NASA Budget Announced

The budget news out of Washington is not good. President Obama's budget proposal has put the entire Constellation program and the Vision for Space Exploration - Moon, Mars & Beyond - on hold. They plan to fund current operations and the development costs for Ares and Orion, but the project review suggests that the future of the program may be in doubt. According to CNET News:

The Obama administration's fiscal 2010 NASA budget request includes $630 million in additional near-term funding for development of follow-on rockets and spacecraft needed for the agency's post-shuttle moon program, officials said Thursday. But most of the increase is from the administration's economic stimulus package, and projections through 2013 show a $3.1 billion reduction in overall funding for the program compared with 2009 projections. Unveiling NASA's $18.7 billion 2010 budget on Thursday, acting Administrator Chris Scolese said the Obama administration had ordered an independent review of NASA's plans to replace the space shuttle with a combination of manned and unmanned Ares rockets, Apollo-style Orion capsules, and lunar landers needed to establish research stations on the moon by the early 2020s. The new rockets are the central elements of what NASA calls the Constellation program.

This suggests to me that President Obama has not prioritized space exploration and that the ambitious program to return to the Moon and go on to Mars may be dramatically scaled back or even eliminated. Is it possible that the U.S. will no longer have a shuttle program or a next generation spacecraft ready to follow the shuttle? In this budgetary environment, I guess anything is possible.

Comments

[David C.]

I have begun to wonder if Obama cares about NASA at all, beyond the undeniable fact of how many high paying jobs they provide. If he nixed the entire Orion program, there would be thousands of highly paid people out of work and would destroy what's left of the fragile economy.
If someone could just prove to him the Apollo program of the 60's and 70's was a major contributor to the prosperity of the 80's and 90's, perhaps he would give NASA the kind of budget and direction we haven't seen since JFK.