Astronauts blast science budget cuts

Published: Mar 03, 2006
Source: www.cnn.com



WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- The Bush administration's focus on big, expensive space missions is starving budgets for some of NASA's most productive small-scale science programs, astronomers told the U.S. Congress on Thursday.

"The 2007 budget is tilted to an unhealthy extent to large missions," said Joseph Taylor, who helped craft a U.S. 10-year survey for astrophysics.

Taylor and others who help chart the course of U.S. space science told the U.S. House of Representatives Science Committee that cutting or scrapping some smaller NASA programs will cut into an already shrinking pool of talented young scientists who work for the U.S. space agency.continue..