Congressman Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY), the chair of the House Science Committee, delivered a speech Monday at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. While most of the speech focused on the physics research performed there, he did have a few things to say about NASA, primarily funding for the new exploration initiative and the competition for funding between NASA and the National Science Foundation:
We in the Congress will still have our duty to choose among competing priorities. The budget is always a constraint, and it’s more constraining now that it has been in a long time.
Right now, for example, as Science chairman, I especially have to wrestle with the President’s proposed space exploration initiative. It’s a thoughtful proposal, and no doubt would be worthy of immediate funding in a universe in which money was no object. But we don’t live in that universe, and we’re not likely to find one like it in the future.
So I have to weigh that proposal against other priorities, and get more information about its costs and its benefits and its timing before I can make a decision on how I think we should proceed.
As part of my decision-making, one matter I have to weigh is the relative merit of additional funding for NASA versus additional funding for other federal science agencies, particularly NSF, which competes head-to-head for funding with NASA because they’re in the same appropriations bill. Believe me, this isn’t an easy task.
So much for a zero-sum game. Divided we fall I suppose, although there is another way: offload some of the NASA scientific work to NSF.
This should help alleviate some competing science vs. engineering forces within NASA which would otherwise make the Exploration initiative less likely to succeed – all should be better off.
If NSF have any sense, they’ll use the money to help rectify the 18% reduction in their education budget (if I remember correctly). So the next generation of (cheap to employ) students can be more involved in space science, which is surely one of the objectives of the Exploration Initiative in the first place.