NASA's billion-dollar budget for space science survived relatively unscathed for the current year, and officials are hopeful that the same will be true for fiscal 1988. But flight time, not money, is the biggest immediate problem for scientists, acknowledged John Holtz, assistant director of NASA's Astrophysics Division.
"We need these alternatives to support the PIs [principal investigators] due to the lack of flight opportunities in the wake of the down time and extensions in the [shuttle] manifest," Holtz said. The astronomy and physics programs received the majority of the funds for space science, $528 million in fiscal 1987, with planetary exploration receiving $374 million and the life sciences $70 million.
The space program relies heavily on the work of university-based researchers and their graduate students, who design many of the experiments and later help to analyze the data. In many cases, the projects serve as material for dissertations and theses. ...
