We need those dollars to build democracy in Iraq I guess. - J.

http://space.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn11422&feedId=online-news_r
ss20

Futuristic NASA think tank to be shut down

* 21:39 20 March 2007
* NewScientist.com news service
* Maggie McKee

NASA will likely shut down its Institute for Advanced Concepts, which
funds research into futuristic - and often far-out - ideas in
spaceflight and aeronautics, officials say. The controversial move
highlights the budgetary pressures the agency is facing as it struggles
to retire the space shuttles by 2010 and develop their replacement.

The NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) was established to "give
an opportunity for people outside of NASA to develop really
revolutionary and creative concepts for future aeronautics and space
missions", says Robert Cassanova, who has served as the institute's
director since its inception in February 1998.

The institute, which operates from an office in Atlanta, Georgia, US,
receives about $4 million per year from NASA. Most of that is used to
fund research into innovative technologies; recent grants include the
conceptual development of spacecraft that could surf the solar system on
magnetic fields, motion-sensitive spacesuits that could generate power
and tiny, spherical robots that could explore Mars.

Now, the future development of those and other projects has been thrown
into doubt, since NIAC was unofficially told by NASA last week that it
was to be shut down, perhaps in August. "We've been verbally informed
that that is likely to happen, but we don't have anything official yet,"
Cassanova told New Scientist.
Limited funding

The reason appears to be down to NASA's tight budget. The agency funds
NIAC through its exploration systems programme, which also pays for the
development of the shuttle's planned replacement - the Orion Crew
Exploration Vehicle and Ares rockets.

That programme is expected to lose an estimated $600 million or so in
the agency's 2008 budget due to the higher-than-expected costs of
returning the shuttles to flight after the Columbia disaster in 2003 and
new legislation limiting NASA's 2007 funding to that of 2006 (see Budget
cuts may delay shuttle replacement).

"NASA is in a very difficult position," Cassanova says. "The cuts have
to come from somewhere."

But Keith Cowing, editor of the independent website NASAWatch, which
broke news of the likely shutdown on Tuesday, says it does not make
sense for NASA to cut funding to the institute. "This is one of the few
places at NASA that embodies far-thinking, new stuff," he told New
Scientist. "When they're cutting stuff like this, they're desperate, or
stupid, or both."
Small investment

He acknowledges that NASA's chief, Mike Griffin, "does not have enough
money to do things that would normally be on NASA's plate". But he
argues that the research NIAC funds is "the sort of stuff that a very
small investment could yield a very great return".

Griffin has been criticised in the past for slashing NASA's science
budget to fund overruns in the space shuttle programme (see NASA to
divert cash from science into shuttle). If NASA now shuts down NIAC to
save $4 million in its annual $17 billion budget, it signals Griffin is
"cutting down the forest and ploughing up the fields and throwing it all
in the furnace", Cowing says.

"The more money you need, the harder it is to find," he says. "They've
been through that last year and the year before. Now they're going after
nickels and dimes."

NASA could not be reached for comment on the possible shutdown. But
Cassanova says he expects a formal, written announcement about it
"fairly soon".

"We're not complaining about NASA," he emphasises. "Obviously, we're
disappointed. A lot of good things have been accomplished over the last
nine years, and it's because NASA did put the money into it. We just
wish they had more funding to increase the pace of exploration."