Obama Administration’s Proposed NASA Budget

February 2, 2010 at 8:19 am | Posted in Space Law Current Events | Leave a comment

by Joanne Irene Gabrynowicz with the blog faculty

Source: The White House

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Funding Highlights:

• Adds $6 billion to NASA’s budget over five years and draws upon American ingenuity to enable us to embark on an ambitious 21st Century program of human space exploration.

• Initiates flagship exploration technology development and demonstration programs of “game- changing” technologies that will increase the reach and reduce the costs of future human space exploration as well as other NASA, government, and commercial space activities.

• Embraces the commercial space industry and the thousands of new jobs that it can create by contracting with American companies to provide astronaut transportation to the Space Station—thus reducing the risk of relying exclusively on foreign crew transport capabilities.

• Ends NASA’s Constellation program, which was planning to use an approach similar to the Apollo program to return astronauts back to the Moon 50 years after that program’s triumphs. An independent panel found that Constellation was years behind schedule and would require large budget increases to land even a handful of astronauts back on the Moon before 2030. Instead, we are launching a bold new effort that invests in American ingenuity for developing more capable and innovative technologies for future space exploration.

• Extends the International Space Station and enhances its utilization, bringing nations together in a common pursuit of knowledge and excellence in space.

• Enhances the Nation’s global climate change research and monitoring system, including re- flight of a satellite that will help identify global carbon sources and sinks.

• Provides for a robust program of robotic solar system exploration and new astronomical observatories, including a probe that will fly through the Sun’s atmosphere and an expanded effort to detect potentially hazardous asteroids.

• Revitalizes and realigns NASA to put in place the right workforce and facilities to function as an efficient 21st Century research and development agency.