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NASA: the New Now

By catdynamics on February 22, 2007.

Brutally blunt ScienceCareers article on this year's NASA funding

Article summarises the current situation well, focusing on a couple of hard hit fields like astrobio and Earth observations.

If you want to see the future, go admire the new ROSES call for proposals - as promised, Long Term Space Astrophysics is gone, but so has the Beyond Einstein Foundation Science program and the Terrestrial Planet Finder Foundation Science.
BEFS was subsumed in the Astrophysics Theory Program, but the total budget for that is much less than the combined budget of the two programs used to be - classic "merge and cut" move.

The net effect of the cuts is that this year there would be funding for 4 new postdocs or 6-8 new graduate students across all of the US to work on Beyond Einstein science - that is Constellation-X, JDEM, LISA, EXIST and the CMB polarization probe.
So one graduate student per mission concept and one postdoc for the mission selected to be first.
That will get things moving...

Ok, it is not quite that bad, but this is the funding for people to actually think about the science involved and the methodology, as opposed to the engineering and operations.

And no real prospect for relief until maybe 2009/10.

Tags
astro

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