NASA science advisers dismissed when philosophies clash

An apparent clash over the role of advisers on the NASA Advisory Council led to the dismissal of two members of the council’s science committee and the resignation of a third in August, according to NAC chairman Harrison Schmitt and one of the affected scientists. The tension between NASA administrators and the scientists is centered on ongoing disputes at the space agency about the balance between the science and manned programs. Although NASA’s overall R&D funding is likely to increase by more than 7% in fiscal year 2007, virtually all of that increase is expected to go to developing new manned space vehicles. Science funding would stay flat, which follows sharp cuts that were made to the program last year.

NASA administrator Michael Griffin asked for the resignations of Wesley Huntress, a chemical physicist who spent much of his career at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, and physicist Eugene Levy, provost of Rice University in Houston, Texas. Shortly after the two received phone calls from Griffin asking them to step down, physicist Charles Kennel, former director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, offered his resignation.

Griffin asked for the resignations after consultation with Schmitt, a geologist, Apollo astronaut, and former Republican senator from New Mexico. Schmitt, who was the only scientist to walk on the Moon, was unapologetic about the dismissals. “The most important function of the council is to focus on the implementation of policy,” he said. “It is a waste of time to argue with national policies within the council, or to make recommendations without suggesting how they could be implemented.”

Levy said that although he disagrees with the direction in which NASA appears to be headed under President Bush’s Moon and Mars initiatives, he was working within the parameters of NAC’s science committee, and was chairman of a subcommittee developing plans for science that could be done when humans return to the Moon. “Returning to the Moon is fine,” he said, “but we shouldn’t lose focus on robotic scientific missions. We were trying to serve the program as it moves forward, but without losing sight of other important issues. Nobody was violating the context of the committee, but nor were we pretending to agree with everything and act as a rubber stamp.”

Levy cited two disputes with Schmitt, but said he didn’t think they rose to a level to warrant dismissal. In one, Levy argued that the committee should not make a specific budget decision that he felt was the responsibility of NASA management. The other dispute was over the content of a mission statement for returning humans to the Moon. “I’ve been on advisory committees for 30 years,” he said. “What happened here was odd,” he said of the dismissals, “especially given how little the precipitating causes were.”

Schmitt said he “wants to see us do the best science we can with the constraints we’re under.” Science research accounts for a third of NASA’s budget, “but the science community doesn’t include exploration science as science,” and that is wrong, he said. “Historically, there has been the fallacious belief that if you fund human exploration you decrease science funding. That isn’t right.”

Discussions on the advisory panel must focus on “how you implement national policy,” Schmitt said. “It’s not a matter of getting advice you don’t want to hear, it’s getting advice you can’t use.”