Scientists blast NASA budget cuts (CNN/Reuters)

'Sense of gloom and discouragement is widespread'

Friday, March 3, 2006; Posted: 10:17 a.m. EST (15:17 GMT)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- The Bush administration's focus on big, expensive space missions is starving budgets for some of NASA's most productive small-scale science programs, astronomers told the U.S. Congress on Thursday.
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Taylor and others who help chart the course of U.S. space science told the U.S. House of Representatives Science Committee that cutting or scrapping some smaller NASA programs will cut into an already shrinking pool of talented young scientists who work for the U.S. space agency.

The Bush budget request for fiscal 2007 gives NASA an overall increase of 3.2 percent to $16.8 billion, but much of that is meant to fund the space shuttle, to finish building the international space station and to get a successor to the shuttle aloft.

By contrast, science programs in NASA would increase 1.5 percent to about $5.3 billion. This latest budget request, which must be approved or amended by Congress, means that NASA's science programs would get $3.1 billion less than previously projected for the years from 2006 through 2010.
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more at: http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/space/03/02/space.budget.reax.reut/index.html

comment: The 'smaller, faster, cheaper' approach has paid off very well for NASA. Now ** is forcing NASA to return to the big, high-profile approach. Evidently he was just kidding about disliking 'big government'.

Mission to Mars - what a steaming mound of political bullshit. Can't fund boosting Hubble to a higher orbit, can't fund an Earth observation satellite, can't find the money to hire the best and brightest - oh, but we've got all we need for a project that will never happen - and which would cost at least as much as the Iraq War to date if, in some parallel universe, it DID come to pass.

:eyes: