The numbers are in. On Tuesday, the Obama administration unveiled details of its requested budget for 2017, including about $19 billion for NASA – a $260 million decrease from this year.
Some of the biggest cuts will hit the Orion and Space Launch System, a spacecraft and rocket designed for a crewed deep space mission. The agency says it remains committed an uncrewed test in 2018, as well as a crewed launch by 2023.
“The state of our NASA is as strong as it’s ever been,” announced NASA administrator Charles Bolden in an address at Langley Research Center in Virginia. The proposed budget, he added, will “empower the people of NASA to improve our quality of life today and prepare to send American astronauts to Mars in the 2030s”.
The reductions, however, garnered criticism elsewhere. “This administration cannot continue to tout plans to send astronauts to Mars while strangling the programs that will take us there,” said Congressman Lamar Smith, chairman of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, in a statement on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, a portion of the money has been allotted for “space transportation”: funding for commercial spacecraft capable of carrying astronauts into space. Two uncrewed demo missions from SpaceX and Boeing are scheduled for 2017, followed by two crewed demonstrations.
Other projects in the budget include the planned mission to redirect and visit an asteroid, tentatively slated for the early 2020s; additional flights of its experimental X-planes; and the development of a habitat that could be set up in cislunar space – that between Earth and the moon.
NASA also asked for funds to support International Space Station operations until at least 2024 and nearly $50 million for a mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa towards the end of the 2020s – later than previously suggested.
Before the budget kicks in this October, the official start of the 2017 fiscal year, it still needs to be approved by US Congress.