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Space-station managers at the US space agency NASA are braced for a 30 per cent reduction in funds next year for research on the station. The lower-than-expected allocation is to enable the agency to guard against a possible Russian default on delivering key elements of the station.

Although NASA's budget for the fiscal year 2000 will not be finalized until 1 February, the agency has been told by the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to expect less than half the money it requested to cover such a situation.

OMB's refusal of the full request for contingency planning would result in a “considerable reduction in funding to the [space station] research programmes,” says Michael Suffredini, manager of the space-station payloads office at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

A memorandum sent by Suffredini to agency research managers on 8 January was leaked last week to NASA Watch, an independent website that tracks space policy issues. As a result of OMB's constraints, the space-station programme faces a $200 million shortfall over the next five years, plus an additional burden of $70 million to pay for the development of new technology.

The easiest place to find the money without jeopardizing the space station's tight construction schedule is the research ‘utilization’ budget, which pays for NASA-funded scientists to develop hardware and experiments for the station. Agency science managers have therefore been asked to draw up plans to scale down their research programmes.

Top priority will be given to maintaining the launch schedule for large ‘facility class’ instruments, which will be used by many different researchers on the station. Priority will also be given to building hardware for individual experiments that have already passed key design reviews.

The cuts are targeted for the period when the station is being built, with research funding expected to rise again in 2003. NASA officials have promised that past reductions to the research budget would be restored by the time the orbiting laboratory is fully operational in 2004.

Suffredini's memo calls for the number of principal investigators preparing flight experiments to be held “at current levels”. NASA had hoped to enlarge the pool of scientists, but the number is now anticipated to fall by 30 per cent. Contractors are also likely to be laid off “in selected areas”.

The number of scientists involved has been a “highly visible metric with Congress and the research community”, wrote Suffredini. With the proposed cuts, “NASA's commitment to research on [the station] appears questionable”.

The idea of raiding the station's research budget, even temporarily, to counter problems caused by the partnership with Russia is sure to raise hackles in Congress. Members of the House Science Committee, which oversees NASA's budget, have repeatedly warned the agency not to short-change science, which has been a leading justification for the project.

Congressional appropriators last year ordered responsibility for the station research budget to be shifted from the human spaceflight office — which operates the space shuttle and is building the station — to the agency's Office of Life and Microgravity Sciences and Applications. But the change has yet to take place.

The reaction on Capitol Hill to a 30 per cent cut, says one congressional source, is likely to be “universally negative”. Congress may add more money when it takes up NASA's budget request in the coming year.

Meanwhile, scientists working in the fields of microgravity and life sciences say they are only too accustomed to delays and dwindling budgets for space-station research. When told of the latest funding threat, one NASA-funded scientist quipped: “Ho hum, what else is new?”