NASA aeronautics lacks money, relevance, NRC says

For more than a year, NASA has been taking flak from legislators and scientists for ongoing cuts to science missions as the agency shifts its priorities to a new manned space vehicle and a goal, mandated by President Bush, of returning humans to the Moon and eventually sending them to Mars. Now concern is growing on Capitol Hill and in the aeronautics industry that NASA’s aeronautics program, represented by the first “A” in NASA, is being underfunded to such an extent that it might be, in the words of a recent National Research Council report, on “a glide path to irrelevance.”

Two recent NRC reports, one a decadal survey of civil aeronautics and the other a study of the aeronautics programs at NASA, raise serious concerns about the administration’s cuts in aeronautics funding and the space agency’s failure to restructure the program to reflect its shrinking budget. The decadal survey, which offers a detailed list of “51 challenges” NASA should address so as to maintain its aeronautics program, notes that funding has been “severely cut during the past few years, falling from over $1 billion in fiscal year 2004 to a proposed $724 million in fiscal year 2007.”

The budget cuts are even worse than that, Michael Romanowski, a representative of the Aerospace Industries Association of America, told the space and aeronautics subcommittee of the House Committee on Science in July. Funding for NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate was $1.54 billion in FY 1994, he said, and 13 years of consistent cuts have resulted in a more than 50% reduction in federal support.

The NRC study on aeronautics challenges faced by NASA says the space agency’s aeronautics program is “overshadowed in resources, managerial attention, and political support by the agency’s principal mission of space exploration and discovery.” The administration’s Moon and Mars initiatives have made the relatively lower status of aeronautics within NASA “if anything more pronounced,” the study says.

NASA’s aeronautics program “supports research and development in advanced airframe, engine, emissions, air safety, and air traffic control technologies,” the study says, and has historically played a critical role in the development and global leadership of the US aeronautics industry. But a lack of a national consensus on the role of government involvement in civilian aviation persists.

“On the one hand, the community of industry, academic, and other … experts support an expansive public [R&D] program with NASA playing a lead role,” the NRC study says. “On the other hand, successive administrations and sessions of Congress have over the past seven or eight years reduced NASA’s aeronautics budget without articulating how the programs should be scaled back.” NASA has tried to keep most of its aeronautics programs running with less and less money, and as a result, the programs are losing their value to the aeronautics industry, the study concludes.

Although NASA’s overall budget is on track to remain flat for FY 2007, the R&D budget will actually increase by about 7.6% to $12.2 billion because the agency has moved money around. But almost all of the increase will go to human space vehicle development, leaving aeronautics with a 7% cut. And that cut would be even bigger without the $100 million House appropriators have added back to the aeronautics budget. Science spending will rise only 0.8%.

The problem at NASA aeronautics, the NRC study concludes, is “extremely acute.”