The Plain Dealer [Cleveland] Tuesday, March 27, 2001
NASA Glenn scientists anticipate budget cuts
By David L. Chandler, Globe Staff, 3/27/2001
By JOHN MANGELS
PLAIN DEALER SCIENCE WRITER
The Bush administration's plans to downsize the International Space Station and ground some government-funded flight research are causing tremors at Cleveland's NASA Glenn Research Center and beyond.
NASA Glenn's main missions include designing scientific experiments for the orbiting space station and developing better aircraft engines. More than 1,400 people there work in space science and aeronautics-related jobs.
So any significant paring of NASA's aeronautics or space-station programs is likely to have an impact at the Cleveland center, which had only recently begun to rebound from huge budget blows during the 1990s that sapped hundreds of millions of dollars and more than 1,000 workers from its sprawling campus.
"It would take a dramatic change in the trend [of budget priorities] to make me happy," said U.S. Sen. Mike DeWine, the Ohio Republican who is a member of the appropriations subcommittee that will help decide NASA's budget.
Although he is not privy to exact numbers yet, DeWine said that based on past attempts to cut the center's funding, "folks there have every right to be concerned."
"We have had a consistent challenge in trying to protect the 3,000 jobs directly on the line at NASA Glenn," added U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a Cleveland Democrat whose district includes the center. "It is important to be vigilant."
Nationally, space-station cutbacks could hurt research aimed at producing new drugs, boosting automobiles' gas mileage and cutting pollution, some scientists said. And scaling back NASA's aeronautics studies would hinder air-travel improvements and weaken U.S. aviation firms' attempts to stay ahead of their European competitors, according to industry officials.
The amount and scope of the potential cuts and their effect at NASA Glenn and elsewhere won't begin to come into focus until next month, when Bush provides details of his 2002 budget plan and NASA reveals how much it aims to dole out to its 10 field centers.
Even then, Congress will have the chance to tinker with funding levels before finally approving a spending plan for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1.
Still, just the threat of reductions is enough to rattle NASA Glenn's fragile self-confidence. It also worries the wider aerospace community of academic scientists and aviation-industry officials who say they will feel the ripple effects if the Bush administration and NASA follow through.
"We're really in the rumor stage, but I am concerned about what the budget will mean to NASA aeronautics," said Carol Cash of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics' public policy committee. AIAA represents aerospace engineers and scientists. "We're concerned about programs that might go away [from NASA Glenn], and we don't know what role Glenn will play in future programs."
Cash was part of a 27-member team of aerospace scientists and business leaders who briefed Ohio's congressional delegation last week about the harm that reduced funding would cause at NASA Glenn, the Air Force Research Laboratory in Dayton, and for the aviation business as a whole.
"We're currently scheduled to build three of the 10 science experiment racks for the space station," said a NASA Glenn scientist who asked not to be named. "And we're a propulsion research center. The agency's in this chaotic turmoil and the Bush administration is moving at warp speed. Is there good reason for concern? You bet."
Two things are driving the apprehension.
First, NASA must deal with $4 billion in cost overruns for the International Space Station, which is being assembled in orbit. Under White House orders to curb the debt, NASA will eliminate a dormitory and rescue craft on the station - moves that, for now, will shrink the astronaut crew from seven to three.
"There's little question that if you cut back the level of crew, it will have an adverse effect, stringing out the time scale to accomplish the experiments as well as limiting the scope and variety," said David Black, the space-station program's former chief scientist.
Black now heads a coalition of universities, including Case Western Reserve University, that do space-based research. He said scientists "may have to wait five or six years to follow up on experiments," an eternity compared to the pace of Earth-based science.
"If they don't give us the tools to do [research], the space station will be a shell, a tin can with no purpose," said Dr. Larry DeLucas, a University of Alabama at Birmingham researcher who did protein crystal-growing experiments in the space shuttle in 1993 and is designing more experiments for the space station.
"If we take at face value what [NASA] has said, they're building a research lab with enough room for the janitors but no room for the research," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense and space-policy organization.
Station cutbacks will be felt on Earth as well as in space, some researchers warn.
"We are concerned that this may drastically affect the microgravity research programs," wrote Vedha Nayagam, a NASA Glenn microgravity researcher, in an e-mail message last week that was widely circulated to his science colleagues.
At NASA Glenn, more than 240 people work in the Microgravity Science Division, which is designing combustion and fluids experiments for future space station missions. The results are supposed to provide insight into how engines and heating systems can burn fuel more efficiently, and improve fire safety in space and on Earth.
The second reason NASA Glenn personnel and others are concerned is that Bush's proposed budget directs NASA to "eliminate lower-priority aeronautics programs," without specifying which ones.
The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that has influence with the Bush administration and Republican lawmakers, has a more radical plan. Its outline for an ideal budget would scrap NASA's aeronautics research programs by 2003, saying that NASA's military work could be done by the Defense Department and that its assistance to commercial aviation companies is a needless corporate handout.
NASA Glenn is NASA's primary center for aircraft propulsion. More than 1,100 people work in its aeronautics programs, designing safer, quieter, higher-power and more fuel-stingy engines for commercial and military aircraft. The center also is working on a "combined-cycle" engine that would provide power both in Earth's atmosphere and as a rocket in space.
NASA does the kind of basic aeronautics research that commercial aircraft companies can't because of the cost and risk, argues the Aerospace Industry Association. Far from a reduction, it wants the government to boost NASA's aerospace budget by $20 billion in the next five years.
The organization believes such an increase would help fund technology solutions to air travel delays and safety concerns, as well as beat back a threat to the American aviation industry.
The European Union in January proposed a $100 billion public-private partnership to make its aeronautics industry the world leader by 2020.
"I really consider the funding of these [aeronautics] programs at NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration to be an investment that will produce a return to the public that's much greater than the money put in," said Robert Robeson, AIAA's vice president for civil aviation. "You've got a traveling public and Congress that's madder than a wet hen" about air travel problems, "yet people are talking about whacking the FAA and NASA aeronautics budgets. You'd think someone would scratch their heads and say, What about that?'"
Plain Dealer reporter Tom Diemer contributed to this article.
©2001 THE PLAIN DEALER.
