Over the next few months, the future of astrophysics in space for the next decade may be set.
It ought to be a rational process (hah!), and it ought to be based on fully symmetric information...
Most of all, it should lead to a decison that someone will stick to for more than a year or two. That may be most important of all.
After talking to a few people, I learned a few interesting things that some of you should know:
The senior majority party congress critters control the appropriations committees. Duh.
Unless it impacts their districts directly, they rarely care about the details at the sub-billion $ per year level. The staffers care. Or, rather, they can be made to care.
Particle physics people have become very good at sucking up to proactively informing key congressional staffers. They may be flown out for talks on funding processes, wined and dined and listened to by erudite nobel laureates, should you have any spare ones lying around.
A good dinner, tour, and half a bottle of merlot can be worth a billion dollars or two.
Play the game people.
As nice as HST is, and JWST will be, you cannot have a rational national program of space based astronomy based only on those missions. It destroys half the field. SOFIA doesn't count, it is just not in the same league.
Do not ever put down other peoples' science. It backfires.
Be enthusiastic about your own science. People know if you've given up.
You have to be able to do the "elevator explanation" off-the cuff and cheerfully, especially if you are actually in an elevator.
Do not lieexaggerate your technological development level and launch readiness before a committee of experts. It just annoys them.
Strangely, it sounds like a tight enthusiastic presentation on the science and tech does actually go a long way towards making a good case for priority. We can hope.
If a mission concept has not yet been selected, then you should not presume you own the mission slot. There are other people out there, some may even be cleverer than you. Competition is good, eh?
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Hi Steinn. Thanks, these posts are very helpful and informative. I hope as many of these missions get launched as possible, despite issues with the "dark energy" interpretation.
Do not ever put down other peoples' science. It backfires.
Heh. Bigtime.
Of course, it's so much easier to do that than to do anything else....
Too often I see people in my department expressing the opinion that some other subfield of the department is fundamentally uninteresting, unimportant, or overblown. It goes in all directions. It's one thing to have that opinion, it's another thing to express it to those sympathetic, but it's entirely antother thing to express it in public or in front of visitors. (And, yes, I've seen that happen.)
-Rob