Exploration is defunct at NSF and NRC

Recently a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society got it right when he quoted a complaint from a fellow member: "Observation in the real world and small-scale experiments on the Earth now take second place to expensive and ever-expanding theoretical models of questionalbe reliability."

In the case of our NRC the TRACE game is a concrete example of an expensive and ever-expanding theoretical model that is demonstrably unreliable.

And NSF will dump a proposal for exploratory work unless the package includes a preponderance of theoretical nonsense.