NASA planetary science budget woes

[D H]

This is from last week (I was on vacation and then I worked like a dog to make up for the vacation):

Nature news article on the subject: http://www.nature.com/news/nasa-funding-shuffle-alarms-planetary-scientists-1.14304
Eric Berger on the subject: http://blog.chron.com/sciguy/2013/1...netary-science-will-nasa-soon-stand-for-nada/

NASA escaped the 2013 sequestration without trimming too much substance. This will not be the case for 2014, with the planetary sciences budget appearing to be taking the greatest hit.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

Tough times ahead :(

 

[zoobyshoe]

I think the government is incrementally nudging space stuff away from NASA into the private sector.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/11/12/nasa-budget-private-sector/3510345/

I suspect there's opposition to funding "pure science" in many quarters, since it has no immediate practical application.

 

[leroyjenkens]

I wish the government would take just 1% of the defense budget and put it into science. With that much money, we could colonize the sun.

 

[Vanadium 50]

Wrong.

The NSF alone has a budget about the size of 1% of Defense. That doesn't include NASA, DoE or NIH.

 

[dipole]

Eh, honestly it's hard enough for scientists who work in areas where there should be jobs to find jobs, I find it a bit hard to sympathize with people who basically won the job lottery.

They'll just have to find real work like everyone else now...

 

[leroyjenkens]

Wrong.

The NSF alone has a budget about the size of 1% of Defense. That doesn't include NASA, DoE or NIH.

What percentage of it would we need to colonize the sun?

 

[Office_Shredder]

What percentage of it would we need to colonize the sun?

Look at how much it cost just to colonize Afghanistan. Yeah we were fighting insurgents but that's probably easier than fighting the sun. Easily larger than 100% of the defense budget.