NASA

An article about NASA funding in the Washington Post. I'm really of two minds on this. It is exciting to consider sending manned missions to the moon and to Mars, and I think that is part of what NASA should be doing. The budget approval is great. However, it still looks like this new "vision" will take a big chunk out of the science that NASA funds. O'Keefe, the current administrator of NASA, does not seem interested at all in science. He wants to move NASA to an "operations" organization rather than a scientific one. His plans seem to involve phasing out science entirely. As a space scientist this scares me on a very basic level (what about my career? will I be able to get funding?), but even stepping back from that the plan doesn't make sense to me. Science drives operations. New discoveries open up the way for more experiments. If you cut science out of the picture you'll get by for a couple years, but then what? Without basic research setting down the foundations, future operations will have no direction, and that seems pointless to me.