14 DAY TRIAL // Last year, the US Congress approved a $18.7 billion spending plan for the American space agency. At this time, that budget is about $1 billion short, and authorities are looking for ways to come up with the cash. Appropriators are currently directing their attention to other US Departments.
The Department of Commerce and Department of Justice may have their accounts siphoned in such a way so that NASA could receive the billion dollars it needs to carry out its current plans with the already-approved level of funding.
At this time, the space agency cannot allocate as much money as before for developing a manned crew capsule for space exploration. It all cannot afford to construct a new heavy-lift delivery system in the time frame Congress set for it.
Both these aspects would be resolved if NASA got the money it was promised. The agency planned its expenses and investments with $18.7 billion in mind, and cannot hope to accomplish all it has proposed – or was asked of it – with such a large deficit.
“There’s over a billion-dollar difference between the budget request and the authorized levels in [20]12 for the launch system and the crew vehicle, and now that falls squarely back on the shoulders of [the appropriations committees] to try and figure out where to come up with that money,” said a panelist.
The official, whose name was not disclosed, was speaking at a breakfast organized by the Women in Aerospace (WIA) on Capitol Hill on March 23. The meeting was held under the guises of the Chatham House Rule, which means that participants discussed frankly, but covered by anonymity.
According to the panelist, the NASA Authorization Act of 2010 that President Barack Obama signed into law last October calls for a lot more spending on the capsule/rocket combo than the current budgets allow for.
Under the NAA 2010, the space agency was supposed to spend $4 billion in 2012 on the development of the two spacecraft, but it can now afford to pay only $2.8 billion total. The official added that congressional appropriators now need find the extra money needed to respect the Authorization Act.
They need “to find a billion dollars in other places in NASA to pay for those activities or to decide to make those tradeoffs and take that money out of the departments of Commerce or Justice or the other agencies that are funded in the same bill as NASA,” the panelist said.
The funding that gets to NASA is part of a spending bill that also includes the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST), the Commerce and Justice departments and a host of other agencies.
All in all, the spending package is worth around $65 billion, which appropriators need to divide among all the agencies they are in charge with establishing funding levels for.
The panelist added that the appropriations subcommittees is “very supportive of [NASA], they’re supportive of the authorization, they want to see NASA get as close as possible to those authorized levels, so that will be a work in progress,” Space reports.