NASA Making Changes to its Astrobiology Program
NASA’s Astrobiology Program Evolving to Meet the Future, NASA
“To better support the broad, interdisciplinary field of astrobiology – the study of the origin, evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe – NASA is announcing a new programmatic infrastructure for the Astrobiology Program.”
“By the end of 2019, the Astrobiology Program will establish several virtual collaboration structures called “research coordination networks” (RCNs) that will replace the Program’s virtual institute, the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI). With this shift, NASA’s overall investment in the Astrobiology Program is not changing. Astrobiology is an important part of NASA’s portfolio and Congress formally added Astrobiology as one of NASA’s ten objectives in 2017. This will only change how this interdisciplinary research is coordinated between researchers.”
With all of the Acronym Dance that we observe at NASA one wonders how researchers do any actual work. This has to be frustrating.
Probably a cost saving measure. Looks like the NAI has/had 8 permanent staff, and 3 part time staffers… and they’re talking about the RCNs being self-organizing, so seems like someone doesn’t think that overhead is necessary.
“As of 2018, the NAI has 10 teams including about 600 researchers distributed across ~100 institutions. It also has 13 international partner organizations. Some past and present teams are:[12][13]”
It sounds like a fairly comprehensive program with a modest budget that is responsible for coordinating a fairly important part of NASA research. Universities have high overheads as well, and a university is not going to magically get money for astrobiology from a source other than NASA, and the people running NAI seem to have solid reputations, so it’s just not easy for me to see how eliminating a small full-time management team would save money. There may or may not be a good reason for the change, but if there is, it isn’t obvious.
An alternative might be that someone thought the RCNs would be more effective than the NAI, at whatever the NAI did. Not sure that’s more or less plausible.
In any event, NASA pays university overhead with or without the NAI… although with the RCNs some project time will be spent doing what the NAI did.
I have no idea what levels of funding the 10 teams had, although I imagine a good portion of the 600 researchers mentioned are unfunded collaborators. If funding averaged $2M/year per team, then the cost of the permanent NAI staff must be on the order of 10% of that…
It may also be that at the time the NAI was created there was a perceived need to promote research in astrobiology via the NAI. Perhaps at this point it is thought not to be necessary… anyway, just speculating.
And I don’t normally comment on grammar, but unless it’s just two “researchers” it would be “among” not “between.”
Fewer/less. Whom/who. Me/I. I suppose I’m speaking old english now.
Nope. It IS actually only between two researchers. It was always a small field…
I hear ya on the Old English comment, though… Drives me up the wall. We live in a near-infinite ocean of near-instantaneous communication across the entire globe, and hardly anyone actually says anything of substance…much less are many able to construct coherent sentences. Reminds me of a joke I remember reading a bit ago:
“Where are we going, and why are we in this hand basket?”