The Crunch Comes

In November and December, there were ups and downs for Griffin. The positive event was that Congress passed legislation that gave the agency the funds Bush had requested for FY 2006—$16.5 billion. It also, for the first time, formally endorsed the Vision for Space Exploration (i. e., Constellation) in the NASA Authorization Act of 2005.20 Congress also directed NASA to retain the general balance between human spaceflight and science, a directive not so welcome for Griffin in view of the setbacks he experienced in this period.

Griffin desperately wanted to speed up the development of Orion-Ares I, as the shuttle successor and initial capsule-rocket component of the Constellation Program was called. But what he discovered was that the shuttle cost projec­tions were now running $3 billion to $5 billion higher than estimated in 2004. One reason lay with the lengthy and expensive repairs. Also, instead of launch expenses declining as the shuttle neared its rescheduled 2010 retirement date, they would require virtually what they had cost in earlier years.21

Griffin went to OMB in November and asked for a realistic budget that returned the money taken away from NASA’s projected five-year budget just before he became administrator. He also wanted a substantial raise for NASA. The request was for almost a 9% increase. OMB responded with less than half that figure, with most of that going to Katrina-related facility repairs. Griffin warned that unless he got substantial additional program funds, he would be forced “to hold science’s budget fixed at FY 2006 levels for the next five years.” That would hurt all science programs, including the robotic Mars effort.22 Sci­ence editorialized that NASA was “back to eating seed corn.” It commented that the issue was not just human spaceflight versus science. When push came to shove, Griffin would have to go with lunar research over Mars research because the Moon came first in the Moon-Mars initiative.23

Many of the individuals who were involved in the post-Columbia interagency committee meetings in late 2003 and who assisted O’Keefe in getting the Vision for Space Exploration adopted were no longer in government or had moved to positions in government different from that decision period. Bush and Cheney were still around, but both preoccupied with issues other than space. Neither had given any indication, at least publicly, of wanting to use political capital to help NASA. Nevertheless, Griffin appealed beyond OMB to the president to get the money he believed the agency had to have to do its job.

Bush—like most presidents—did not customarily intervene in agency-OMB disputes, but Griffin was forcing the issue. In December, the day of decision arrived. The key protagonists at the meeting in the Oval Office were OMB di­rector Josh Bolton and Griffin. Bush, Cheney, presidential science advisor John Marburger, a state department representative, and various other high-ranking aides were present.24

It was quickly clear that the big raise Griffin wanted would not fly when the administration was still scrambling to pay for higher priorities, including the Iraq War and Katrina recovery. So how was NASA to pay the huge and unantici­pated shuttle costs? Bolton gave the OMB position, which was to end the shuttle early, arguing that it was a dead-end program. But terminating the shuttle meant also abandoning the space station and breaking a host of international com­mitments, as Griffin pointed out. Bush’s legislative aide told the president that Congress would not let him kill the shuttle even if he had wanted to do so.

The next option discussed was to take money from science—the five-year flatlining strategy Griffin had warned might happen without a significant NASA raise. Griffin felt forced by his desire to protect Constellation and narrow the shuttle succession gap to defend the science-flatline option. Bolton opposed him, and Marburger spoke up for science. In the end, Bush sought a measure of compromise. He gave NASA a modest raise. The shuttle would continue, as would the space station. Science would get a small increase, perhaps an aver­age of 1% a year for five years. Exploration systems would also go up, but they would have to help fund the shuttle costs.

Griffin had said “not one thin dime” would be taken from science to sup­port human spaceflight, specifically the Constellation Program. Now, thanks to the White House funding decision, money would come from both science and human exploration systems to pay for the shuttle shortfall. Griffin’s goal to narrow the four-year shuttle successor gap could now not be achieved.25 For the robotic MEP, these presidential choices created an environment that virtually guaranteed austerity for at least the remainder of Bush’s term.

In February 2006, Bush’s budget request was announced. NASA got addi­tional funds for Katrina repairs. Science at NASA received a 1.5% raise, but the five-year projection showed that mark declining to an average of 1% a year. Mars funding was cut in half. The Science magazine news report on the budget stated, “The prospects for NASA-funded scientists are among the bleakest in the federal government.”26

The reaction from scientists and their congressional supporters was immedi­ate and negative. Huntress, a former director of NASA’s Science Directorate, criticized NASA for “using money intended for science programs to fund con­tinued operation of the shuttle.” Like OMB, he could not agree with that trade­off, since the shuttle was “a program scheduled for termination.” Congressman Sherwood Boehlert said he was “greatly concerned” with the science cutbacks.27

Among the scientists, the planetary researchers were most alarmed. Rita Beebe, a New Mexico State University researcher and member of the NAS SSB, complained that the planetary scientists had been especially hit by the cuts. “The proposed budget transforms an existing, vibrant program into a stagnant holding pattern,” she declared. Beebe suggested that NASA was “reenacting the events of the 1970s,” a time when the planetary program went from an active series of missions to the doldrums. She called the damage “immediate and in­creasingly irreversible.”28 An astrobiology researcher, Rocco Mancinelli, called the budget “a disaster,” coming just when “instruments aimed at understanding the fingerprints of life. . . are being built for the Mars Science Laboratory.”29 The Planetary Society (of which Huntress was the current president) launched a Save Our Science (SOS) campaign among its members.30

Griffin called the scientific response “a hysterical reaction, a reaction out of all proportion to the damage done.”31 There was still a great deal of money for science, he pointed out, and the 1% five-year raise was better than the 0.5% cut borne by federal nondefense discretionary programs generally. Griffin’s words seemed to make many scientists all the angrier, and they reminded him of his “not one thin dime” pledge the year before. Fisk pointed out that 1% was no raise; it translated into “a major retrenchment” given inflation.32

Fisk and his SSB decided that they should take the lead in building a united front among space scientists. Unless they did so, the various disciplines and specialties would fight among themselves and weaken their position. At best, a united community might be able to appeal to Congress to enlarge the science budget. The lawmakers made their decisions regarding the president’s budget proposal over the course of 2006. At minimum, the scientists would try to agree among themselves as to what were top priorities that had to be protected, rather than having those priorities determined by NASA managers or Congress.

Cleave, Griffin’s embattled science chief, bore the brunt of the scientists’ ire. She was pilloried for cancelling a small mission in March—an asteroid project called Dawn—shortly after she had promised a congressional committee that she would be attentive to such missions. These kinds of smaller projects benefit – ted academic scientists and their graduate students. Critics charged that NASA seemed intent on protecting the larger “flagship” missions and the institutions behind them, such as JPL. They were flagships, Griffin insisted, because the scientific community, via the NAS, had helped make them so through NAS decadal surveys of science priorities.33 The “big” versus “little” science balance clearly was an issue, as was Mars versus non-Mars planetary science.