Senate Backs NASA with Higher Budget than House
Senate Appropriations Subcommittee Approves $18 Billion for NASA in FY2014, Space Policy Online
“The Senate appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over NASA approved $18 billion for the agency for FY2014 this morning, a significant increase over the level recommended by its House counterpart last week and more than the Obama Administration requested.
The Senate Appropriations Commerce-Justice-Science (CJS) subcommittee, chaired by Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), who also chairs the full committee, approved the bill with little discussion in a short markup session. Full committee markup is scheduled for Thursday at 10:00 am ET.”
Marc’s note: Before you get too excited remember that the House will want to lower the budget. So this is yet just another House-Senate ongoing battle leading nowhere at the moment.
UPDATE: Here’s the House Bill with more details.
“The Committee recommends $16,598,300,000 for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which is $928,430,000 below fiscal year 2013 and $1,117,095,000 below the request.”
![Human Landing System Post-Budget Tag-Up [Audio]](https://nasawatch.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/HLS-1024x562.png)
Looks like the Senate doesn’t have any interest in an asteroid mission either:
“The Committee believes that NASA
should take the time to complete further concept studies, pursue
the support of Congress through the authorization process and line
up support from potential international partners before seeking
new resources to carry out the mission. In the interim, the Com-
mittee’s recommendation does not include any of the requested in-
creases associated with the asteroid retrieval proposal.” -page 60
The exploration budget: Total 3.6B
Orion 1.0B SLS 1.8B COTS 0.5B R&D 0.3B
-Landers, Habs, Depots, Tankers, Transfer Stages 0B
If one keeps SLS/Orion for BLEO missions with no habitat, no lander, then i suppose the only thing left to do is to send it 70,000 km away from the moon for 25 days. At least someone tried to make lemonaid when handed a handful of lemons.
How about a new direction? Total 4.6B
– Hab 0.7B
– Zero Boiloff LH2 Depot 1.0B
– Tankers, Transfer Stages 0.8B
– COTS 1.0B EP 0.6 R&D (incl GCR protection) 0.5B
Simply defer the missions five years or so and have the first mission send a hab 70,000 km from the moon or to L2, and start visits by the crew, gradually extending the time from 25 days up to one year with GCR mitigation testing.
Once the depot and tankers and transfer stages are in place, start work on the multiple missions possible. Allow the science community to refuel in LEO to add mass to future missions also, and bank on EP a decade or so from now, depending on funding.
– Hab 0.7B
– Zero Boiloff LH2 Depot 1.0B
– Tankers, Transfer Stages 0.8B
– COTS 1.0B EP 0.6 R&D (incl GCR protection) 0.5B
Where do those cost estimate numbers come from? At this point they’re even more fanciful than the Orion/SLS numbers everyone on this site sneers at. Landers, Habs, Depots, Tankers, and Transfer Stages will occur when those in the political class decide to pay for them; and not by wishful thinking.
The values are not totals, but simply one year, pay as you go annual budget numbers. SLS/Orion’s budget is flat for 3 decades at 2.5B/year. Unlike SLS/Orion, once the hardware is complete, NASA can move forward to exploration and science.
Think of depots, tankers, and habitats as SLS/Orion without 4 new engine development programs and a capsule that NASA does not require. One can stretch the schedule and reign the costs back to the 3.6B quite easily, but with such a great plan forward, the “wishful” thinking forward was that Congress would offer a plus-up (4.7B), the direct opposite of the current SLS/Orion mission to nowhere trend. In reality, one could likely develop these components for substantially less cost, but is too *constrained*.
For total costs, recall that internal NASA studies already showed that for 15 missions over 20 years, SLS consumed 143B while depot centric was 86B. That is quite a bit of margin, no? http://www.spaceref.com/new…
The depot is essentially an upper stage with a power bus and refrigerators. Habitats have decades of history, and of course so do transfer stages and tankers. Hence the costs have greater confidence than multiple engine development programs that sadly do not offer any hope of providing economic access to space.
http://www.thespacereview.c…
IOW: even if you reassigned every dollar from SLS/ORION to depot centric, the nation would be better off.
The advantage of depot centric is quite simple:
“breaking costs into smaller, less-monolithic amounts allows great flexibility in meeting smaller and changing budget profiles.”
Unfortunately, votes seem to matter more, not the progress of the country.
Of these estimates are anywhere near correct, or even if they are somewhat high, the business case for SLS does not close.
http://www.thespacereview.c…