The stage is set for a Capitol Hill tug-of-war over NASA budget priorities between lawmakers who favor space exploration and those who want to prop up the agency's sagging Earth science programs.
Funding for NASA's Earth observation programs has declined by nearly a third over the last decade, as the agency shifted its emphasis toward space exploration.
But that would change under a fiscal 2008 spending bill approved by the House Commerce-Justice-Science Appropriations Subcommittee and scheduled for action later this month by the full Appropriations Committee. The measure would increase NASA's Earth and climate science budget, and stanch the flow of money to a planned manned mission to Mars.
"NASA has too much on its plate already," said CJS subcommittee Chairman Alan Mollohan (D-W.Va.) earlier this month during the introduction of the spending bill. "The president is welcome to include adequate funding for the Human Mars Initiative in a budget amendment or subsequent year funding requests."
The heart of the issue: an overall NASA budget that has remained relatively flat as the agency has added new programs, like the Mars effort. Unveiled by President Bush in January 2004, the Mars program was originally estimated to cost $12 billion over its first five years.
With NASA's budget hovering between $16 billion and $17 billion for the same time period, the agency has funded new programs in part by steering money from science to exploration.
"We've seen steep cuts in NASA's support of environmental research as well as aeronautics, astronomy and biology research," said Kei Koizumi, director of the budget and policy program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. "NASA has to fit in these big increases for developing the next generation of human spacecraft within an overall flat budget, which means something has to give."
NASA's latest five-year budget projection would put the agency's Earth science funding at $1.35 billion by 2012 -- a 20-year low in real terms, noted Richard Anthes, who co-directed a recent National Academy of Sciences (NAS) report that found U.S. Earth science efforts to be "at great risk" after cumulative rounds of budget cutting.
"With a fixed NASA budget, when you start out planning for a hugely expensive mission like Moon-Mars, it's got to come from somewhere," said Anthes, president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. "You can't just have it all ways."
To reverse the Earth science decline, the National Academy report recommended $7.5 billion in new high-priority instruments and satellite missions through 2020. The vast majority -- 15 of 17 recommended missions -- would be funded by NASA, at an annual cost of about $500 million, restoring the agency, in real dollars, to its funding levels in the late 1990s under the Clinton administration.
The nation's ability to monitor severe weather, freshwater shortages, declining fish populations, increased soil erosion and the likelihood of "substantial changes" in the Earth's climate all depend on restoring NASA's Earth science budget, the science academy warned.
"We are still riding high on the hog, based on planning and budgets from the late 1990s and the first part of this decade," Anthes said. "The worry is that when these satellites and instruments gradually age and are no longer viable, there will be nothing to replace them."
The National Academy plan has been broadly endorsed by the scientific community.
"This is a blueprint for a program that will bring immense returns for modest costs," the board of directors of the American Association for the Advancement of Science said in April. "The Congress and the administration ought to implement it."
The plan has also gained a toehold among key congressional Democrats, as witnessed by the House appropriations bill, which would add $180 million over the White House budget request to NASA's Earth science efforts.
But it is unclear how the bill will fare as it heads to the full Appropriations Committee, whose members include lawmakers from both sides of the aisle who strongly support space exploration. The legislation would bar NASA from funding any programs related exclusively to the Mars effort.
"I don't think NASA should be doing any Earth observation. That should be done by NOAA," said Rep. Dave Weldon (R-Fla.), an appropriator whose district includes the Kennedy Space Center -- and a vocal proponent of space exploration.
Weldon said he would favor increases in the Earth science budget "to the degree it gets more support for space exploration.
"I'm not against increasing Earth science," he said. "But we're a nation of pioneers -- and space exploration has clearly shown benefits over the years, from Velcro to CT scanning machines to MRIs to pacemakers."
There are also questions about how the White House will receive the CJS spending bill, given President Bush's threat to veto appropriations bills that exceed his fiscal 2008 requests. The House approved an overall CJS mark of $53.6 billion, or $2.4 billion above the White House request.
Koizumi, the AAAS budget analyst, predicted the House spending bill "will make a difference at the margin ... but it's not enough money to really reverse the trends."
Over the years, "appropriators have tried to fence off money with NASA and have mostly not been successful," Koizumi added. "But something always happens, like the Columbia shuttle disaster, where NASA needs to transfer [money between its accounts]. And the transfers are always in one direction -- from research accounts to big-ticket spacecraft accounts."
Across the Capitol, the chairwoman of the Senate appropriations subcommittee that handles NASA's budget has pledged to increase the agency's budget by $1 billion.
Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) said she and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) are "firmly committed" to the increase, which they introduced as a budget amendment last year. The plan would help repay NASA's $2 billion bill for repairing the space shuttle fleet after the Columbia explosion.
While it is not clear how that would affect Earth science programs, Mikulski has praised the National Academy report.
"At a time when we are facing possibly significant threats to our planet Earth -- like global warming and severe weather -- we need sound science to inform our policy decisions," she said in March. "We need NASA to provide that science."
In the end, "this is just not the time to reduce the number of Earth observations," said Anthes, who said funding recommended by the NAS report works out to $2 per American per year.
"That's not even enough to buy a good cup of coffee," Anthes added. "We're looking at spending millions of dollars to mitigate climate change. If we don't know if those actions are doing any good or not, the money could be completely wasted. We need to be able to monitor as we move forward."
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