Pundits weigh in on NASA's budget woes

Gregg Easterbrook, a writer for Slate.com, published an interesting rant on NASA's misguided priorities and budget entitled "It's the Earth, Stupid." Here's one of the money quotes:

"As for the moon base, for three decades NASA has sent nothing to the moon, not even a robot probe. That's because the Apollo missions found little to suggest that the moon is interesting, except to geology postdocs."

Sigh. I happen to be a geology postdoc, and furthermore I work at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, right next door to the Johnson Space Center (mission control for the Apollo missions). So an unbiased commentator I am not. But here are some nitpicking faults: NASA has actually been involved with two lunar spacecraft since the Apollo program. The first wast the 1994 Clementine orbiter (which was a DOD satellite but involved NASA scientists), and the second was the 1998 Lunar Prospector mission. To be fair, the Prospector mission billed itself as the first NASA lunar mission in 25 years. The last Apollo mission, Apollo 17, flew in 1972.

But nitpicks aside, several important points are raised in this article. More on this later.

2006 Lunar & Planetary Science Conference

The week before last was the big annual conference in planetary science, the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. I didn't have to go very far since it is hosted by the LPI (Lunar and Planetary Institute) in Houston, TX. There is always way too much stuff going on to really soak in. For some of the most detailed coverage of the event, check out Emily Lakdawalla's science blog over at the Planetary Society.

There were many highlights, but one talk in particular caught my attention. Given by L. Paul Knauth, it was titled "Impact Surge as the Simplest of the Proposed Hypotheses for the Origin of Sediments at the Opportunity Landing Site on Mars." Emily's blog gives a great summary of the talk and Q&A immediately following. Knauth and colleagues published an interesting paper in Nature recently where they proposed that the sedimentary deposits at the Meridiani landing site on Mars were deposited by a base surge from a large impact crater. This hypothesis is in direct conflict with the work of the MER (Mars Exploration Rover) science team, whom favor a playa lake formation for at least the upper portion of the deposits.

What does it matter, you might ask? Well, it matters a great deal. In the MER team view, water plays a big role. Since almost everywhere on Earth where there is liquid water, there is also life, this would imply that these deposits have the potential to presence biomarkers (traces of life). The impact surge hypothesis, in contrast, would imply little to no water shaping these deposits.

Neither hypothesis has been completely proved or disproved, in my opinion, but the weight of the evidence seems to tilt towards the team's explanation. But an interesting point to consider is how much NASA Mars missions are driven by investigating the role of water. To use a bad pun, NASA's science goals are saturated with the search for water-related activity. There is tremendous pressure on the team members to demonstrates that these missions have fulfilled the science objectives. NASA wants to tell the public that their money has been well spent. As a result, I think there may be a subtle or not-so subtle bias toward water-related explanations that permeates all of Martian science. It's kind of like in baseball where a tie goes to a runner. On Mars, the tie seems to go to the water-related explanation.

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.