Ed Weiler Says He Quit NASA Over Cuts to Mars Program
Next week, President Barack Obama will propose a $300 million cut in NASA's planetary science programs as part of his 2013 request for the agency, ScienceInsider has learned. If adopted by Congress, the 20% cut in planetary science would in all likelihood shelve NASA's ability to participate in two Mars missions to be carried out in partnership with the European Space Agency (ESA). And the former head of NASA's science mission says that the targeting of the ExoMars program by White House budget officials was the final straw leading to his resignation last fall.
"The Mars program is one of the crown jewels of NASA," says Ed Weiler. "In what irrational, Homer Simpson world would we single it out for disproportionate cuts?"
Weiler's resignation in September caught the space science community by surprise. But he says it was the culmination of a soul-sapping and ultimately unsuccessful battle with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on how to accommodate the rising cost of the James Webb Space Telescope within an overall agency budget being squeezed by efforts to reduce federal spending and shrink the deficit. "It all left a very bad taste," Weiler told ScienceInsider this morning from his house in Vero Beach, Florida.
The story begins with a 2008 agreement between NASA and ESA to share the costs of sending the Trace Gas Orbiter to Mars in a 2016 mission, followed by a European rover and a U.S. rover in 2018. Last week, ESA officials said that they were in talks with Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, to fly those missions without any help from NASA on the assumption that NASA was likely to pull out of the partnership.
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http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/02/ed-weiler-says-he-quit-nasa-over.html
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