In principle, astronomy could, indeed, win out from such an imbalance by “riding on the coat-tails” of unrelated well-funded facilities. However, as we know only too well at this point, there is a huge risk associated with such a gamble. All the existing history on facility costs, both nationally and internationally, should teach us that the generation of headroom through this route is most unlikely.

fundamentally it seems that the range of activities and communities/users falling within the current STFC remit makes it difficult to have a transparent process to tension the different elements: so we end up with apparently arbitrary strategic decisions. moving the astro/PP grants from STFC – who seem to take the facilities part of their title most seriously – would at least mean that they only have to decide about the relative importance of different facilities – not facilities versus exploitation (a balance that was hard enough to get right even for PPARC). such a move could be presented as more fine-tuning, than a u-turn, and so might be politically possible.

Pete :you don’t mention that in US PP is funded by the DOE .. how weird is that ?

>rather than have STFC Science Board and Council having any say over spending on space science
>and exploration you would rather give the money to some other body who would be under no
>obligation to tension spending against other areas of science.

at least in terms of space “exploration” – there has been precious little “science” justification provided to allow peer-review – so the idea that this funding-black-hole can be reasonably tensioned against, say, science from exploitation of “current” ground-based STP facilities is a joke…

pushing space exploration out of STFC’s remit – as paul suggested – i’m sure would sound sensible to our PP colleagues (and perhaps even in time) diamond users.

You say that the present management of STFC made a poor job of making the case at this CSR round, but you have no evidence for this as you have no way of knowing whether a better settlement could have been achieved. Or maybe you do know differently in which case you could tell us how STFC could have made a better case.

“SB is gravely concerned about the level of resource being committed to the Aurora programme.. With a backdrop of Job losses, the loss of whole fields of science and the career demolition that will occur across the programme, it seems inappropriate to commit more resources to this project.”

Shouldn’t our “space industry” (different from “space science”) be funded through an expanded BNSC-type agency rather than a _research_ council (even one without research in its title)? You express similar concerns in your quotes from the 20 Feb RF news item.

Andy: your point on Keith is well made. Still, he’s asking _us_ to make the case to gov’t for the next CSR, when the present management made such a poor job this round.. If such criticism is for the pub, then how can anyone justify Gemini Board-bashing by the CEO of a research council in front of the UK media?

I am not into the Keith-bashing bit. Thats really for bar-room talk. This blog has become pretty public.