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...
