The administration proposes a budget, but it’s Congress that actually enacts the budget and appropriates the money.
I think the best way forward for the people out there in the science community and in the public is, frankly, to appeal to Congress to see if they can’t reverse this cut. Is there any chance the cut could be reversed? We’ve really expanded our knowledge of the solar system and the whole universe though NASA’s programs. The Kepler mission has found well over 1,000 new planets Hubble Space Telescope has given us pictures of the galaxy and understanding of things as exotic as black holes. We’ve got indisputable evidence of vast amounts of water on Mars, which - coupled with what else we know - leads to the high probability that Mars was habitable in the past. What’s the argument that NASA science programs deserve more money? These are technical capabilities that reside in very highly trained people. It’s not just a piece of hardware sitting in the corner that you dust off. The Russians have tried 21 times and they’ve never been fully successful at Mars.
Historically, the success rate for missions to Mars is only about 1 in 3. You lose the capability, the momentum and the knowledge that you’ve built up. And when you take something like this apart, the scientists go elsewhere. I just gave a lecture at NASA where I pointed out how close we are to really answering this question of, “Was there ever life on Mars?” We’ve built up the scientific momentum and we’ve got the instruments, the spacecraft, the direction to go and do this. Loss of human capital is an immediate and very serious risk. This cut to Mars seems to threaten the existing missions and their operations as well as the future beyond what’s called MAVEN. It raises questions about whether or not OMB intends for NASA to keep operating missions that are there and working successfully, like the Opportunity rover and Mars Odyssey and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and so forth. One thing that is very worrisome: If you look at the details, in a line called “Mars extended operations,” that budget is significantly lower than it should be. How will this affect the Mars rovers and other missions there? This hit to the Mars program and planetary science is a real dark spot. NASA has been given, overall, actually a fairly good budget. They have committed in the past to long-term missions like Voyager, and Cassini to Saturn and Galileo to Jupiter. When I put the mission program together in its current form 10 years ago, OMB was willing to talk about a whole decade. The decline from the previous budget was really startling, and many of us were worried that this already was indicating that OMB was intending to take the planetary science area and Mars program even lower. It was signaled that bad things might be happening well over a year ago, when the fiscal year 2012 budget came out. How long have these cuts been in the works? Now a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford University, he spoke with The Times about what the future holds for exploration of the Red Planet. Scott Hubbard, a member of the NASA Advisory Council Science Committee and the agency’s former “Mars czar,” has been assessing the effect the cuts would have on the agency’s programs. Though the budget plan, released this week, would preserve funding for high-profile projects like the James Webb Space Telescope and manned space missions, scientists were alarmed by the size of the hit to relatively inexpensive programs that explore the solar system with high-tech robots. President Obama’s proposed budget for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for fiscal year 2013 would eliminate $300 million from the agency’s planetary sciences division, a 20% cut from the $1.5 billion it received for 2012. Lean financial times are prompting belt-tightening far and wide - and now that extends to Mars and the rest of the solar system.
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