U. may benefit from proposed cuts to NASA moon exploration

David Spergel ’82, chair of the astrophysics department, said in an e-mail that he thought the plan was “good for the agency, the manned program and for science.”

Since President George W. Bush announced the project in 2004, NASA has directed all spare funding toward a mission to return American astronauts to the moon by 2020, a move that reduced the amount of funding dedicated to research.

Obama’s policy realignment, in addition to his proposal to increase NASA’s budget by $6 billion over the next five years, would bring more money to universities for research, Donald Kniffen, vice president for science at the Universities Space Research Association, told The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The $6 billion is in addition to roughly $94 billion requested by NASA for the next five years, NASA spokesman Michael Cabbage said in an e-mail.

Spergel said he thought the moon mission was poorly designed. “NASA has been adrift,” he said. “The Bush ‘moon-first’ plan ... was ill-conceived and poorly motivated. It envisioned sending men back to the moon without any well-motivated goal.”

Spergel served as chair of the Astrophysics Subcommittee of the NASA Advisory Council during the Bush administration.

Astrophysics major Aaron Smargon ’11 also supported the proposal.

“I rarely agree with any of the Obama administration’s decisions, but here I must applaud President Obama for doing what is rational and what is in the best interest of our survival as a species,” Smargon said in an e-mail. “We simply should not be sending human beings into space right now when we can do the same with robots for a fraction of the cost, both in terms of money and lives.”

Astrophysics professor Neta Bahcall said in an e-mail that she supports Obama’s plan in light of the country’s “current budget conditions.”

The moon mission is an “unnecessary and expensive detour when Mars should be the primary goal for manned exploration,” Khee-Gan Lee GS, a student in the astrophysics department, said in an e-mail. Lee is also a columnist for The Daily Princetonian.

Astrophysics professor Jim Stone criticized the motivation behind the moon mission. “Manned space flight is driven by politics, not science,” he said, noting that competition with other countries like China might have been a driving factor.

But Katy Ghantous GS, a student in the plasma physics program, said that the moon mission has merit.

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“I don’t care about the moon personally, but the underlying drive for the mission is important,” she explained. “You need missions to understand more about science.”

Cabbage also noted the complementary relationship between research and exploration. “The purpose of the International Space Station, which has been orbiting Earth for 10 years and will continue to do so for at least 10 more, is primarily for research,” he said.

Professors at Princeton said they supported redirecting NASA’s funds away from its own human spaceflight projects.

Lee, calling NASA “the watchword for bureaucratic inefficiency,” said he supported the encouragement of private investment in spaceflight.

Spergel cited the initiative’s support for private companies in the aerospace industry and its efforts to make access to space cheaper as positive moves. He added that the plan also encourages rocket development, which will contribute to the effort to send astronauts to Mars.

Based on NASA’s budget estimate, earth sciences will see an overall 60 percent increase in funding, while funding for planetary sciences will increase by 20 percent over the next five years. During the 2011 fiscal year, about $5 billion in funding will go toward scientific research in fields including geosciences, planetary sciences, astrophysics and heliophysics, according to the estimate.

Astrophysics will receive $1.08 billion in 2011, a slight decrease from the $1.10 billion it received this year, though funding for astrophysics will increase each year after that through 2015.

Spergel noted that NASA typically funds roughly 20 percent of all research proposals it receives, but that the University has a funding success rate of more than 50 percent. He explained that if more research initiatives can be funded, the success rate may increase to 60 percent.

There could potentially be more research fellows in the astrophysics department as well, Spergel said, though he added that he did not anticipate a significant impact on the department, since the bulk of the increased funding will go toward geosciences.

Astrophysics professor Jim Stone said in an e-mail that NASA currently funds undergraduate and graduate students in research projects, adding that the University would receive additional funding if it keeps “doing good science.”

“I do think it is a good idea for NASA to support science, because with their input and engineering expertise, we can do far more than what scientists could do on their own,” Stone said.

Bahcall explained that the University has previously received NASA funding for research projects such as a cosmic microwave background experiment, which revealed the remnants of the early universe and the “original seeds” which formed its structure.

She said that she hoped the increased funding will finance research on dark matter and dark energy, in addition to research in cosmology concerning black holes and extra-solar planets.

NASA will also devote $3.1 billion over the next five years to funding for propulsion research, which Ghantous said would be useful. Plasma physics is used in propulsion research, she explained, adding that “plasma propulsion is quite promising.”

“There is definitely overlap between plasma physics and astrophysics,” Ghantous said. “Plasma is everywhere in the universe.”

Ghantous noted, however, that the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, a federally run laboratory affiliated with the University, receives most of its funding from the Department of Energy.

Smargon said that Obama’s proposal was fitting for the current state of astronomical research.

“We need to focus on learning the tools requisite for manned space exploration in the long term, and not on wasting valuable resources to play out childhood fantasies in the present,” Smargon said.