7:35 p.m.: UPDATED—NASA budget includes missions to fly past Europa and to redirect an asteroidNASA’s request of $18.5 billion represents a rise of 2.7% over 2015 enacted levels. That may not come close to the 5% rises requested by other research agencies, such as the National Science Foundation. But for NASA watchers, it’s better than it has been a long time.
“This is the best starting point we’ve had in 4 years from the White House,” says Casey Dreier, director of advocacy for the Planetary Society, based in Pasadena, California. “That shouldn’t be dismissed.”
For NASA’s science office, perhaps the biggest surprise is an official embrace of a mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa that would launch in the mid-2020s. The agency asks for $30 million for the Europa mission in 2016 and plans on developing the mission concept this spring. That request signals a detente between the administration, which had avoided requesting funding for Europa, and Congress, which always plumped for the mission—including the $100 million that it appropriated for Europa in 2015. “This is a big change in administration policy and we’re very pleased,” Dreier says.
At a briefing today, NASA chief financial officer David Radzanowski would not say what the overall price tag of the Europa mission would be, only that it would have to cost much less than $4 billion. That’s why advocates have pushed for a “Europa Clipper” concept that would spin around the moon in multiple flybys, rather than calling for an orbiter—a more difficult and expensive mission that would subject the spacecraft to much greater doses of radiation from Jupiter. There has been growing evidence that Europa may be emitting plumes of water from its south pole, and many scientists want any mission to be able to sample those plumes for signs of life.
The budget also asks for $220 million for an Asteroid Initiative, which includes money for a controversial mission to send astronauts to an asteroid that had been redirected from its natural orbit to the vicinity of Earth. However, there is no line item for the asteroid redirect mission, and the agency has delayed making a decision on choosing an approach for the mission (whether to snatch a boulder from a larger asteroid, for instance, or to bag up an entire asteroid and bring it to Earth). Marcia Smith, a veteran space policy analyst and consultant based in Arlington, Virginia, says the longer NASA avoids committing to a particular mission, the easier it will be for a subsequent administration to kill the proposal. “It seems that time is running out for them to make that choice,” she says. “It suggests that they’re having some challenges at a fundamental level.”
In the request, NASA’s Science Mission Directorate gets far less of a boost than the agency does overall—a rise of just 0.8% to $5.289 billion. Within the four science divisions—earth science, astrophysics, planetary science, and heliophysics—earth science appears to be the big winner. That division gets $1.947 billion—a whopping 10% jump over 2015 levels.
This is no surprise coming from the Obama administration, which has consistently tried to raise earth science funding. But it also comes with increased responsibilities—the administration wants NASA to take over the management of all nonweather satellites from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Nevertheless, Steven Running, chair of a NASA earth science advisory committee meeting, was pleased both with the funding request, as well as with a year that had seen the launch of three major missions: the Global Precipitation Measurement mission, joint with the Japanese Space Agency; the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 mission; and the Soil Moisture Active Passive mission, which just launched on 31 January. “NASA Earth science has had a tremendously good year,” says Running, of the University of Montana, Missoula. “We’re feeling our oats.”
NASA planetary science appears to be the biggest loser in the Science Mission Directorate, with a 5% cut from 2015 enacted levels. But that reflects the pattern of the last few years, where the administration underasks for planetary and Congress overdelivers to the division. “It’s a very familiar story,” Dreier says. Among now operating planetary missions, the agency expects to zero out the Mars Opportunity rover, the Mars Odyssey orbiter, and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. But Radzanowski says that the agency has been able to find money to continue operations for aging missions before. “We will look at ways to continuing operations—if they actually are operational by 2016 and the science value does make sense.”
The agency requests a 3.7% hike to $709 million for astrophysics, and an additional $620 million to continue building its chief astronomical priority, the $8.8 billion James Webb Space Telescope. “On the whole, it’s not a bad situation,” says Bradley Peterson, an astronomer at Ohio State University, Columbus, who heads a NASA astrophysics advisory committee.
One surprise is the administration request for the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a joint mission with the German space agency that consists of a converted 747 jet with a telescope riding in the rear. Last year, the administration tried to cancel the mission, which has been expensive and relatively unproductive scientifically. But Congress rushed to the mission’s aid with $70 million for 2015. This year the agency asked for $85 million. “Let bygones be bygones,” Dreier joked. “I was very surprised to see that, coming out as if nothing had happened.” According to Peterson, “that was recognition that they should not have made any unilateral decision on the future of SOFIA without discussions with our German partners.”
Within the human exploration program, which takes up roughly a quarter of NASA’s overall budget, the agency continues to take a two-pronged approach to developing rockets that would return astronauts to space after the retirement of the Space Shuttle. The commercial crew program—which provides subsidies to companies such as SpaceX and Boeing to develop privately owned, human-rated rockets and capsules—would get $1.244 billion, a more than 50% jump over what Congress gave the program in 2015.
In addition, the agency would spend almost double that, $2.453 billion, on its own capsule, Orion, and a rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), a lumbering, and delayed, heavy-lift vehicle that will not see its first launch until the end of 2018. Yet NASA’s request calls for 15% less than Congress spent on Orion and SLS for 2015. The requested levels are telling and anticipate familiar battles with Congress, which has taken a dim view of commercial crew while protecting SLS. Both the Europa mission and the asteroid redirect mission could take advantage of rides on a SLS rocket in the 2020s. –Eric Hand |
