Budget Outlook

Lawmakers hope alliances will avoid deep space cuts, Houston Chronicle

“The trick will be to show what manned space flight can do for the nation, rather than what the nation can do for manned space flight,” said Pace, a former NASA associate administrator. … With difficult times facing the space agency, critics such as Alan Stern, an astrophysicist who served as an associate administrator, are raising questions about the agency’s habits. Stern sees “a NASA culture that has lost control of spending.” “The costs of badly run NASA projects,” he added in a New York Times op-ed article, “are paid for with cutbacks or delays in NASA programs that didn’t go over budget.”