NASA cannibalizes its science program

Dennis Overbye in the The New York Times writes about disturbing, deep cuts to NASA's science budget. (nytimes.com requires registration - here's a repost from the Orlando sentinel). Over the past several weeks, there has been alarm amongst scientists who work for or with NASA over cuts to the science program. The NASA organization chart (see it here) is complicated and seems to shift around completely ever few years, but there are basically two parts to NASA: the science program and the engineering program. I work for the science side. The engineering program is the men and woman who design and maintain the shuttle, International Space Station (ISS), and other mission hardware. The scientists are the ones who figure out where to send exploration missions and analyze the data these missions return.

NASA administrator Michael Griffin said six months ago that he would not cut "one thin dime" from the science budget. Now, it looks like he'll be cutting 3 billion over five years. Even though NASA's budget has actually increased a bit, that increase and more is being sucked up by the shuttle, shuttle replacement, and ISS. By the way, these cuts represent 3*10¹⁰ dimes, which is the equivalent of 40,500 km (25,166 miles). Put another way, that is enough dimes that if they were stacked up and layed on their sides, they would wrap all of the way around the Earth.