Mr. HD hits the nail on the head relative to the manned space program. This should be cut way back and reduced in priority, as proposed by physicists Bob Park and Steven Weinberg. But then we have people like Dr. Phil Plait, the bad astronomer, pontificating that Park and Weinberg don’t know what they are talking about.

Plus, I’m not interested in doing earth science; it’s fine stuff, but it’s not my gig. It’s not why I spent all that time to get a Ph.D. Now, that might sound selfish, but it’s not really: if I’m going to do stuff I’m not interested in, why shouldn’t I take that quant job or go to work for Google and make 2-3x the money? So that’s another scientist gone. Multiply that by the number of space scientists who don’t want to change disciplines. Interest is why we do this, isn’t it? And once NASA gets out of the habit of funding science missions (and they already are, getting out of the habit), the science will head over to ESA, just like HEP headed over to CERN. We cancelled TPF-I; ESA is still working on Darwin. I’ve already watched a bunch of my European colleagues leave NASA and go back to ESA.

If you want to rail against something, rail against the manned space program. That’s where the lion’s share of NASA’s money is going, and that’s completely scientifically useless.

And if you are interested in astrobiology you may be interested in Robert Hazen’s book.

By the way, I work in cancer research and we do need more money for that. Resistance should be futile…

That as I understand it has been the argument against space science since its initial inception. Its also why scientists have to find ways to make even pure discoveries and the search for knowledge relevant to the the mass public that has very little worth for science.

I work in Information Technology with many college graduates who are very intelligent and very very few of them have any thirst or interest in gaining pure unadulterated knowledge of the universe we live in. A select few of them find it even blasphemous that we try to understand the universe.

On a side note, If I hear one more of them talk about the end of the world in 2012, or Obama’s New World Order. I’m going to pull my hair out.

if we compare the budgets for NASA and NOAA with those of the defense department or homeland security?

Or Social Security. It’s the biggest single line item in the federal budget, and no rational person thinks that mess is even on the same continent as sanity. Problem is that some people consider it holy writ, and go into fits of religious apoplexy if someone so much as suggests a tiny change.

in a climate of limited budgets.

What climate is this? The one with the trillion dollars in stimulus?

balance budgets so that we’re doing a better job to foster the next the generation of scientific leaders

How does balancing the budget do that? To balance this budget you need to hack off about 1/3 to 1/2 of the federal government, or raise taxes over 100%. You think this is something we can all just hold hands and roll up our sleeves (not in that order) and fix in one fiscal year? This mess has been building since the 1940s.

You think the politicians care? Any of them in any Party? Here in California, with people struggling, the “Oh, we care for the pooooooor!” Democrats passed the largest increase of completely regressive state taxes ever seen in the history of this country. And did the media question a single scrap of it? They don’t care either beyond the next ratings book.

Suggest that a single, precious holy government worker gets laid off (you know, like what happens to everyone else in the world outside of a public job), and the politicos go into the same apoplexy mentioned above. Make a dent in their power? What? Have that man arrested? What? He’s done nothing wrong? then pass a law to make something he did illegal, and then arrest him!

An Orwell character said the future can be represented by a boot stomping on a face. The real image now is a government drone sitting in a cubicle surfing the Internet for porn all day. Or a legislator going on vacation- oops! I mean a “fact finding mission” paid for by sales taxes coughed up by the poor trying to buy groceries.