Fourteen Nobel laureates have signed a letter supporting President Obama’s proposed strategy for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and criticizing a NASA authorization bill under consideration in the House of Representatives.

The House bill, the writers said, would leave “substantially underfunded” the areas of technology development, commercial spaceflight, robotic missions, and university and student research.

“These are the key elements of the president’s new plan for NASA that must be retained in any consensus solution reached by Congress and the White House,” said the letter, delivered to the office of Representative Bart Gordon, a Tennessee Democrat who leads the Committee on Science and Technology. .

The signers included David Baltimore of the California Institute of Technology, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1975; Baruch S. Blumberg, a former director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute and a winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1976; Douglas D. Osheroff of Stanford, a member of the board that investigated the loss of the space shuttle Columbia and a winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1996; and Frank Wilczek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004. Some former NASA officials and seven former astronauts also signed the letter.