Hall Cautions NASA about Space Science Budget

Concerns about the budget deficit might put NASA’s major space science projects in jeopardy, Rep. Ralph Hall (D-Texas), warned NASA officials and space scientists on April 14. Hall, chairman of the House Science Subcommittee on Space, speculated at a NASA reauthorization hearing that the AXAF, Cassini, and EOS projects might have to “run the gauntlet” of surviving individual floor votes. Last year in the authorization process, the space station program was singled out for a House vote when an amendment was offered to terminate it, and it survived by a single vote (see FYI #82, 1993.)

The witnesses agreed that while President Clinton’s fiscal year 1995 budget request for space science provides sufficient funds to keep the major projects on track, the outlook for the following four years is bleak. Hall pointed out that NASA’s five-year budget projection shows a ten percent decrease for space science in the four years after 1995, which comes closer to a 20 percent cut when inflation is factored in.

Hall, a NASA supporter, raised some pointed questions about the agency’s budget request. Noting that the appropriations committees usually cut the request by “several hundred million dollars,” he challenged NASA space science officials to explain how they would cope with such a reduction. NASA Chief Scientist France Cordova said that NASA was looking for more programmatic and managerial efficiencies, and working on more collaborative efforts, both within the federal government and internationally. Associate Administrator for Space Sciences, Wesley Huntress, said that further reductions would force him to look for deletions and delays in future years, such as reducing replacement instruments for the Hubble Space Telescope, as well as efficiencies in Mission Operations and Data Analysis (MO&DA.) Associate Administrator for Mission to Planet Earth, Charles Kennel, testified that he had already been forced to delay the three follow-on elements to EOS AM-1 by nine months to meet reductions from the expected budget profile.

Cordova reported that NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin was committed to trying to squeeze an additional $100 million from the current science programs, and an additional $200 million from elsewhere within NASA, to fund several new starts in space science.

She assured Hall that, “if we have enough time,” NASA had the “creativity and commitment” to enable a strong space science program in future years. Hall cautioned her, however, that timeliness was an issue. Citing concerns by full committee chairman George Brown (D-California) about the space science budget, Hall said NASA ran a good chance of losing Brown’s support for the space station if the science budget concerns were not resolved before NASA’s reauthorizing legislation came up for a vote. (Just last month, NASA’s policy of looking for cost savings by management efficiencies and program stretch-outs came under fire in a Congressional Budget Office report requested by Brown; see FYIs #48 and #49.)

The space science community was represented by Claude Canizares of MIT, chairman of NASA’s Space Science Advisory Committee; Anthony England, a member of the National Research Council’s Space Studies Board; and Glenn Mason, chairman of the American Association of Universities’ Space Sciences Working Group. While they supported the fiscal 1995 budget request and its emphasis on enabling the major missions- AXAF, Cassini, and EOS- to go forward, all three were pessimistic about the following years. Mason said it looked like a “closing down, turning away” from space science, and England called it a “going out of business” budget. Although decrying the lack of funding for new starts, they unanimously cautioned against “raiding” the Research and Analysis (R&A) and MO&DA budgets for additional funds.

Finally, Hall asked whether, if the space science budget was cut, it was “better to underfund all areas of space science, or focus our dwindling resources...by cutting something big?” Canizares’s answer: Rather than “do everything poorly,” NASA should make decisions among its high-priority missions, as it has been forced to in the past.