This is not a NASA Website. You might learn something. It's YOUR space agency. Get involved. Take it back. Make it work - for YOU.
Education

Losing a Generation of Planetary Scientists

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
December 26, 2012
Filed under

Editorial: U.S. Planetary Program Poised to Lose a Generation of Scientists, Planetary Exploration Newsletter
“National Research Council reports have long recognized these programs as fundamental to US solar system exploration efforts. The recent NRC planetary decadal survey gave them high priority, independent of the fiscal situation (the worse the fiscal climate, the more important these programs are to sustaining national capabilities in this area). Unfortunately, policy decisions by NASA leadership have resulted in selection rates for competitive proposals plummeting to historic lows with negative impact.”

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

2 responses to “Losing a Generation of Planetary Scientists”

  1. Helen Simpson says:
    0
    0

    Without statistics about the total number of planetary scientists and their students competing for these awards, this comes across as an “entitlement” sort of argument. In no way is someone who wants to be a planetary scientist entitled to be a planetary scientist at taxpayer expense. If, for example, the low selection rates are a matter of a lot more applicants wanting funding, then that’s just a sign of a science community that hasn’t managed itself very well. If, on the other hand, it’s a matter of cuts to federal funding, such that a community that had managed itself on the basis of expected level funding found the rug pulled out from under them, that would be another matter. This would be a more effective argument if the latter were the case, and explained outright.

    Are the “policy decisions” referred to here cuts in funding? Or are they perhaps statements that funds aren’t going to reflexively escalate to meet demands of a poorly managed planetary science community? I’d be more sympathetic to the case being made here if it were the former.

  2. cb450sc says:
    0
    0

    It’s not just planetary – this is happening across the board at SMD. My own experience with astrophysics is that not only has the oversubscription rate gone up, the size of the individual awards has decreased substantially. It used to be that a given grant might fund a post-doc for 2-3 years, now this has to be patched together out of the sum of many grants. I would guess the number of proposals a successful researcher needs to write has increased by an order of magnitude vs. something like 15 years ago.