With military and spaceflights gobbling up larger share of the budget, US environment satellites are going to be badly hit, according to an expert.
Kei Koizumi, an expert on science budget policy who works at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is worried that the growing trend would jeopardize the satellites monitoring global warming.
Koizumi said
Environmental research and development has been hit particularly hard over the last few years … The satellite capability that’s projected over the next few years looks pretty bleak.
The budget curtailment would mean that new satellites won’t replace the existing ones, while a whole lot of other planned satellites would be shelved altogether.
Koizumi warned any lapse would affect weather forecast as well as the monitoring of phenomena like global warming.
Koizumi said the budget cut for environment satellites is part of the proposed 2008 budget’s effort to reduce money for domestic programmes.
He said
In the overall budget, Congress and the president have so far reduced domestic spending as the primary way of reducing the deficit. And clearly they have not reduced military spending. In fact it keeps growing, primarily because the cost of our war keeps increasing.
Photo credit: gsfc.nasa.gov