Dear COMRAA:

I have a few general thoughts about this subject, not especially well informed I'm afraid.

1) the organizational effectiveness of Federal support of astronomical sciences;

I think Federal support is pretty essential, particularly for those institutions which have good talented astronomers but do not own a private observatory. I think peer review and competition has been very important, and should continue. However, competing for every little bit of support is pretty time consuming and I would favor decentralizing decision making by allowing competitions for larger blocks of funds and longer periods of time.

2) the advantage and disadvantages of transferring NSF's astronomy responsibilities to NASA; and

I think the main problem to be addressed is that NSF has not been sufficiently effective in advocating astronomy (or maybe even science in general) to the Congress or the public, and hence views astronomy as a competitor for scarce funds that have to be shared among many groups. This is the view that there is a fixed resource and people are entitled to share it. However, the resource is not fixed, it is a negotiated result, and the degree of effort and skill that are brought to bear make a big difference. I think this means that NSF should be devoting more effort to getting credit for what it does. It might also mean re-thinking its approach to Congress, with long term strategic plans and other ways of explaining the importance of what it does. NASA certainly makes a big effort, particularly for its most successful projects.

Given this point of view, I think NSF's problem is wider than just astronomy, and the right answer is to fix NSF. How, I don't exactly know, I'm not at all familiar with its inner politics or personnel.

Within astronomy, there is a huge cultural difference between making huge engineering projects (which NASA does pretty well most of the time) and making exploratory research in a wide variety of large and small areas. NASA has its own problems in this, particularly in regard to peer review of long term technology efforts.

Hence, I do not think that transferring the NSF's astronomy work to NASA is the right answer. On the other hand, I think NASA is capable of taking it on if it is so mandated. As a NASA person my opinion is obviously a little biased on this.

3) other options for addressing the management and organizational issues identified by the committee and by recent NRC reports.

No opinion.

Thanks for asking!