to answer your question, the House Science Committee and Senate Commerce Committee are currently negotiating in staff conference over the NASA Authorization bill. Hopefully that will be complete by the time the House and Senate come back from Thanksgiving recesses in December, and get signed and sent to the President.

The good news is that this bill will almost certainly give NASA legislative authority to issue larger prizes. Also, if the bill “authorizes” a certain amount for Centennial Challenges in FY2006, NASA may not only be able to use previously appropriated dollars but also have some flexibility to REQUEST to reprogram other FY2006 exploration funds towards prizes.

The bad news is that the Appropriations bill, which actually cut the total check to NASA, with limits on how much NASA can spend on various projects, provided no funds for prizes in FY2006, so the prize money would have to be approved by the Appropriations Committees as part of a “reprogramming”.

Bottom line: the key is for the authorization bill to legally authorize NASA to award significant prizes. Once that hurdle is solved, it will be easier (but not easy) to actually win funding for those prizes.

Even in my work I see some of JPL’s lasting intellectual contributions to the world. In the theory of error-correcting codes, some of the best upper bounds on the parameters for error correction are called “the JPL bounds”. Why was JPL looking at this? Because spacecraft data links are an important use of error-correcting codes. Spin-off like this indicate basic technical strength in the organization. It’s not another Tang-and-Velcro urban myth; this spin-off is for real.

Passing from the sublime to the ridiculous, Robert Park reports that the space station is not a leader in space science. Rather, science on the space station has finally been cancelled completely. I think that Jeff Foust in the Space Review once suggested that there was a “debate” about the value of science on the space station. There was never much debate among serious scientists. The real debate, if you can call it that, had NASA and Washington on one side and scientists on the other side. This week, NASA and Washington threw in the towel.

-MM