NASA's Cuts and Delays in Its Earth Science Program are Dictated by US President Bush's Pursuit of Manned Exploration of the Moon and Mars. (April 30, 2005)

    At a hearing of the US House of Representatives Science Committee, scientists and members of Congress voiced disquiet by recent cuts and delays in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Earth science program. The cost of US President George W Bush's directive to send astronauts back to the Moon and later to Mars is squeezing NASA's budget.

According to The New York Times, "The hearing focused on a report released Wednesday by an expert panel of the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences that concluded that recent and planned cuts in financing were crippling NASA's Earth-monitoring program. Under the program, satellites study a broad range of things, including short-term weather phenomena like hurricanes and monsoon rains, and longer-term issues like global warming and the amount of radiation Earth absorbs from space."

In addition Science reports in its April 29, 2005 issue that there are to be big cuts in the science programs that had been scheduled to be undertaken at the International Space Station. Andrew Lawler reports, "The space agency intends to postpone and cancel a number of experiments, abandon a host of research facilities, and reduce the amount of crew time and agency funding devoted to station science, according to outside scientists and NASA officials familiar with the plan. Scientists are also upset that they have been largely excluded from the review, and politicians are complaining about the apparently shrinking payoff from the billions being spent on the orbiting laboratory."

President Bush's interest in manned Moon and Mars exploration is moving NASA to redirect the life sciences program on the ISS toward collecting data that "would benefit astronauts living and working for long periods beyond Earth orbit." In addition, "Commercial interest in studies relating to drug discovery never gelled, for example, and in the late 1990s, NASA began tapping funds for research facilities to pay for station cost overruns. Work in the materials sciences was largely jettisoned after a 2002 review, and the 2003 Columbia disaster severely curtailed short-term research plans."

Meanwhile  MIT Physics Nobel Laureate Sam Ting, still hopes to launch his Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer to the station in 2008 to search for antimatter. Lawler reports Ting as saying NASA paid only 5% of the US$1.2 billion cost of the project, which includes participants from 16 countries. If it's dropped, Ting says, "then I don't see how NASA can say it wants international cooperation."

 According to Charles Oman, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology aerospace engineer following the course of NASA's research plan revisions, "The station is not going to be the world-class facility we foresaw, that is the cold reality."

But to many what appears to be the further squandering of billions of dollars in continuing palliative care for the ISS is an egregious waste of limited resources.