[Diana]

The Bush administration's focus on big, expensive space missions is starving budgets for some of NASA's most productive small-scale science programs, astronomers told the U.S. Congress on Thursday.

The Bush budget request for fiscal 2007 gives NASA an overall increase of 3.2 percent to $16.8 billion, but much of that is meant to fund the space shuttle, to finish building the international space station and to get a successor to the shuttle aloft.
By contrast, science programs in NASA would increase 1.5 percent to about $5.3 billion. This latest budget request, which must be approved or amended by Congress, means that NASA's science programs would get $3.1 billion less than previously projected for the years from 2006 through 2010.

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