Congrats to Bill Borucki who challenged the bureaucrats and naysayers until he got what he wanted!
We need more like Bill to counter the un-iinformed and illiterate about science in congress and appointed positions.
Go Bill!!!
(Former NASA employee who worked in the same building as Bill and his team.)

Bill's Team and 'science on a budget'. I had already left Lick Observatory as a staff member when I heard about Bill's Planet Finder Team doing a 'ground truth' experiment up in a little old dome at the observatory on Mount Hamilton (dedicated in 1888). Bill decided to do proof-of-concept in an entirely Silicon Valley "old garage" format! (Hewlett & Packard startup garage in Palo Alto)

Use an older abandoned dome, at a great steady-air mountain-top established observatory, and you get lots of hidden financial support. It comes from infrastructure. It comes from an old-school-but-innovative observatory staff. Lick Observatory has a century-long history of supporting innovation. The Ten Meter Telescopes (1990s) and the soon to launch Web Space Telescope are other examples.

NASA AMES also, of course, has a well deserved reputation among astronomers and physicists of many fields, of great-advances-on-a-budget.

There was a fine quote from a local astronomy teacher/professor, Kepler was a project that 'changed the textbooks'. No future textbook discussing the Solar System and planets will ever be published without reference to the discoveries of the Kepler experiment.