14 Nobel Winners Sign Letter Backing Obama Space Plan

[impik]

From the NYT:


Fourteen Nobel laureates have signed a letter supporting President Obama’s proposed strategy for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and criticizing a NASA authorization bill under consideration in the House of Representatives.

The signers included David Baltimore of the California Institute of Technology, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1975; Baruch S. Blumberg, a former director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute and a winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1976; Douglas D. Osheroff of Stanford, a member of the board that investigated the loss of the space shuttle Columbia and a winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1996; and Frank Wilczek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004. Some former NASA officials and seven former astronauts also signed the letter.

G. Scott Hubbard, who was director of NASA’s Ames Research Center, said he and John M. Logsdon, former director of the Space Policy Institute of George Washington University, came up with the idea for the letter.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/science/space/01nasa.html?ref=todayspaper