Why won NASA let the winners fly during early short science?
The SOFIA airplane will still be in development during the Early Science phase and the project will need to minimize the complexity of operations and hence the number of persons on the airplane to mission critical personnel. As the Short Science observations are to be performed by the instrument teams (with input from selected community members) the very limited number of “astronomer slots” available have all been allocated to the instrument teams. Also the SI teams have been asked to limit the number of people on the plane during Early Science.
