BALANCING ACT

摘要

When NASA announced last summer that it would streamline its bureaucracy into something better-suited for the president's new space exploration vision, the biggest immediate change was the decision to merge the Earth science and space science enterprises more than a decade after they had been split apart. With a $5.5 billion annual budget, the new Science Mission Directorate makes its boss, Al Diaz, responsible for a third of NASA's resources. The merger also gave him challenges few would envy as he attempts to balance existing programs with the agency's evolving new exploration priorities. As director of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Diaz spent the last six years dealing with programs as diverse as the Earth Observing System and the Hubble Space Telescope.