I would like to comment on the questions posed in the AAS mailing.

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

I think the current structure is generally good. It is especially good to have two separate funding agencies (NSF and NASA). This fosters competition, which I see as good.

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

I work for NASA in both management and research areas. I think it would be VERY bad for Astronomy if it were all transferred to NASA. In practice NASA is an engineering agency, not a science agency. Most NASA money goes to industry and NASA's focus is in this direction. When money is needed for a flight project it comes out of science. I feel that Astronomy would suffer badly from this environment.

The only advantage I see for combining them under NASA is that Astronomy has several large projects involving the development of new telescopes. These projects could benefit from NASA's experience in managing large systems. However, NSF could hire this experience from contractors.

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

Given that NASA does not have science as a top priority, it would be helpful if NSF would be more willing to financially support research done with NASA spacecraft.

The report suggested a more comprehensive plan for financial support of the science of NASA missions. Comprehensive plans are developed for doing research with NASA missions. However, the funds requested in these plans are almost always ( possibly always) seriously cut. For example, successfully operating missions are cut by half after the first two years of "nominal" operations. Guest investigator money never makes up for this cut. So, a science research plan is developed and then abandoned for lack of money. Suggestion - ensure that NASA is given adequate money to do research using existing spacecraft, or transfer the money for this to NSF and let NSF compete the science to be done with NASA spacecraft. This would go along with the suggestion in the report on ground based facilities.

Art Poland