$344M Cut From Station Research To Fund Moon, Mars
Missions
In the agency's quest to reach the moon -- and beyond -- NASA is
looking to drastically cut its funds supporting a program much
closer to home: the International Space Station. NASA's European
partners aren't very happy about that.
According to the UK's Guardian newspaper, the American space
agency intends to limit funding to research programs aimed at
determining the effects of space radiation on humans, advanced
environmental controls, and the design of life support systems --
research that would undoubtably benefit a long-duration space
mission.
However, budget woes (to the tune of an anticipated $5 billion
shortfall for FY2006) mean any spare dollar helps -- or in this
case, $344 million of them. As expected, however, not everyone
agrees.
"They're cutting hundreds of millions of dollars of life
sciences research that has been planned, in some cases, for
decades," said Keith Cowing, a former NASA scientist. "Hundreds of
contractors have been laid off at several research centers run by
NASA."
NASA Administrator Michael Griffin maintains those future
programs are of little importance if the agency can't afford to
perform even the most basic tasks -- such as completing the
station.
"It seemed to me it was getting the cart before the horse to be
worrying about money for human or other life sciences when we could
not assure ourselves the continued capability to be able to place
people in orbit in the first place," Griffin told members of a US
House committee on science recently.
"My priority became assuring that the United States would have
as close to continuous capability to put people in space first and
then conducting research on them after that. Utilization of [the
station] for research or technology will have to be minimized in
favor of getting it assembled."
The ISS is currently in a kind of fiscal netherworld. It's too
expensive to utilize the full potential of the orbital laboratory,
and the only other option for the ISS -- abandoning the station
outright -- is not realistic as NASA and the other entities
involved already have too much invested in it. NASA alone has spent
$100 billion to bring the station to its current point of
development.
Lack of capacity onboard the station -- and lack of a speedy,
reliable way to ferry astronauts to and from the station -- has
meant many European supporters of the station have watched as their
programs have been delayed, or cancelled.
George Fraser, the director of the space research centre at the
University of Leicester in Britain, was succinct in his assessment
of the quandry NASA finds itself in.
"Following the accident of Columbia, it was obvious they had to
replace the shuttle. That's where all of NASA's energies are going
and beyond that to the Moon and Mars," Fraser said.
"One feels instinctively that it's on the road to nowhere much
at all."