Now, NASA has long had an ambitious, and one might add expensive, program to attack this problem, and it involved a series of billion dollar-plus missions over the next 10 to 15 years. One of the consequences of the revectoring of the agency toward the Vision for Space Exploration, and a relative decreased rate of growth in the science budget, is that the agency has essentially hit the “reset” button on its extrasolar planet program. There is only one mission that is firmly in the queue right now, and that is a mission based here at Ames, the Keplar Planet Finding mission that launches in late 2008. The rest of the program involving missions like SIM and two versions of the TPF — Terrestrial Planet Finder — have essentially been put either on the backburner or moved out in time so far as to not be “real” missions by some definition at this point.

And so, what the agency has come to conclude is that they cannot afford all of these missions. By hitting a reset button, I think they are they are providing the community an opportunity to re-examine the way we find planets around nearby stars, and hopefully use technology developments and an additional 15 years of “thinking time” (since these missions were proposed in the late 1980s and early 90s) to try to bring to bear some innovative techniques on finding extrasolar planets, and hopefully do it for less than a billion dollars per mission.

I think Ames is well positioned to contribute to this discussion. And it is a community-wide effort: JPL will certainly will be participating, Goddard, and many people throughout the academic community. The goal here is to reassess the best way to utilize our scarce resources to continue this endeavor. This, of course, leads to innovation, such as landing probes on Mars with airbags rather than a thruster-controlled touchdown. The standard Martian landing has been with airbags, but the upcoming missions, including the Mars Science Lab that launches in 2009, are so large that airbags are no longer a viable option, so we have to come up with yet another innovative landing technique. The gestation period for any of these missions tends to stretch out for 10, 15, 20, even 25 years. It’s very easy to become trapped into a certain view of how to do a certain mission. And as time evolves, you get younger people coming in with newer ideas, you have technology developments that come to bear, and there is nothing like a budget crunch to force people to think outside the box. It sounds cliché, but it happens all the time within NASA. We’re in one of those environments now where science still comprises a healthy component of the agency’s budget, but the predicted rate of growth of that budget is less than what was anticipated as recently as a year ago. And so, if we want to pursue all of the things we were hoping to do in space science, we have two options: find more creative, innovative, cheaper ways of doing things, or we’re going to have to do fewer of the things we wanted to do.