About the scientist-NASA disconnect

In a post earlier this week about a meeting between scientists and NASA officials at a planetary sciences conference, I noted that there appeared to be a “disconnect” between scientists and NASA officials; the latter seemed to be genuinely puzzled regarding why scientists were so angry about the NASA budget. A reader who has some insight into the tug-of-war between the two sides (but asked to be anonymous given his/her role in the debate) emailed some insights into this situation:

A lot of the press seems to be focusing on the missions that got cut or deferred, but they are focusing on the sideshow, not the main issue. The reason why the science community is so upset is because of NASA cuts to some relatively small things. The most important is the research and analysis funding. This hits the scientists really hard because it is forcing them to dismiss graduate students. University scientists are really wounded by this, because they are not simply laying off employees, they may essentially be destroying somebody’s education AND their job. And as you know, professors usually have a closer relationship with grad students than bosses have with employees. NASA’s cut to R&A, which is also in some ways retroactive, is really angering a lot of people.

In addition, NASA took a swipe at a number of other things that the scientific community considers important longer-term programs, like Explorer missions (relatively small, but important) and technology development (important for many missions, including the flagship missions). So to summarize, the scientists are most upset about relatively small budget cuts. This is something that NASA does not fully comprehend.

Second, there is also the problem that NASA has eliminated much of its advisory structure, so they did not have the kind of input from the scientific community that they normally have. If they did have that input, they probably never would have cut R&A budgets (the advisors would have warned them). Couple this with something that Cleave said a couple of months ago, when she said that the only science stakeholders are the White House and Congress—which seemed to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the fact that a major amount of NASA data analysis is done by non-NASA scientists.

Wrap it all up and NASA is presenting an image of an agency that really doesn’t understand the way the science community works. And add to this the fact that the scientists were promised a lot more in the past few years and now they are getting nothing—they expected more. So it’s not simplythe cuts, it’s the way that they have been made to a community that was feeling pretty good the past few years.