Funding Science

An Orange County high school student returned from an all-expenses-paid trip to West Germany to ride aboard a magnetically levitated train similar to one proposed between Orlando International Airport and International Drive. Brandy Davis, a senior at Dr. Phillips High School, won the trip for a prize-winning Electricity Science Projects about the so-called maglev trains, which are powered by electrified magnets and can go more than 300 mph.

The contest was sponsored by Maglev Transit Inc., the company proposing to bring a maglev train to Orlando for Electricity Science Projects. Davis, with her science teacher, Phyllis Robitaille, and Deputy Superintendent Don Shaw, rode the company's demonstration train in the rural northwest West German town of Lathen.

House Science, Space and Technology Committee Chairman George Brown says an imbalance that he believes favors big science projects, like the Superconducting Super Collider, over small, individual-researcher science, has to be redressed. But Brown, D-Calif., adds that it will be up to the appropriations committees, and not his science panel, to decide how much funding to provide for SSC next fiscal year.

In an interview last week, Brown acknowledged that political pressure likely will continue to bear down on SSC because its practical payoff is further off than the results of other large science projects, like the Bush administration's High Performance Computing Initiative.

Still, Brown, a physicist by training, is quick to stress his support for SSC. "I have no questions whatsoever about the merits of the SSC project," he said. "It's in the nature of high energy physicsthat they have to keep building larger and larger machines until they know every single secret of the nature of matter. God knows when that will be."

The difficult decisions on funding priorities, says Brown, will be made by the appropriations panels. "If we do have a problem with the SSC, it will be in the appropriations committees, with Rep. Tom Bevill, and he will have to make whatever decisions he will have to make. And I will counsel with him if he asks me." "The science committee has done its work," he asserted. "We authorized that project in the last Congress with a cap of $ 5 billion for the federal contribution." DOE estimates that SSC will cost a total $ 8.5 billion).

Brown acknowledged that the committee may have been a little too quick in the past to approve every large science project that came along. He points to the space station, in particular, as an example of a project that "got away from us" in terms of its complexity and cost.