Astronomy under a cloud - and much else besides.

Scientists in fields ranging from astronomy to nanotechnology and cancer research face an uncertain few months with at least $150 million in funding tied to the Abbott government's blocked higher education reform bill.

The Senate's move earlier this month to stymie the government's controversial higher education package has had collateral impact of threatening to halt funding for the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) and other key research, scientists said.

The NCRIS funding of $150 million for the 2015-16 year was announced in the May budget, extending the annual expenditure for another year. Scientists were banking on the government being able to arrange multi-year funding for future programs to avoid the annual threat of disruption that comes with each budget. Instead, that threat has come early this year.

Education Minister Christopher Pyne has warned that Labor's actions could cause up to 1500 researchers to lose their jobs in the years ahead. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen

"All we want to get is some certainty, so we can do some planning," Tim Clancy, director of the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network, said. "It would be a massive tragedy if we lost the underlying capability."

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NCRIS helps underwrite everything from biosecurity intelligence, the Synchrotron in Melbourne and the Integrated Marine Observing System which researches climate change in the Southern Ocean and elsewhere.

Nobel laureate and Astronomy Australia's chair Brian Schmidt said that without the money promised to them for the next financial year the not-for-profit company - which partly funds most of the country's telescopes, including the precursor to the Square Kilometre Array, ASKAP, and the Murchison Widefield Array -would likely shut down.

"Australia has been at the forefront of astronomy since the 1940s, [and] we're on the threshold of throwing that away," said Professor Schmidt.

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Science funding snarled by stalled education bill