Comptabilité

1994 · Best.-Nr. 91338 — Washington DC: United States General Accounting Office 1994. Presumed First Edition First Printing. Wraps. Very good. 27 1 pages. Footnotes. Figures. Tables. This is a "Report to the Ranking Minority Member Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management Committee on Governmental Affairs U.S. Senate". The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's NASA goal is to launch assemble and operate an earth-orbiting microgravity and life sciences research laboratory-International Space Station Alpha-starting in 1997. Congress requested that we review NASA's efforts to develop a robust life and microgravity sciences research community for the space station. Specifically we reviewed 1 what NASA is doing to assess the required size of the research community needed for the space station and to ensure that such a community will be available 2 how NASA will ensure that the research selected for the space station will be the best possible and 3 whether a recently canceled Shuttle research flight adversely affected NASA's efforts to develop a research community for the space station. In June 1994 we reported to you on the impact of the expanded Russian role on space station funding and research. We stated that Russian participation in the space station would substantially increase overall station research resources. However the degree to which the U.S. research community will benefit from these increased resources has yet to be determined. NASA has taken an initial step to assess the size of the space station's research community but it is not intending to develop this community by directly soliciting proposals to do research on the space station. Instead NASA is focusing on developing a comprehensive research program that emphasizes more ground-based research and uses space flight only for research efforts that require a microgravity environment in space. To accomplish this program NASA wants to greatly increase the number of ground-based investigators. This science-oriented approach is reasonable but funding levels could jeopardize it unless NASA adjusts its funding priorities. To achieve its goal NASA would need increased funding for its life and microgravity sciences research and analysis over fiscal years 1995 to 1999-the formative years for the initial development of space station-related research. However NASA expects such funding to remain constant. The result could be a smaller than desired number of investigators in the ground-based research program from which station-based research will be selected. The existing process of using peer review panels to judge the scientific merit and microgravity-related relevance of experiments for the space station will continue. The peer review scores for 285 life and microgravity sciences research proposals show that NASA's funding decisions were generally consistent with the findings of the peer review panels: most top-rated proposals and none of the lowest rated ones were funded. But peer review panels and NASA sometimes disagreed on the scientific merit and relevance of these proposals. For example 4 of the 15 U.S. experiments selected by NASA for a July 1994 Space Shuttle research flight-the International Microgravity Laboratory-were not among those rated highest in the peer review process. NASA's efforts to increase the size of its life and microgravity sciences research community are not likely to be adversely affected by the February 1994 cancellation of the third Spacelab Life Sciences flight SLS-3. The U.S. principal investigators on that flight stated that although they were concerned about NASA's lack of communication about the flight cancellation most of them have been accommodated on other space flights and they generally will be able to meet their experiment objectives. All of the investigators with whom we spoke also plan to continue submitting proposals for future NASA research opportunities. United States General Accounting Office paperback