Media Reaction to NASA FY 2012 Budget

Obama proposes five-year freeze on NASA budget, AFP
“President Barack Obama on Monday proposed reining in expenses at NASA, sending his 2012 budget blueprint to Congress calling for a five-year freeze on new spending at the US space agency. The president would restrict NASA’s budget to last year’s levels, $18.7 billion annually through fiscal 2016. The figure represents a 1.6-percent decrease from the spending total the agency had sought for fiscal 2011, which ends in September. “This budget reflects the overall fiscal reality of the US government. There is not a lot of money available,” said John Logsdon, a former director of the Space Policy Institute in Washington.”
Budget 2012: NASA, Washington Post
“President Obama’s proposed budget also makes explicit that the agency is focusing its longer-range planning on traveling to an asteroid, rather than to the moon. It adds funds as well to make use of the International Space Station more available to scientists and their institutions. The $100 billion space station, which has been formally designated as a national laboratory, would be funded through 2020 under the Obama budget. Earlier budgets during the Bush administration gave it funding only through 2015.”
NASA budget picks fight with Congress, Orlando Sentinel
“President Barack Obama today released a $18.7-billion budget proposal for NASA that’s almost certain to reignite last year’s heated battle over the role that commercial companies should play in blasting astronauts into space. Obama’s plan would spend $850 million in 2012 to help commercial companies, like SpaceX of California, meet a White House goal of using non-government spacecraft to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station by 2016. That’s $350 million more than what Congress outlined in a heavily-debated NASA policy plan signed into law last year. And Obama would also cut nearly $1 billion from the new heavy-lift rocket that Congress ordered NASA to build by the end of 2016.”