Future Thoughts

The past couple of entries are focused on NASA and its budget woes. I hate to see it happen to an agency that still does more with its money before breakfast than most other agencies combined do all day long. That’s not to say that NASA doesn’t have its problems, but when you look at what the agency does with the money it gets, it’s pretty much been a blueprint for our future in science and technology.

But, this is as much about NASA today as it is about the sciences, and how we approach them in our time. Back when I was a kid, we were about to land people on the Moon. There was  huge push for more science in the schools. Lots of planetarium facilities got built because people saw a value in teaching about space travel and astronomy.  And, there’s absolutely everything right about that. Science helps us understand our world, our cosmos from the physical point of view.  And, NASA has been a big part of that.

Today, several decades later, the dreams of space travel and exploration are still there, but as I pointed out a few entries ago, they’re held slightly differently by different generations. The up-and-coming folks want to “experience” and “know” science, not just dwell on the glories of the past.  More power to ‘em. It’s a way of knowing that you can’t discount, particularly in the face of so many on this planet who would rather push twaddle about creationist fantasies or alien abductions, or ill-thought-out rants against science and technology that show more ignorance and intolerance than they do rational thought.

This is why I still think NASA is one of our best avenues to the future for technological advance and exploration. So, yeah, it does hurt to see it pinched to the bone; forced to cut one program to pay for another, when the waste from other programs our taxpayer dollars fund could easily keep NASA from having to make do with its relatively small budget (compared to others I pointed out yesterday).

I’m the kid who built an Apollo capsule for her junior high science project (my folks helped). I’m the one who expected to be living on the Moon in my dotage. And, I’m the one who logs in every day to see the latest pictures from Mars, Mercury, Venus, Saturn, and other fantastic places in the cosmos. NASA (and its sibling programs in Europe and Asia) brings us those things; it also brings us ways of knowing that are unmatched in human history.  So, yeah, I’d like to see NASA get more money. Every dollar spent at NASA gets paid to someone who pays their house payment, feeds their kids, pays taxes, and brings us priceless knowledge.

NASA’s Budget Cuts Hit a Rover

It turns out that (according to this blog entry at CNN) NASA’s budget cuts and cost overruns in another Mars program now mean that some scientists in the Mars Rover program will lose their jobs and that the Mars Spirit Rover will be shut down (hibernated) to save money. It may be awakened again (presumably if the money ever comes back).

So… we cut jobs at NASA, put a working spacecraft to sleep, and this benefits the country how? Is that saved money going to education? Health care? Human services? Skeptical cat is skeptical.

UPDATE: A hearty thanks and a polite curtsy to Fred Kiesche of TexasBestGrok, who points out in the comments that apparently there’s a change of plan for the MER missions. Now, according to AP and other sources, the Mars Rovers won’t be cut or shut down. Good news. I wonder what happened to cause that turnaround?

Diverting NASA Funds to Education: What Will That Accomplish?

We go through this every election cycle or so: some candidate wants to make a push for more education so they go to NASA for the money. NASA’s funding is a pretty small fraction of the federal budget in the U.S., as you can see from the chart below (that shows budgets for the past few years). Yet, it stimulates many sectors beyond space exploration and astronomy.

Notice that the Department of Education gets $61 billion dollars. The Department of Transportation gets $56 Billion. More than $400 billion goes to debt servicing. And, Defense gets $$600 billion while Health and Human Services gets nearly $700 Billion. Curiously, I just read a web page that traces the “faith based funding” initiatives in this country, a noble if perhaps vaguely unconstitutional use of taxpayer money.  In 2004, such funding, which now appears to be money spent to help the government meddle in Americans’ spiritual and intimate lives while purporting to help them out of poverty, etc., was promised access to $40 billion of taxpayer funds. This year (2008) the “faith-based” budget is down to $75 million, and apparently now that it’s a community initiative and not-as-faith-based as it used to be, they get less. And, there’s this little matter of a war that we’re paying for, moving into the $1.2 trillion dollar range.(That’s T for Trillion folks… enough money to fund education several times over, with some to spare for infrastructure upgrades and health care.)

So, how does tossing a small portion (a few hundred million) of the NASA budget (as Obama wants to do to postpone the Constellation project) help education? I’d challenge every candidate to answer that question because diverting that little bit to an education budget that is many times the size of the amounts Obama wants to take from an already-thin NASA budget is very much like cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. And for no good reason. If education is truly broken and $61 billion isn’t fixing it, then an additional few hundred million taken from an agency that is already doing its best to keep the country on a forward-looking footing just doesn’t make sense. Unless, of course, there’s some political or other reason why you would want to do this. Are there benefactors looking to make book on this diversion of funds?  Political paybacks disguised as “reality”?

The future of this country, not just in space exploration, but in technological development AND education is just too important to play base politics with. If you don’t have the jobs at NASA (or in other tech sectors that NASA drives) then what exactly are you educating the kids for, Mr. and Mrs. Candidate for President/Senate/House? Read more about Obama’s push to shovel money from NASA to education here.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t strengthen education or that money shouldn’t go to community-based groups to help those in need. We already have programs to do that and we should work to make them accessible to all Americans who need it (without the preaching), and run more efficiently.

But, cutting NASA, an agency that is, essentially, growing our technological seed corn for us, is not the way to do it. I suggest the candidates (Obama in particular, but they’re all in need of a wakeup call), look elsewhere first. And figure out how to lead the U.S. with forward-looking 21st-century ideas, not worn-out 20th-century memes.

Chart from Federal Budget.com

Do your own research on how much money our government spends in which sectors by Googling such terms as “NASA budget”, “US budget”, “war spending”, “Hillary NASA” “Obama NASA” and other terms that will help you understand what our tax dollars go for.

Or Engage?

Generation Y Internet-savvy

But Expects Different Things from NASA

I read an article yesterday about a discussion at a symposium held by NASA, the National Space Society, and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics that explored the attitudes toward space held by Generation Y. These 8- to 31-year-olds are where the next generation of taxpaying space enthusiasts are coming from, but it seems that they’re not so connected to space in the same their parents and grandparents have been. This information is not a terribly big surprise, coming as it does at a time when budgets for space exploration, science education, and research are heading downhill at the same time we have a huge rise in the technology of global interconnectivity.

It’s also not too surprising that this generation, when pressed for information on their interests in space, seems to be saying that NASA needs to give them more real-time insight and connectivity to the topics being explored by the agency. Gen Y is the first to be so totally connected for most of their lives by the Internet and instant communications for much of their lives. They’re comfortable with globalization and want to be involved in science and exploration, but aren’t too interested in hearing about the past glories of space exploration.

This is interesting food for thought for educators and science center folk who are reaching out to this age group. I’ve been in many a conversation with such colleagues, and some are still wondering what these audiences want. Or, they’re trying to tailor currently accessible programming to this generation’s tastes. It’s a challenge, but not too different from the ones outreach people have always faced when trying to get the word out about science and exploration to vastly different generations.

Some Protoplanetary Disks have Water Vapor

So, not only have astronomers found methane in the atmosphere of a planet circling another star, but now CalTech astronomers have found water vapor in the spinning disks of gas and dust surrounding other stars. These disks, called protoplanetary disks, or “proplyds” for short, are where planets are born.

The Earth and other planets of the solar system formed in a proplyd beginning more than 4.5 billion years ago, and so we look to other systems to understand how planets are born, and how ours looked at that time. The image here is a protoplanetary disk in the Orion Nebula studied by Hubble Space Telescope.

The astronomers used NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and the Keck II telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawai’i to study the infrared wavelengths of light emitted by from these disks. The chemical fingerprints of water vapor showed up in disks around the stars DR Tau and AS 205A. The next step was to figure out where the vapor exists in the disk around each star. So, the science team (consisting of astronomers from CalTech, the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, SRON, and the University of Texas at Austin) made high-resolution measurements at shorter wavelengths of infrared light. The data showed the clumps of material where the water resides were moving at fast speeds, meaning that the clumps are closer to their stars, possibly in regions where Earth-like planets might be forming.

Now, you might think, “Okay, so they’ve found water vapor at a couple of stars. So what?” Astronomers expect to make more observations of dozens of similar-type stars, and the two instruments they’ve used should turn up more water vapor in more proplyds (if it exists). The bigger implications lie with figuring out how water concentrations evolve and survive in protoplanetary disks and eventually create oceans (or ice-covered planets). Who knows? What scientists find may help us understand how Earth got its oceans. Stay tuned!