Abstract
Sue Bowler, Editor It’s a cheery time for solar system science: UK work in this field has had an international stamp of approval, ESA’s Aurora programme is moving forwards, and existing missions such as Cassini and Mars Express are producing superb quality data that are full of scientific surprises. But it’s a bit less cheery for other branches of the science, faced with PPARC’s and NASA’s budget plans for the coming years. NASA is giving human spaceflight – in the form of the International Space Station, the shuttle and its replacement – priority over planned science missions such as Dawn and the Terrestrial Planet Finder. PPARC is struggling to cover the higher than anticipated costs of paying universities a fair rate for the work researchers do, and paying postgraduate students and research assistants a living wage. The result, on both sides of the Atlantic, is a squeeze on successful areas of research that will mean some of them stopping for good. Space missions are being cancelled or indefinitely postponed, research groups will have to find something else to research, and hardpressed physics departments will feel the pinch of less research in the long run. It’s not an enticing prospect, but this is what is happening. Science and scientists are expensive, and those running science have to decide what parts of it are worth paying for. There is no alternative: money is not going to magically appear from the public purse, nor should it. Instead, people are going to have to make the case for science, loudly and repeatedly, at all levels. Outreach has become a necessity, not an extra. The challenge is to show that research – in space, Earth sciences and astrophysical sciences, as well as in planetary exploration – matters and is worth paying for. And we have to reach voters, not just the idealized “interested layperson”. Compare the current public enthusiasm for the ISS with the fervour of the early days of the Apollo programme: we have a very long way to go. EDITORIAL
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