U.S. astronomy. You make the call, NASA chief tells scientists.

www.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 310 21 OCTOBER 2005 425 Faced with problems fixing the space shuttle, finishing the international space station, and winning support for an ambitious exploration effort, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin told researchers last week that he was “fed up” with conflicting advice from the science community. Instead of expecting more funds, Griffin explained to the federal Astronomy and Astrophysics Advisory Committee, researchers need to make tough choices about how to spend what money is available. The NASA chief ’s blunt talk comes as he and the White House negotiate the agency’s 2007 budget request, which will be released in February. Science accounts for nearly a third of NASA’s $16 billion budget, which is unlikely to increase faster than inflation in coming years—and neither is science’s share of it, Administration officials say. “The good news is that the NASA administrator is going to give us our fair share,” says Lennard Fisk, a solar physicist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and chair of the National Academies’ Space Studies Board. “The bad news is that ... we can’t execute the programs we have with the money available.” The community’s intense—and successful—lobbying to repair the Hubble Space Telescope is a good example of how a sound scientific argument can conflict with a limited budget, Griffin told the advisory panel, which was formed 2 years ago to coordinate space and ground-based astronomy funded by NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Energy. “The astronomy community did this to itself,” he said. Unless the James Webb Space Telescope— currently $1.5 billion over budget—is scaled back, he warned, “I just don’t see how to pay for other missions.” Researchers say they are willing to make