NASA Gets $19 Billion Budget for 2011

US Congressmen on Wednesday approved a bill setting the budget of the American space agency at around $19 billion for 2011. The document also cuts the amount of money President Barack Obama wanted to make available to the private sector. Instead, politicians decided to award about $3 billion to research and development initiatives that are a part of Project Constellation. As such, the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle will get additional funding, as will teams developing the next generation of heavy-lift delivery systems, Space reports.

The bill that includes the NASA funding also provides additional money for the Commerce and Justice departments. The total worth of the document is $60 billion. According to members of the Senate Appropriations Committee, the new approach to space exploration is extremely well suited to the current economic and political situation, and sets more realistic goals for America than the plans proposed by Obama at the beginning of the year.

“The bill restructures NASA's human spaceflight programs providing for a new heavy-lift launch vehicle crew capsule for exploring beyond low-earth orbit,” said a few days ago Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.). She is the chair of the Senate Appropriations commerce, justice, science subcommittee, as well as the veteran lawmaker in the group. The subcommittee introduced and approved the bill on July 21. Under the document, the International Space Station (ISS) will continue to get American support until at least 2020.

What this bill actually shows is that the views the Augustine Commission wanted to pass as the only possible options for NASA were actually skewed. Last year, Obama asked a panel of experts from the space industry and universities to look at possible opportunities for the space agency, and to elaborate a number of possible avenues of development for NASA and Project Constellation. The group, led by former Lockheed Martin CEO Norm Augustine, found that Constellation was unsustainable, and that the ISS could not be supported for the next decade. However, the members found that the US can give more than $6 billion over 5 years to the private spaceflight industry.

Under the new approach, the Commercial Orbital Space Transportation (COTS) program will only receive $250 million in 2011, which is only half of the original sum. The main thing about the bill is that it includes $1.9 billion for the development of a new heavy-lift delivery system, starting in 2011. Obama had proposed that this endeavor be left on stand-by until 2015, so the new plans are actually moving faster than the President's.

“It changes some of the direction that the president would recommend that we go with the heavy lift thing for the future. It gives us hope, but at the end of the day I think NASA is going to have to show a lot of vision where they want to go and how we're going to get there, and then we've got to consider how we're going to fund it,” Senator Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) says. He is the ranking member in Mikulski's subcommittee. The two worked closely together in drafting the bill.