Now, it will be getting $19.3 billion, which is a $1.3 billion increase from their budget for 2015. That money is desperately needed, because work has reportedly called behind schedule on Orion due to (you guessed it) budget cuts. Love, NASA, ‘ saying in part, “It’s as if we keep ordering expensive takeout because we haven’t yet set up our own kitchen – only, in this case, the takeout meals are costing us hundreds of millions of dollars”.
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After years of penny-pinching from a lack of federal funding, the folks over at NASA woke up to a bit of pleasant news this morning when Congress announced a $1.3 billion increase for its 2016 budget.
Contenders need to be US citizens with a bachelor’s degree in science, math or engineering. NASA is banned from cooperating with China on space technology or missions. The New Horizons probe that visited Pluto this year was also a planetary science mission. OSIRIS aims to eventually touch down on the surface of the asteroid Bennu, spend nearly two years there, then send a capsule home to this planet with asteroid samples.
One area of the budget NASA is surely happy to see funded is with its Commercial Crew program. New robotic missions are planned for after 2020 to Europa and Mars. NASA’s next-generation rocket system, The Space Launch System (SLS), will get $2 billion, which is $300 million greater than what the program obtained for 2015 and $644 million higher than the administration’s ask for the program. NASA ordered its first crewed flight from Boeing back in May, and in November, the space agency ordered a crewed flight on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon. This, by the way, is the first time that Congress has matched or rather outdone a President’s request for funding the space agency. Boeing could provide as few as two and as many as six missions to the space station after completing human rating certification.
Compared to the previous fiscal year, NASA has some pocket money to pursue their private rocket-building initiative, which is looking to replace space shuttles.
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The bill also includes $1.24 billion for the continued development of NASA’s commercial crew program which will enable the agency to once again launch American astronauts on American-made rockets, instead of relying on the Russians for rides to the space station. However, for now, NASA has already bought half a dozen seats aboard the Russian Soyuz spacecraft for 2018.
