Late last year, President Trump announced a new — and expensive — mission for NASA: Return Americans to the moon, then reach Mars and planets beyond and do it in collaboration with private-sector partnerships.
The change in strategy as NASA turns 60 is reflected in both the administration’s request for funding and the plan agreed to by lawmakers in Congress, who must approve the space agency’s annual spending allotment.
“The directive I am signing today will refocus America’s space program on human exploration and discovery,” Trump said in December. “It marks a first step in returning American astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972, for long-term exploration and use. This time, we will not only plant our flag and leave our footprints, we will establish a foundation for an eventual mission to Mars, and perhaps someday, to many worlds beyond.”
Such an ambitious initiative requires ample federal funding, and House and Senate lawmakers have for now agreed to bolster NASA spending.
“NASA is one of those agencies that has a lot of support,” Rep. Jose Serrano, D-N.Y., a top appropriator, told the Washington Examiner.
Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kansas, the top Senate appropriator on the panel that oversees NASA spending, said the agency’s 60th anniversary should serve as a reminder of the value of space exploration.
“We will do everything we can to encourage the necessary resources to enhance the mission of NASA,” Moran told the Washington Examiner.
Dale Skran, the executive vice president of the National Space Society, a citizen advocacy group for space exploration based in Washington, D.C., said his organization believes NASA funding should increase by about $1 billion annually.
“For many years, funding was the same in constant dollars, but with inflation taking place that amounts to a cut of a few percent each year,” Skran said. “That went on for at least 10 years.”
The billion-dollar annual boost, Skran said, “would make up for what amounts to cuts over the last 10 years and it would prevent warfare between the different branches of NASA,” over the available funding.
But Congress, now run by Republicans in both chambers, has grown weary of misspending, even at the vaunted space agency.
Lawmakers were alarmed after a hearing in July on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, which has suffered from cost overruns and schedule delays.
The telescope is set to serve as “the premier observatory of the next decade,” according to NASA.
But according to House Science, Space, and Technology Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, the cost of the troubled telescope has increased 19 times and has been delayed 14 years.
“Another adverse effect of cost overruns, of course, is that they can jeopardize other space programs,” Smith said at a recent oversight hearing on the telescope.
Appropriators including Moran are paying close attention to the Webb fiasco.
“When we talk about additional resources, part of it is going to be deciding whether the programs that are currently being funded at NASA, what the funding should be in the future,” Moran said. “So, it’s not always about something more, it’s also about how do we take care of what we have.”
NASA funding has increased during the Trump administration and GOP governance of Congress.
The House Appropriations Committee in May approved an $810 million increase for NASA, which if signed into law will provide the agency with a $21.5 billion budget in the next fiscal year.
The House NASA funding bill provides $5.1 billion for Deep Space Exploration Systems, which amounts to a $294 million increase over 2018 spending.
The money will be used to develop NASA’s new exploration spacecraft, Orion, which will eventually take a crew back into space.
The money is also intended to develop the Space Launch System, which NASA touts as the most powerful rocket it has ever built.
Another $459 million in new funding targets missions to other planets, while $620 million is dedicated to NASA’s planned lunar orbital space station and advanced lunar and surface capabilities, which the agency says “will extend human presence in deep space.”
Space exploration advocates praised the new spending proposal.
“The moon is the best and most accessible location in the solar system to address fundamentally important questions about our origins and a life-sustaining planetary system, while providing a credible path that carries exploration beyond low-Earth orbit,” David Kring, senior staff scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, told the Washington Examiner.
“NASA’s proposed Lunar Exploration Campaign is thus welcome and budgets to support that effort can produce transformative results.”
The Senate NASA spending bill also boosts funding, but not as much as the House legislation.
The Senate legislation provides NASA with a $21.3 billion fiscal 2019 budget, including $2.15 billion for the International Space Station “and for new vehicles that will take humans beyond low-Earth orbit,” according to panel Democrats.
Trump’s budget zeroed out funding for the ISS in an effort to redirect funding to outer space exploration. But the move drew considerable backlash from Senate Democrats including Bill Nelson, of Florida, who rode on the Space Shuttle.
Despite differences in House and Senate spending proposals for NASA, the agency is on track to win a funding increase for 2019.
It will be the second year in a row Congress awarded NASA a significant spending increase.
The fiscal 2018 omnibus spending deal signed into law in March provided the agency with a $1.1 billion spending increase over the previous fiscal year, including $75 million to support the Mars Exploration Program and specifically the proposed mission to return samples from the planet via a robotic spacecraft.
Despite the spending advances for NASA, space exploration advocates warn the United States is spending far too little on the agency, which during the moon expedition era consumed about 4 percent of the federal budget.
NASA now receives about 0.4 percent of all federal spending and has seen private companies and other countries fill in critical areas of space exploration development.
Next April, NASA is hoping to launch U.S. astronauts into space beginning with a test flight from Kennedy Space Center.
The crew will board spacecraft “Dragon” designed by the commercial company SpaceX. The test flight is aimed at proving the SpaceX craft is capable of sending astronauts to the space station and back.
