The Space Review by Jeff Foust 6/19/2023
The federal appropriations process is never easy, but some years are more difficult than others. This year appears to be shaping up to be one of the more difficult ones, particularly for NASA.
That process started in March with the release of the president’s budget proposal for fiscal year 2024. There were few surprises in that proposal, with the only new major project seeking funding is a deorbit vehicle for the International Space Station: $180 million in 2024 for a vehicle that agency officials said might cost up to $1 billion, all to provide redundancy for Russian Progress cargo spacecraft to ensure a safe deorbiting of the station around 2030.
The budget proposal sought an overall increase of 7.1% for NASA to $27.2 billion. While at first glance that might look a healthy increase, it was only roughly keeping pace with inflation over the last year.
Budget proposals are just that: proposals that are often substantially altered by Congress. (If you had a dollar for every time someone says, “The president proposes but Congress disposes,” you could fund NASA for a substantial part of next year.) That process plays out over months in the House and Senate.
However, it was clear early on that there would be problems, not for NASA specifically but for the overall appropriations process. The new Republican leadership of the House, expressing concerns about large budget deficits, said they would only agree to an increase in the debt ceiling, needed by June, if it was also accompanied by caps that could cut spending on discretionary programs, like NASA.
How much of a cut was not clear from those initial proposals. However, Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee asked agencies to outline the potential effects in two scenarios. In one, overall discretionary spending, both defense and non-defense, was reduced to 2022 levels. In the other, overall discretionary spending was reduced to 2022 levels but the cuts concentrated on non-defense agencies.
In his response, NASA administrator Bill Nelson warned of dire consequences in either scenario. In the first, NASA’s budget would drop to $24 billion. That would delay several planetary science missions already facing budget and schedule problems (see “The hard truths of NASA’s planetary program”, The Space Review, March 20, 2023) as well as other Earth and space science missions. NASA would delay work on that ISS deorbit tug and slow down funding for commercial space stations to succeed the ISS. It would also “substantially delay” Artemis 4 and end work on contracts to support later Artemis missions.
In the second scenario, NASA’s budget would fall to $19.8 billion, 22% below its 2023 level. Many of the science missions facing delays in the first scenario would now be in danger of cancellation, NASA argued. There would be a “substantially increased risk to U.S. presence” in low Earth orbit by delaying the deorbit tug and commercial space station work while also cutting back on cargo flights to the ISS. The cuts would also threaten Artemis 4 and “defer lunar exploration beyond Artemis IV.”
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https://thespacereview.com/article/4605/1
