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From the Executive Director

Inside The Beltway

Click to enlarge > Louis D. Friedman Executive Director of The Planetary Society Credit: The Planetary Society

January 25, 2007

Watching a congressional transition is always interesting -- a mix of hopeful ideals and mundane maneuverings -- as I was reminded this month, when I paid a visit to members of the staff in the newly organized Democratic Congress. The maneuverings usually focus around office space: one staffer I visited had her office moved from the basement of an outlying building to a suite on the third floor of Capitol itself.

Besides office assignments, the big source of confusion this year is Congress' action (some call it "inaction") on the 2007 budget. They have decided to ignore all of last year's proposals and committee work, and merely re-set the budgets for federal agencies to 2006 levels, with no direction on how to spend it. I asked a half-dozen knowledgeable people to tell me the effect that would have on NASA -- and got a dozen different interpretations. Even NASA Administrator Mike Griffin was uncertain about the effect.

I attended a speech Griffin gave, in which defensively responded to charges that NASA should run its programs more like private industry. He spent a lot of time dealing with the difference between a private company working for profit for a few and a government agency charged with working for the common good. In the question-and-answer period that followed, I could not help reminding Mike that he should have bragged more about the things NASA does well, and for which the country is so proud, such as Spirit and Opportunity, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Cassini-Huygens, the Hubble Space Telescope, and Stardust, plus the Nobel Prize awarded for work done with NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer.

The current budget philosophy, reiterated by Griffin this month, of taking from the science and aeronautics programs to fund new rocket development in the Vision for Space Exploration (VSE) belies both public interest in a space program, and the Administration's promise to carry out the VSE and "go as you pay." Along with many others, I thought "go as you pay" meant that new plans for human spaceflight would only be undertaken if budgets permitted new development, but it has turned out to mean go as you transfer funds from other NASA programs.

The Planetary Society's campaign to Save Our Science has focused on budget priorities, but we don't want to lose sight of the hopeful ideals expressed in the original Vision for Space Exploration. The Vision has become both cloudy and myopic -- losing sight of the goal and focused on a few near-term advantages. This year we need to explore how to correct the Vision.

Any ophthalmologists out there?

-- Louis Friedman

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