NASA Talking Points on Administration Policy
Investing in NASA, Advancing American Leadership in Space
“The Obama Administration has proposed a record five-year investment of nearly $92 billion in NASA to maintain America’s leadership in space exploration and spur scientific and technical discovery here on Earth. Although not all of this funding has been approved, NASA has still been racking up extraordinary accomplishments, including: … “
Keith. I think that White House statement is referring to $92B proposed since he has been in office, not $92M going forward. NASA HQ assumes for future years, no more than what they were offered by the White House for 2014 – $17.715B.
SLS came out of DIRECT 3.0 design proposed by an independent group of NASA and industry engineers. It ended up replacing Ares of CxP as you know. Both Constellation and DIRECT designs chose to man-rate the heavy lift launch vehicles. The NASA procedural requirements (NPR) for man-rating a system makes development practically twice as costly. That burden on development and then the cost of maintaining an infrequently used heavy lifter (once a year or two or longer) will cost NASA dearly for at least a decade.
The choices are not good. Politicians want to make SLS, Orion development (ISS & JWST, too) unstoppable [H.R. 3625]. If the NASA funding level remains in the $17B range, year after year, exploration and science research will suffer. They could pass 3625 and raise the NASA budget in 2014 and beyond to make everyone happy. But the problem with doing that is that we build SLS and Orion and are stuck with two very costly systems. SLS will cost $500M to $600M per launch versus a Falcon Heavy [$130M] and maintaining NASA’s own private heavy launch vehicle will cost $Billions each year. This is more burden on the US taxpayer, will make every NASA SLS launch and mission more expensive, and it is money otherwise that would have gone to developing real payloads to launch and research to undertake. And delays in SLS and Orion compared to what commercial can offer is pushing NASA missions farther into the future.
DIRECT 3.0 came out of NASA not the other way around.
It was not sanctioned by NASA but was in the face of ongoing Constellation development. DIRECT had their own website. I don’t think they had any NASA funding for V 1.0 and 2.0.
What Keith means is that DIRECT was actually the resurrection of an alternative SDLV from the time of the ESAS study. A lot of the number-crunching and other work was done by NASA engineers in their own time too.
That’s odd. The text says “proposed a record five-year investment,”
in NASA, but when I look at the table, I see a budget that that’s lower each year, with the FY 2013 “operating plan” budget nearly two billion dollars less than the budget for 2010. I’m not sure what relevance there is to the President’s request for FY-2014– is there any chance that this budget will be passed???
Budget deal news an hour or so ago. Still looking at numbers but seems that agency top line would go down at least a few hundred mill In 2014 vs 2013. Trouble ahead. Lots.
It’s a puzzle.
Supposedly sequestration is going away, but does that mean NASA;s 1914 budget stays in place?
Or what?
Only parts of sequestration are going away.
This corrects an earlier post of mine here –
Upon further thinking through the meaning of the 2014 budget deal.
It would appear the NASA budget will increase in 2014, just a little, as compared to 2013, remembering that the 2013 budget was a Billion LESS than 2012. I would extrapolate from the top level numbers in the news a slight (few hundred million addition) to the NASA 2014 budget.
The reason is a linear extrapolation from the news. The $100 B in 2014 automatic sequester cuts is now avoided, replaced by a deal that puts in place only $40 B in cuts per year each of the next two years. But this was relative to budget requests, not prior years. The $100 B cut was going to mean a freezing of budgets in 2014 through 2020, basically, defense and non-defense equally, 50/50. The deal then is RELATIVELY a plus up, relative to any 2013 level. But not much.
It does mean the cut NASA got from 2012 to 2013, the Billion less, is now more firmly written in stone for the next two years. More or less.
That’s a very polite way to put it. Blood running down the corridors is how I choose to think of it.
Keith; Unless I’m reading this post wrong it says; WH Amin proposes 5 yr. investment. The table show 3 yrs. past 1 in progress & only 1 new year. Is the $92 billion over 5 YRS. meant as 2014 – 2018 or is it really encompassing the previous years as shown? If so, HOW is that a new investment? if the administration is serious about accomplishing those stated goals, then wouldn’t they need to request a budget that is double what NASA receives now? Not only request it but fight for the funding. Since neither is expected to happen how is this a “proposed NEW investment”??? I really don’t care who (D or R) gets credit for it; just someone in DC show some real leadership that goes beyond a power point & 30 sec. sound bite.
I would like to see details of the investment. When they say 5 year proposal is that 5 years starting with 2014 or does it include the preceding term in office of the administration?