Two from CU are named to committees on NASA budget

By David Brand

Two members of the Cornell faculty have been named to NASA committees overseeing the agency's budget and management of space science programs.

Robert C. Richardson, the Floyd R. Newman Professor of Physics and vice provost for research at Cornell, has been named to the International Space Station (ISS) Management and Cost Evaluation Task Force, which will help NASA analyze the recent cost growth of the program.

Paul M. Kintner Jr., professor of electrical and computer engineering, will chair the Living With a Star--Geospace Mission Definition Team, which will determine how NASA spends $300 million in science funding.

Richardson, who shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1996, will join a team of notable experts in the field of science, engineering, finance and business to advise NASA and the Bush administration on how to maximize the scientific returns on the ISS, while staying within the guidelines of the president's budget. The task force will report its findings to the NASA Advisory Council by Nov. 1.

"It's a broad examination of management of the space station and its technical program, its finances and mechanical plan," Richardson recently told The Chronicle of Higher Education. "There's a cost overrun, and decisions have to be made about how the costs can be contained, if they can, and what the overall program will be eventually."

Kintner will chair the NASA geospace committee for the next year, leading a team that will decide how the space agency spends money on research, ranging from understanding climate change to investigating radiation belt and ionospheric effects on global positioning satellites.

Living With a Star (LWS) is part of the Sun-Earth Connection, one of four science themes within NASA's Office of Space Science.