esoteric, which in some senses it may well be, but searching for planets around other stars with TPF is, for all practical purposes, equally so. Both goals are, nevertheless, very exciting and inspiring.

In fact, JWST is a general purpose observatory in much the same way Hubble is, and will enable a very broad base of astronomy, from cosmology at high redshift in the early Universe, all the way back to the formation of planetary systems in our own Galaxy, and to the study of objects in the Kuiper Belt of our own solar system. Again, practically speaking, these are all esoteric and yet you only have to look at the public's fascination with the enormous number of astonishing discoveries that Hubble and other astronomical telescopes have made to realise that such things play a vital role in our philosophical understanding of our part in this vast Universe.

With regards the idea that JWST is somehow NASA's spolied child, keep in mind that the US astronomy community identified it as its number one priority in the most recent Decadal Review of the National Academy of Sciences, along with the European and Canadian communities: NASA is following through on this outside recommendation. Of course, there are grave problems in the NASA space science budget and no-one likes to see missions cut or delayed, and yes, there have been cost overruns on JWST (albeit largely due to non-technical issues outside the JWST project's control), but it's simply wrong to believe that NASA has somehow made its difficult decisions in a vacuum.

Most astonishing though is Easterbrook's naive assertion about gravy train aerospace contractors building the JWST: just who, exactly, does he think is going to build TPF? A couple of University of Podunk astronomers and a dog? TPF is, if anything, even more technologically challenging than JWST and can only be built by many of the very same aerospace contractors: it's bonkers to think otherwise.

Finally, on naming the former Next Generation Space Telescope after James Webb, while, I remember very clearly the moment that was announced by NASA and yes, it was a bit of a shock. All the same, it's important to remember that Webb put in place much of NASA's space science program at the same time as running Apollo, so his credentials are respectable at the very least. In any case, get over it: let's get the JWST done and launched, and answer some of those fascinating esoteric questions.