If you haven’t seen it yet, a NRC panel released a report today titled “An Assessment of Balance in NASA’s Science Programs.” Their news release is here.

Here are some excerpts:

Finding 1. NASA is being asked to accomplish too much with too little. The agency does not have the necessary resources to carry out the tasks of completing the International Space Station, returning humans to the Moon, maintaining vigorous space and Earth science and microgravity life and physical sciences programs, and sustaining capabilities in aeronautical research.

Recommendation 1. Both the executive and the legislative branches of the federal government need to seriously examine the mismatch between the tasks assigned to NASA and the resources that the agency has been provided to accomplish them and should identify actions that will make the agency’s portfolio of responsibilities sustainable.

Finding 2. The program proposed for space and Earth sciences is not robust; it is not properly balanced to support a healthy mix of small, moderate-size, and large missions and an underlying foundation of scientific research and advanced technology projects; and it is neither sustainable nor capable of making adequate progress toward the goals that were recommended in the National Research Council’s decadal surveys.

The question I would raise out of this: Is it time for a government-wide reorg of Earth and space sciences that would include scrapping NASA as it now exists?

The committee is concerned that the big-ticket items (i.e. manned moon/Mars) are being emphasized at the expense of the smaller projects, especially in the Earth sciences. My question is, when we already have NSF and NOAA exploring Earth science questions, why do we need NASA to be pursuing that research as well?

If we want to do high-tech exploration, which is much more an engineering challenge than a basic research endeavor, let’s separate out the functions. Let’s have one agency that focuses on exploration and an agency or two that pursues the basic research questions. It no longer makes sense (if it ever did) that we have an agency focused both on the engineering challenges of flying the ISS or getting people back to the moon and on Mars, while also trying to do basic research on Earth’s climate system.

Asking NASA to do both missions without much specific direction from Congress, or directions from Congress that often contradict direction from the White House, sends confusing messages to NASA about their mission. A similar problem is occurring within NIST, where Congressional appropriators have made no specific appropriations for various programs in favor of giving NIST a pool of money and telling them “we expect you to carry out programs X, Y and Z with this.”