U.S. Space Science Confronts New Economic Reality

The Hubble space telescope floats higher than the Earth.

Astronomers are worried.

It’s not some new unexplained mystery of the universe or the upcoming launch of a space telescope that is unnerving them, though. The problems they currently face are much more down-to-Earth — and the future of space exploration hangs in the balance.

The anxiety stems from the fact that astronomy, especially space-based astronomy, is just plain expensive. And with federal budgets tapering, the government will be less and less able to make huge investments in huge knowledge projects.

“We may see in the next decade or so an end to the quest for the laws of scenery which will not be resumed again in our own lifetimes,” warned Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg in January during the American Astronomical Society assembly in Austin, Texas.

The president’s upcoming 2013 federal budget request, which will be released Feb. 13, will include a taste of things to come for U.S. space knowledge. NASA is likely to have fewer resources in the near future. Smaller reserves and fewer missions have already caused divisions and public fights between different groups of scientists. If astronomers want to build larger telescopes that can do better knowledge, NASA says that they have to band collectively and agree on a very restricted number of huge flagship projects.

“Right now, all needs to step back a small bit and question not ‘how can I have mine’ but ‘how can we have ours,’” said astronomer Matt Mountain, director of the Space Telescope Knowledge Institute that oversees operations of Hubble and other telescopes.

But some astronomers claim that consensus-construction and political thinking are getting in the way of research. Packing multiple instruments into a single project leads to increased costs without automatically delivering more knowledge. The result is a mission that will be able to do more things, but less well.

“All likes the huge flashy flagships,” said astronomer Nahum Arav of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. “This is what Congress will approve, this is how we satisfy the community. But you are not being driven by knowledge, you are driven by lots of different levels of political thinking.”

Instead, astronomers like Arav say it’s time for NASA to take a look at how it does business and see if there’s a better way. Rather than working on enormous and expensive projects, perhaps the community could be better served with a suite of smaller, cheaper, more focused missions and increased competition.

If the astronomy community can’t agree on which tack to take, knowledge could endure greatly and the United States stands to lose its dominance in space knowledge and technology. If a huge, expensive mission gets funding, but some of the astronomy community doesn’t help it, the project becomes extremely vulnerable to being killed by a Congress that needs to find budget cuts. This leaves European missions — which are often smaller in scale and delight in long-term funding commitments — at the forefront.

Particle physicists learned the hard way that the government is willing to abandon a project even if billions of dollars have already been spent on it, as was the case with the Super Conducting Super Collider. When that project got the axe, Europe’s Large Hadron Collider stood to become the world’s largest collider and the center of the particle physics world.

All of these concerns are coming to the forefront in anticipation of the new budget. In recent years, astronomy’s main federal funding sources, NASA and the National Knowledge Foundation, have seen modest funding increases at best, while NASA’s 2012 funding fell unevenly $ 650 million to $ 17.8 billion.

Shrinking budgets have already cast a shadow over near every area of astronomy. Space-based flagship-scale missions — projects like the Hubble space telescope or its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope — are likely to only get funded once every 20 or 30 years. Cost overruns on the fantastic James Webb project — which has grown from an first $ 1 billion assess to the contemporary $ 8.7 billion price tag — are an ever-increasing part of NASA’s budget, leaving project managers of smaller missions looking nervously over their shoulders.

The NSF announced in January that it can no longer afford to help either of the large ground-based telescopes currently under construction, the Thirty Measuring device Telescope and the Giant Magellan Telescope. This throws the future of both projects into question and could cause them to lose their foreign investors to the European Extremely Large Telescope.

NASA’s planetary knowledge division also seems destined to take a significant hit, possibly losing 20 percent of its budget next year with bonus reductions through 2017. Earlier this week, the European Space Agency revealed that NASA may back out of two plotted joint Mars missions — an orbiting satellite scheduled to launch in 2016 and an advanced rover that would be the first part of a Mars sample-return mission in 2018.