NASA Night is always a stressful evening at AGU. Researchers who depend on NASA funding pack into a lecture hall to hear the head of NASA science talk from on high about how dire the funding situation. Everyone usually ends up leaving the room complaining.

Things are a little different this year, though. The new chief of science at NASA is Alan Stern, who for many years was “one of you”, as he put it — a scientist struggling to fly new missions in an era of ever-uncertain NASA budgets. Fortified with a glass of chardonnay, he held forth from the other side of the podium at NASA Night with an approach that some call a refreshing change. (You can read a Q&A piece Nature did recently with Stern here – subscription required.)

The main thing to remember, Stern cautioned the crowd at AGU, is that blaming the budget is not cool. The science mission directorate at NASA gets $5.4 billion a year. That’s on the scale of the entire National Science Foundation. It has 53 missions currently flying, and a host more are slated for launch in 2008, such as the GLAST gamma-ray telescope and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. In other words, NASA’s space and earth science programs are the envy of the international research community.

But the big problem is cost overruns. This has been known for some time – projects such as the James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, balloon in cost annually. But Stern made it abundantly clear just how much cost overruns are hurting the science community. Over the past five years, overruns on NASA science missions have cost the agency $5.8 billion. Yes, that’s more than a billion dollars a year. The biggest offenders are the James Webb scope, which ran over by $1.3 billion over the past five years, and the SOFIA airborne telescope, at $1.1 billion (and it isn’t even flying yet, despite having been finished years ago).

As a result, NASA is going to focus ever more strongly on cost control. “Once you’re selected to run a mission, we’re going to hold your feet to the fire,” says Stern. How he will do that isn’t exactly clear, but in many cases it might mean descoping a mission — taking off an instrument or two — or placing it in a different, less risky, orbit.

Of course, even with the most stringent belt-tightening measures at NASA, the agency is still subject to the whims of Congress. If Congress goes into the same financial meltdown it did last year, and passes a ‘continuing resolution’ to keep the government operating at fiscal year 2006 levels, NASA will suffer. A long-term continuing resolution, says Stern, “would almost certainly mean mission cancellations”.