The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) received a fiscal year budget of $16.799 billion for 2007, but that funding was accompanied by strong recommendations from the Bush administration to divert funding from science programs towards manned exploration of Mars and a return to the moon. Science critics contend that this will be detrimental in the long run, pushing researchers out of the space field and harming the growth of what they consider more valuable pursuits. This week we talk to Associate Professor William Waller of Tufts' Physics and Astronomy Department, an expert on observational astronomy and astrophysics.
Paul Lemaistre: NASA's recent budget is comparable to previous years, but if you look at the budget, they've shifted money away from science-based experiment programs to exploration programs. There's a large debate over which programs have more merit.
William Waller: That $16 billion figure has been pretty much true for several years now, so I would basically say that NASA has been funded at a flat level for quite some time. It's possible that its actual funding in inflation-adjusted dollars has been going down. In 2004, President Bush gave a new mandate to go back to the moon and establish a new presence there and to make preparations for exploring Mars. We haven't done that in a long time - we've been focusing on earth orbit since the seventies and the end of the Apollo program. It's quite a challenge to now have humans go back to the moon and perhaps onto Mars. Where is that money going to come from, considering NASA's flat funding? According to the new administrator Mike Griffin, this is the kind of funding we'll have for a long time. Why not double NASA's budget? Well first off, the country is in the middle of the war. Also, NASA doesn't have the backing that it used to have. It's one of many programs now, and it has had several setbacks in its human programs recently. The destruction of Columbia before landing coming back into the atmosphere was the latest major problem. Before that we had problems with our programs going to Mars. As Mike Griffin mentioned in a speech at MIT a few weeks ago, we cannot expect a significant increase in the NASA budget given those circumstances. Basically, they have something to prove; that is that we can get back to human spaceflight and do it safer than before.
PL: Is this shift from actual science experiments towards space exploration and the completion of the space station solely a result of Bush's new mandate and other more popular sentiments?
WW: Well, there was more than just President Bush. He set up the Aldridge Commission, and that commission studied the mandate and made its recommendations in 2005. Basically NASA is going to follow those recommendations, which first call for the completion of the space station, which has very strong geopolitical reasons for existence. Second is to focus the space station for research into long-term human survival in space. I personally agree with that. I think that the space station should be supported as an international venture as outlined through the mandate. A lot of the science experiments being conducted on the space station have commercial viability. A lot of the large companies can rent space on the space station and carry out their experiments. I think that the space station is a good place to go commercial.
PL: Isn't it detrimental that money is being taken away from university research? What does that mean for institutions like Tufts that receive federal funding?
WW: In principle, they said that the money for the Vision for Space Exploration program would come from retiring the shuttle fleet and finishing the commitment to the space station. Mike Griffin said that we had a lot on our plate in terms of space science, and not all of it is going to survive. Of course, as a space scientist, I'm upset about it. The decisions going into which mission will be spared and which will be cut, I'm not sure whether the process is as transparent as it should be. That said, there are a lot of things on the chopping block which need to be reviewed. I think that if you look at NASA by itself, there is a modest shift away from traditional space science and towards human factors funding - funding that will pay for studies in support of human survival in space.
For example, we have somebody researching the aging-like effects of weightlessness, by having people lie flat so they don't feel the effect of gravitational forces that cause your heart to pump hard and your bones to maintain their mass against this gravitation. If you lie flat for an extended period of time, it's similar to being in a weightless state. I think this study is being supported by NASA.
A lot of what NASA does is being done at its centers. They outsource to contractors around those centers, but there are a lot of university resources, too. We get those opportunities through grant proposals, and the one that is most common for actually doing space science research is called ROSES, Research Opportunities for Space and Earth Science.
As for what's in it for Tufts, I think that on the engineering side there are a lot of opportunities for people to contribute to enabling human space flight. There will be a lot of grant opportunities available to a lot of the science departments to be engaged in space-related astronomy.
PL: Is there a danger in the long run in diverting money to these other ventures away from research opportunities for scientists to enter the field? In the long run we'd have the technology to get there but not know really what to do when we got there?
WW: Well, that's always the fear. That's what happened with Apollo. We got to the moon, we started doing science in the later missions, but the national interest went away, because national interest is more humans in space. It has more to do with the adventure and thrill of getting these people to the moon, and much less with the actual geology of the moon. In fact, the last mission to the moon was cancelled essentially because of lack of interest. We were barely able to cobble together the first space station Skylab out of extra parts from the Apollo program.
There is always that danger that we'll build the capability and then we'll abandon it. I would say that the space station is one of those situations, where we are committed to building the capability but have lost interest in what, in the long run, it can provide us.
I personally see the space station as a commercial venture. It may never pay for itself in the rents, but it can certainly pay for a sizable fraction of itself through rents to drug companies. Going to the moon, the only way this is going to work is if we establish a real presence on the moon ... a type of permanent colonization of the moon.
PL: The economic opportunities must be considerable, renting out space on the space station as well as opportunities for heavy industry contractors to develop the new technology for the new generation of space travel.
WW: Sure, Boeing and McDonnell Douglas and Lockheed. Some people say that they were reluctant for changes to the status quo; they want the shuttle to remain because it's such an expensive machine.
The fact of the matter is that the shuttle's replacement, which was a major part of the mandate, looks like a super Apollo. It goes on the top of a rocket, and the whole idea is that there won't be any pieces falling in the lived-in part of the craft. You're up on the top, so nothing can fall on you.
It will have a specific purpose of serving and helping to complete the space station, but will also have the capability of going to Mars. It's amazing how traditional it is; it looks like Apollo again. That's because physics is physics: Sometimes the right solution is the oldest one. It's a multi-stage rocket, just like old times.
Who's going to build it? It will be the same players competing for the same contracts. I would say that given this mandate, it's going to be lean times for basic space science. It will be hard to get things started, and it will be harder and take longer than anticipated, because it always does.
Where is this money going to come out of? It will come out of a place that does not feed into that program. They can't take it out of the space shuttle yet, because they have to fly a few more space shuttles to maintain the space station, and hopefully to give the Hubble space telescope more refurbishment.
As a voting citizen I would call for my representatives to fully support NASA. They could use several more billion dollars. If they could get $20 billion, I would be a very happy camper.
