Earlier this week, I wrote about the priority shift at NASA that is causing problems for NASA's Earth science program. Bush's inability to back up his professed vision of manned spaceflight to the Moon and Mars with real money is causing severe cutbacks and delays in scientific missions that would provide great societal benefits, such as the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission that I described in that earlier post.
Now, one manned spaceflight enthusiast, Robert Zimmerman, who happens to write a weekly column for UPI entitled "Space Watch," is trying to portray last week's critical report from an arm of the National Academy of Sciences as merely part of a "turf war" between scientists and engineers.
The turf war between engineers and scientists over government funding erupted again last week with the release of an interim National Research Council report criticizing NASA for canceling or delaying a number of space-based Earth science projects.
A turf war between engineers and scientists? I'd never heard of such a thing. In fact, the entire concept sounds ludicrous to me. In space-based science projects such as the GPM mission, the Mars rovers, Cassini, and others, a huge amount of cutting-edge engineering is involved. The scientists know this; the engineers know this. They are partners.
The real dispute is not between engineers and scientists, but between those whose primary passion is for human space exploration, such as Zimmerman, and those whose top priority is to learn more about the planet we live on and the universe we live in. The sad thing is that this fight is unnecessary. There is a strong overlap between the interests of these groups. But they are being set against each other by Bush's meagerly-funded mandate, the sad result of which will likely be the failure to achieve the goals of either group in the near future. We are already seeing the beginnings of the problems in the scientific arena. Under Bush's plan, the space shuttle and the space station will also be gone soon. At that point, the lack of sufficient funds may finally make it clear to the exploration boosters that the hopes of the Moon-Mars initiative remain as far distant as ever.
Of course, by then, Bush will be long out of office. It will be up to his successors to manage this country's finances better and perhaps to fully fund an ambitious human space program. If they do, Bush clearly hopes to get some of the credit, as John F. Kennedy posthumously was credited for the Apollo program. Yet Bush will deserve none.
Meanwhile, Bush plays Zimmerman and his cohorts for fools, gettting them to praise him as "bold and visioinary," while attacking his critics as merely fighting a turf war. The real story is that Bush is presiding over a space agency that is unwilling to risk sending a shuttle mission to the Hubble Space Telescope in low-Earth orbit, even though it has been sending humans to low-Earth orbit for over forty-three years.
Whenever and however it happens, sending humans to the Moon and Mars will be far riskier than sending them to the Hubble. Bush's NASA apparently wouldn't have the nerve to do it, even if they had the money. Hopefully, his successors' NASA will have both the nerve and the money. And hopefully NASA's science program will not be decimated in the process.
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