Science Appropriations

House subcommittee on Science etc has reported out and full committee is scheduled to vote on the 13th.
JWST cut is formally in as are various other interesting snippets.

The subcommittee report (pdf large) - ie the appropriations by agency recommended to the full committee

Summary Table (pdf) - handy dandy difference between 2012 actual appropriations vs 2011 actual and 2012 requested, respectively.

Remember: this is the subcommittee recommendation to the committee, that gets voted on, then sent to House, then Senate does its thing, then it goes to conference to reconcile.
Change can happen.

Sen. Barbara Mikulski released a statement on the subcommittee recommendations last week - the statement condemns cutting JWST, and then says "the Administration" must step in and fight... yeah, that's not going to happen.
WASS

Ok, before we get to the NASA stuff, contemplate this:
"NIST is encouraged to consider supporting armchair quantum wire research for applications in long-distance electricity trans- mission and wiring, and continuing standards and measurement work in regenerative medicine technologies."

Huh?
Armchair quantum wire?
Like, the "most promising technology of 2005"?
That NASA spent $10M on already?
Obviously not related to the presence on the subcommittee of a Texas Congressman from the district in which Rice University happens to reside. That is just pure coincidence.
Poor NIST.

NOAA is cut $100m from 2011, and $1,000M below request.
NOAA gets repeated directives to support "extramural research" - I think that means, spend the money on contracts to third parties.
NOAA is ordered to investigate iron fertilization as climate mitigation measure.

National Weather Service gets a boost.
New proposed Climate Service is zero funded, explicitly.
NESDIS, GOES-R and JPSS get a lot of money, but not as much as requested.

OSTP budget is cut in half - punishment over infringement on relation with China clauses from previous budget.

Ok, NASA:

JWST, as promised, is zeroed out.
"The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Independent Comprehensive Review Panel revealed chronic and deeply rooted management problems in the JWST project. These issues led to the project cost being underestimated by as much as $1,400,000,000 relative to the most recent baseline, and the budget could continue to rise depending on the final launch date determination. Although JWST is a particularly serious example, significant cost overruns are commonplace at NASA, and the Committee believes that the underlying causes will never be fully addressed if the Congress does not establish clear consequences for failing to meet budget and schedule expectations. The Committee recommendation provides no funding for JWST in fiscal year 2012. The Committee believes that this step will ultimately benefit NASA by setting a cost discipline example for other projects and by relieving the enormous pressure that JWST was placing on NASA's ability to pursue other science missions."

The funding is NOT returned to Astrophysics, which is down to $683M
HST and SOFIA take $185M of that.
This is approximately a 25% cut to astronomy and astrophysics research in the US, 4/11 cut in NASA astro, and NASA is about 3/4 of US astronomy.

Earth Science is cut $100M
Planetary Science gets $1,500M
Helio gets $622M - yep, Heliophysics gets about as much as all of Astrophysics.

$3600M goes to Spaxe Exploration: of that $3,000M goes to design and development of the Multi Purpose Crewed Vehical ($1G) and Space Launch System ($2G) - not actual construction, D&D.
And NASA is supposed to develop a 130 ton heavy launcher, but the work is on a 70-100 ton medium heavy.
Most. Expensive. Powerpoint. Ever.
actually, probably not, DoD must have way more expensive ppt

Space Operations gets $4,000M
$3,000M for International Space Station?
Huh?

Best of all: $550M for the Space Shuttle!
In 2012.
This is for the Contractors Pension fund.
Yes, NASA did include pension fund contributions in the original contract to the aerospace corps.
Apparently they lost it.
Somehow.

$3G goes to cross-agency - basically NASA center salaries.
With a reprimand on "what are all these people doing" not supporting missions.
This is better than the full cost accounting fiction of the last few years, but also implies some double cost accounting going on here.

Ok, back on this later.
Still have to cover the NSF's mandate to study cell phone bandwidth allocations...