NASA impeded by science lobby

stevejdufour_at_yahoo.com
Date: 03/25/05 

Date: 24 Mar 2005 21:22:26 -0800

Space Watch: NASA impeded by science lobby

By Robert Zimmerman
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL

Washington, DC, Mar. 24 (UPI) -- Many scientists have complained about
the Bush administration's gutting of research funding, but a careful
analysis of NASA's fiscal year 2005 budget shows almost half-a-billion
dollars earmarked for additional pet science projects.

Ironic, but the successful lobbying effort by scientists to secure
those projects actually sabotaged other, potentially more valuable,
research.

When Congress approved the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration's 2005 budget last November, it gave the agency the full
$16.2 billion President George W. Bush had requested, an unexpected
result given the federal government's huge budget deficit and
consequent political pressure to cut spending.

That $16.2 billion included, however, 168 to 170 congressional earmarks
totaling from $426 million to $436 million. The totals vary depending
on whether you ask NASA or Congress and how you define what those
earmarks are. Whatever the definition, the projects required NASA to
cut other programs to stay within budget.

No doubt many of those earmarks were inserted in order to gain the
support of specific members of Congress.

For example, Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd's state of West Virginia --
not generally considered a hotbed of space research -- did very well,
gaining $22.9 million in NASA earmarks.

Byrd was not the best at corralling funds for his state, however. Ohio,
with $33.35 million in earmarks, was the leader, followed closely by
New York with $31.9 million. Next were Alabama with $28.4 and Maryland
with $23.5.

All told, Congress earmarked 144 projects in 40 different states.
One-third of the remainder involved multi-state operations, while the
rest were not specific to any locality.

In fact, those NASA earmarks allowed almost every senator and many
members of Congress from all across the country to claim credit for
bringing the bacon home to their districts.

Yet, pork-barreling does not explain the earmarks entirely,
particularly when one of the largest, $7.5 million, went to the
University of Quebec's Hydrogen Research Institute. Unless the U.S.
Constitution was rewritten when no one was looking, Quebec remains part
of Canada.

Instead, the focus of most of the projects was to benefit scientific
causes, directly funding either academic research institutions, science
museums or science education.

In all, 79 different universities, colleges or institutes -- including
the University of Quebec -- received more than $152 million for
specific projects, including building construction, maintenance of
operations and the study of anything from forestry management to
nanotechnology.

Though a good percentage of this research went for space-related work
-- such as super-computing, space medicine and exotic-materials
investigations -- a significant portion also went for things that had
nothing to do with space.

Some examples:

--NASA is now financing the construction of a "musculoskeletal
simulator for injuries" at a medical research clinic in Cleveland.

--The agency is funding an advanced biotechnology incubator project for
the Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, N.Y.

--It is helping Hollins University in Virginia, a woman's college, to
upgrade its science infrastructure.

--It is paying for improvements to the Cooper Library at the University
of South Carolina in Columbia.

--It is financing a minority outreach program at Texas A&M.

--It is building a new science center at St. Bonaventure University in
New York.

--It is subsidizing environmental research in the forest preserve at
the Little River Canyon Field School in Alabama.

Then there were the earmarks to upgrade or build a dozen different
museums across the country at a cost of $6.4 million. The Liberty
Science Center in New Jersey got $1 million, half of which was to be
spent to build the Hudson Harbor and Estuary Ecological Learning
Center. Other examples include the Coca-Cola Space Science Center in
Columbus, Ga., which received $150,000; the New England Marine Science
Center, which got $250,000, and the Boston Museum of Science, for which
Congress authorized $1,000,000.

The earmarks saddled NASA with additional unexpected costs for dozens
of state and nationwide science-education programs costing from
$100,000 to $9.1 million, for a total budget hit of approximately $42
million. Most seem laudable, but the question is why should their
funding come out of the space budget?

Also, what of the $200 million or so in earmarks apparently dedicated
to space research? These projects, too, might be worthwhile and
necessary, but NASA had not requested them, so the lobbying and
congressional politics that imposed them on the agency raises questions
about their value.

The main problem, though, is the lobbying effort by scientists that
resulted in these earmarks seems to have damaged core-value space
research.

Case in point: The first mission scheduled to fly in President Bush's
new space initiative is the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, a robot-scout
ship that will orbit the moon and look for water and the best and most
practical places for future explorers to land.

Fearful NASA would limit LRO's research to engineering and scouting
information, Congress reduced the project's 2005 budget from $60 to $10
million and demanded that 25 percent of the project's remaining funding
be "focused solely on answering basic science questions."

As noted in the congressional conference report, "The conferees are
concerned that the lunar measurement investigations to be carried out
by the LRO mission, intended to characterize future robotic and human
lunar landing sites, will forgo the opportunity for research and focus
only on applied engineering assessments."

NASA has temporarily saved the mission by transfering funds from other
programs. Nonetheless, to make sure LRO did not concentrate on finding
water on the moon, which certainly will determine the most likely
places for human exploration, the scientific lobbying effort tried to
gut the project, making it difficult, if not impossible, for LRO to
search for water on the moon -- one of the most basic scientific
questions of lunar research.

It was also these earmarks -- not Bush's new space initiative -- that
forced delays or trims to a number of NASA's planetary-research
projects in 2005. For example, the launch date for the Kepler mission
-- designed to look for extrasolar planets and originally scheduled for
launch in 2007 -- was postponed for at least a year due to late trims
to the 2005 budget.

Likewise, the Space Interferometry Mission's launch has been delayed
two years, partly because of technical issues, but also because of cuts
required in 2005 to pay for the congressional earmarks.

This robust and almost-never-challenged scientific lobbying effort
discredits the comments by Rosina Bierbaum, dean of the University of
Michigan School of Natural Resources and Environment, when she said
Feb. 20, at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement
of Science, "(Bush's) moon and Mars (initiative) is basically going to
eat everybody's lunch."

If anything, should similar lobbying by scientists occur during future
budget negotiations -- something that seems likely, considering
statements such as Bierbaum's -- the efforts could cripple not only
Bush's space initiative, but also good scientific research, as NASA
struggles to deal with sudden, unexpected and poorly justified projects
imposed by Congress at the last minute. 

--
Robert Zimmerman is an independent space historian. His most recent
book, "Leaving Earth: Space Stations, Rival Superpowers, and the Quest
for Interplanetary Travel," was awarded the Eugene M. Emme Award by the
American Astronautical Society for the best popular space history in
2003. E-mail sciencemail@upi.com

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