NASA's new science chief, Alan
Stern, used his first appearance before Congress to put principal investigators
on notice: keep your missions on budget or prepare to step aside.
Stern, an
experienced principal investigator (PI) with his own NASA-funded
spacecraft hurtling toward Pluto, said scientists lucky enough to have
their mission proposals selected by NASA have an obligation to put their
research duties on hold and focus on getting their spacecraft and instruments
built.
"If their
view of a PI-led mission is that the PI is led around, then they are at risk
and we will find somebody who can do it better," Stern told the House Science
and Technology space and aeronautics
subcommittee during a May 2 hearing on NASA's science budget.
Holding
principal investigators accountable for the budget performance of their
programs is just one of the ways that NASA intends to make better use of the
roughly $5.4 billion a year it currently devotes to science, Stern said. The
agency also has begun requiring its regional field centers to be more
conservative when they estimate costs for the programs they are assigned to do,
he said.
As
ambitious as the NASA science program is with 52 spacecraft in orbit and 41 new
flight missions in development for launch over the next seven years, Stern told
lawmakers, the agency "would in fact have more missions in development on the
same budget were we better able to control costs, and I am setting out to do
that."
The three scientists who shared the
witness table with Stern praised his ideas for getting the most out
of NASA's science budget. But they also said NASA in general, and Stern's
Science Mission Directorate, in particular, need more money to do all that they
has been asked to do.
Lennard Fisk, a former NASA science
chief who chairs the National Research Council's Space Studies Board, noted
that $3 billion to $4 billion was taken from NASA's science budget to pay for shuttle return to flight and
completion of the International Space Station.
"There is no way to remove that much money from the budget without causing
disruptions to ongoing programs and a distortion to the balance among
programs."
Fisk said the obvious remedy for
what ails science at NASA would be to "get back the money that was lost."
"A more
constructive way to make that statement is to note how inadequately NASA as an
agency is funded," Fisk said. "It is being asked to do much with too little and
as a result all components of the agency, including science, are sub-optimally
funded. We should all make it a strategic goal to provide NASA with the funding
that is required."
Rep. Mark
Udall (D-Colo.), the subcommittee chairman, clearly had gotten the message
before the hearing had even begun. In his opening statement, Udall pointed out
that in the three years since U.S. President George W. Bush unveiled the Vision
for Space Exploration, the White House has cut $4 billion from its previously
planned requests for NASA science expenditures.
"At a time
when NASA's science programs offer the promise of major advances in our
understanding of the sun, our solar system, and the universe beyond, we risk
doing long-term damage to the health of those programs if we are not careful,"
Udall said. "If we are going to ask our nation's space science program to
undertake challenging and meaningful initiatives, we are going to need to
provide the necessary resources."
The subcommittee's ranking
Republican, Rep. Ken Calvert of California, also said he thinks NASA is underfunded. But he also expressed
sympathy for the decisions NASA Administrator Mike Griffin has made within the
constraints of the agency's limited budget.
"I don't fault NASA for making the
tough choices it did, but it shouldn't be that way," Calvert said, calling on
the Bush administration to provide more funding for NASA.
Stern said he intends to bring greater
efficiency to a Science Mission Directorate many of his fellow scientists have
lamented as woefully cash-strapped. "I want to turn heads while I am
here," Stern said. "I want to produce landmark scientific achievements and to
make my directorate and its various projects run more efficiently and stay
within their cost boundaries."
Stern
identified rising launch costs, cost growth in mission development and unrealistic cost estimates put
forth by the so-called decadal surveys that shape NASA's science agendas as the
major challenges facing the directorate.
But he also
vowed to increase funding for research and analysis--a budget area especially
hard hit in recent years to the chagrin of grant-funded scientists and
technology developers--and put more support behind the agency's suborbital
launch programs in order to "train space scientists in the art of spaceflight and bridge the 2010 to 2012
desert in orbital launches and provide opportunities for technology development
and demonstration."
Scientists
have been calling on NASA since early last year to restore funding for small-
and medium-sized missions selected through periodic competitions.
In a show
of good faith, Stern said NASA intends to move an Explorer-class mission
competition two months to October of this year.
NASA also
plans to use the forthcoming Explorer announcement of opportunity to impose
more stringent experience requirements for scientists wanting to lead missions,
Stern said.
"We are
calling for a minimum experience level for the principal investigators
themselves." Stern said. "Previously there was no minimum experience level, so
a scientist who had not been involved in spaceflight could write a sufficiently
good proposal and lead a team to win and sometimes that gets you in trouble.
You may wake up in the morning and want to do brain surgery but doesn't mean
you can do it."
Fisk,
alluding to the role NASA oversight plays in driving up mission costs, said he
supported Stern's plan to establish stricter prerequisites for principal
investigators provided the agency then stands back and allows them to perform.
"Choose
experienced PIs. That's a good thing," Fisk said. "But if they are really
experienced, let them do the program in such a way that they can produce
[the mission] in the most cost-effective way possible."
Launch
costs also were discussed during the
hearing, with Calvert asking how NASA intends to meet future launch needs
without the Delta 2 rocket.
Stern said
the current Delta 2 inventory is sufficient to fly out all the missions NASA
has on the books through 2012 and noted that the agency has been using air-launched
Pegasus rockets for smaller payloads.
"We are
looking at some alternatives to or additions to those possibilities to give us
low-cost access to space again for small- and moderate-sized missions," Stern
said. "Decisions have not been made but I can assure you that it's important
not only to the Science Mission Directorate but also the larger agency."
Scientists are eagerly awaiting
NASA's decision. "It has to be a robust solution," Fisk said. "It can't be
simply keep the Delta 2 alive because that would probably be too expensive."
Daniel Baker, a heliophysicist at
the University of Colorado, Boulder, said shifting all NASA launch traffic to
the larger Atlas 5 and Delta 4 rockets also presents problems.
"Going to
larger launch vehicles immediately adds tens of millions of dollars to those
missions' costs. By taking the cap off mass constraints, it can allow for
unexpected growth in missions," Baker said. "I think we would be well advised
to try to restore that capability or make sure we have something comparable to
the Delta 2 to enable these missions."
