



There are winners (Europa robotic mission, which got $80 million for development) and losers (commercial crew, which got $696 million, a number that imperils a goal of having a private U.S. capability to launch humans into orbit by 2017). Jeff Foust has a dependably excellent overview at Space Politics.

I want to focus on funding for the Space Launch System, a massive rocket, and the Orion spacecraft, a crew capsule intended to carry humans into deep space.

An artist's concept drawing of the SLS. (NASA)

An artist’s concept drawing of the SLS. (NASA)

Sen. Bill Nelson, who chairs the Senate subcommittee that oversees NASA, and bills himself as “one of the leading architects of a plan to build a new monster rocket and crew capsule for deep space exploration,” said of the plan, ”This is a big win.” NASA’s administrator, Charles Bolden, also praised the budget deal.

This is the same Nelson who along with other congressional leaders and the White House agreed on a budget plan to fund and build the SLS and Orion during the summer of 2010 (see authorizing legislation).

In that bill Congress called, for example, in fiscal year 2013 to fund the SLS rocket at a level of $2.64 billion. It received significantly less than that in fiscal year 2013. And one would presume funding along those lines, or more, would be needed as the SLS rocket program was building up toward a 2017 test launch. So what did the government give NASA in the new budget for fiscal year 2014? $1.6 billion.

Senator and astronaut, Bill Nelson says the budget deal is a big win for NASA. (AP Photo)

Senator and astronaut Bill Nelson says the budget deal is a big win for NASA. (AP Photo)

Now we could debate all day long whether NASA should be building the SLS. It’s expensive, maybe too expensive, to build and fly. It costs so much that NASA has no funds to build hardware for actual missions into space. There are concerns that it is simply a job program for NASA employees and key contractors. However, if the federal government is going to ask NASA to build the thing, it ought to adequately fund it.

If you’ve ever wondered why big science programs, particularly those at NASA, fall behind schedule and go over budget, this is one reason. (Scientists and engineers are not blameless, either, of course. They know programs with lower costs are more likely to get funded, and that once significant funds are invested in a project it’s more difficult to kill.)

Nevertheless, we’ve seen this exercise before. Most recently, back in 2009, a blue-ribbon panel led by Norm Augustine dug into NASA’s human exploration and concluded, “The premier finding is that the human spaceflight program that the United States is currently pursuing is on an unsustainable trajectory.”

Augustine and his colleagues urged the White House and Congress to give NASA realistic goals and then fully fund the space agency to meet those objectives.

Four years later NASA is being given $1 billion less than it was told it would get in 2010 for a big rocket, and it’s being labeled as a “big win” for the space program.

Big wind, maybe.

Eric Berger

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