You would have thought there might be a little joy at the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) after the fiscal year 2006 federal budget was released last month. With the success of the Mars rover missions, NASA's space scientists gained the astronomical equivalent of rock star status, and the agency's modest budget increase of 2.4% was four times better than the average for government R&D. But instead, the mood is an odd combination of confusion, gloom, and struggle. What's going on over there? It starts with two problems. Long before anyone started thinking about the 2006 budget, NASA officials were struggling with what to do about the Hubble Space Telescope. Send astronauts up to fix it? No, said NASA chief Sean O'Keefe, as he left office; too risky. Wrong, said a National Academies panel. A robotic fix is too costly, and a human servicing mission is safe enough. Other proposals were floated, including one for a new telescope that could look for dark energy and dark matter. The president, perhaps feeling saturated by all of this, didn't include servicing money in his budget, leaving scientists to debate priorities.
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