Why aren all proposals that are highly rated by peer review selected for funding?
Although a proposal in response to an NRA may nominally be judged by peer review to be of intrinsically high merit, it still may not be selected owing to the programmatic issues of relevance to NASA’s stated interests and/or to budget limitations (see also Section C.2 of Appendix C of this Guidebook). Regarding this latter factor, most of NASA’s NRAs are oversubscribed by factors ranging typically from two to five and can be even much higher. The entirety of the factors leading to a decision of selection or nonselection will be conveyed to the proposers during the course of a debriefing after selections are announced (see Section C.6 of Appendix C).
