NASA's FY08 budget: Not much better

The President has proposed a 3.1 percent increase in the NASA budget for FY2008 compared to the budget request for 2007. The problem is NASA is not going to get the small increase it asked for for the rest of the 2007 FY (see earlier post). Even if this FY08 budget gets passed (nothing is assured there, except maybe the Earth Science portion), NASA will be faced with trying to recover from the cuts imposed in 07. It's going to be a tough year, especially with NASA trying to recover from the public relations disaster of astronaut Lisa Nowik's arrest and, as NASAWatch's Keith Cowing points out, the expected efforts of sensationalist media to taint all of NASA with the affair concerning what is, I believe, the only active astronaut ever arrested for anything more than traffic violations in the 46 years of the agency's human spaceflight program. See http://www.nasawatch.com/ as Keith follows both stories.