$344M Cut From Station Research To Fund Moon, Mars Missions

In the agency's quest to reach the moon -- and beyond -- NASA is looking to drastically cut its funds supporting a program much closer to home: the International Space Station. NASA's European partners aren't very happy about that.

According to the UK's Guardian newspaper, the American space agency intends to limit funding to research programs aimed at determining the effects of space radiation on humans, advanced environmental controls, and the design of life support systems -- research that would undoubtably benefit a long-duration space mission.

However, budget woes (to the tune of an anticipated $5 billion shortfall for FY2006) mean any spare dollar helps -- or in this case, $344 million of them. As expected, however, not everyone agrees.

"They're cutting hundreds of millions of dollars of life sciences research that has been planned, in some cases, for decades," said Keith Cowing, a former NASA scientist. "Hundreds of contractors have been laid off at several research centers run by NASA."

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin maintains those future programs are of little importance if the agency can't afford to perform even the most basic tasks -- such as completing the station.

"It seemed to me it was getting the cart before the horse to be worrying about money for human or other life sciences when we could not assure ourselves the continued capability to be able to place people in orbit in the first place," Griffin told members of a US House committee on science recently.

"My priority became assuring that the United States would have as close to continuous capability to put people in space first and then conducting research on them after that. Utilization of [the station] for research or technology will have to be minimized in favor of getting it assembled."

The ISS is currently in a kind of fiscal netherworld. It's too expensive to utilize the full potential of the orbital laboratory, and the only other option for the ISS -- abandoning the station outright -- is not realistic as NASA and the other entities involved already have too much invested in it. NASA alone has spent $100 billion to bring the station to its current point of development.

Lack of capacity onboard the station -- and lack of a speedy, reliable way to ferry astronauts to and from the station -- has meant many European supporters of the station have watched as their programs have been delayed, or cancelled.

George Fraser, the director of the space research centre at the University of Leicester in Britain, was succinct in his assessment of the quandry NASA finds itself in.

"Following the accident of Columbia, it was obvious they had to replace the shuttle. That's where all of NASA's energies are going and beyond that to the Moon and Mars," Fraser said.

"One feels instinctively that it's on the road to nowhere much at all."

FMI: www.nasa.gov