NASA Budget Research Articles

NASA budget, EOS face cuts

The hefty FY 1992 increase for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration proposed by President George Bush has begun to attract Congressional budget‐cutting axes, as predicted. The first cuts, however, have come from an unexpected ax‐wielder—the space subcommittee of the House Committee on Space, Science, and Technology—normally a cheerleader for NASA in recent years.The subcommittee trimmed $488 million from NASA's budget request of $15.8 billion on April 11, according to a staff member of the space subcommittee. Notably, the panel did not touch the allotment for Space Station Freedom. The subcommittee has submitted the NASA authorization bill to the full committee, which is slated to act on it by the end of April, according to the Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report.

Put space science first, NASA advised

The first priority of the U.S. space program should be scientific research, not manned spaceflight, according to a high‐level NASA advisory committee, chaired by Martin Marietta chief executive officer Norman R. Augustine, that reported its findings in December. The committee's recommendations, which also include a 10% annual increase in NASA's budget through the 1990s and a cost‐cutting redesign of Space Station Freedom, were well received January 3 on Capitol Hill during the first of a series of Congressional hearings on the committee's report.The report identifies four content areas that make up the U.S. civil space program—space science, Earth observation missions, manned exploration of the Solar System, technology and launch systems—and states that “the civil space science program should have first priority for NASA resources.” That funding level is to be maintained at a constant level of approximately 20% of NASA's budget. The report also recommends that NASA increasingly use universities and other organizations as “prime contractors for space research instruments and projects.”

NASA big winner in budget

The President's budget request for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration contains a dramatic increase of 24%, or $2.8 billion, over Fiscal Year 1990, bringing the total figure for FY 1991 to $15.1 billion. Of the $4.5 billion the administration has proposed in increases for civilian and defense R&D, NASA receives $2 billion. The largest single increase in the NASA budget is slated for Space Station Freedom, which increases by $700 million (36%) to a total of $2.6 billion. Other big increases go to the lunar/Mars initiative, which is up 47% to a total of $408 million, and the first element of NASA's Mission to Planet Earth, the Earth Observing System (EOS), to receive $264 million.

Space science strategy

The headline to a recent news article read “NASA Focuses on Station, Faces Growing Budget Crisis” [Covault, 1989], which I thought summarized NASA's present and probable future succinctly. The article was unusual: it not only discussed NASA's budget options through 2000, a long time by the normal standards of these discussions, but it also pointed out that “major design decisions over the next two years will be critical to constructing a [space] station that will endure 30 years.”Imagine trying to think 30–40 years ahead in the space program to a time in the middle 2020s when the station will presumably cease to endure! As I will try to show, however, it is crucial for those of us in the space program to think ahead for those 30–40 years if we are going to interpret correctly the events already beginning to shape the program for those years and which must soon begin to have a dramatic effect on its viability.

Budgets approved, but cuts loom

Conferees from the House and Senate have finished work on Fiscal Year (FY) 1990 appropriations for NSF and NASA by giving the agencies most of what they wanted, for now.The conference report on Veterans Affairs, Housing and Urban Development and Independent Agencies, passed in late October by both bodies, calls for a 10% increase for NSF and a 7.5% rise in NASA's budget. However, unless the Bush administration and Congress reach agreement on a new deficit‐reduction plan, 5.3% mandatory cuts to each line item in all agency budgets will wipe out some of the gains.

EOS Panel

NASA's Earth Observation System (EOS) is planned as the prime source of remotely sensed geophysical data for at least a decade. Since EOS is expected to be submitted as a new start in the NASA budget for Fiscal Year 1991, it is appropriate that AGU adopt a formal position on the program. To do this, a panel has been formed by President Don Anderson to draft an AGU position for Council approval. The panel will report by January 1990. It will focus on scientific as opposed to management aspcets in keeping with AGU's expertise.

Science, space budget approved

The Senate is about to approve a budget for NASA, NSF, and other independent agencies that would restore some of the money cut by the House version from President Bush's request.The Senate Appropriations Committee approved recommendations of its Veterans Affairs, Housing and Urban Development, and Independent Agencies (VAHUDIA) subcommittee on $48.05 billion in discretionary spending for Fiscal Year 1990 on September 13. The full Senate could vote on the bill in the next few weeks. Differences between House and Senate versions of the bill will then be worked out by members of both houses in conference later in the year.

SSWG statement on the proposed 1989 NASA budget

The Space Science Working Group applauds the leadership evident in the February 1988 Presidential Directive on National Space Policy and in the President's proposed NASA budget for fiscal year 1989. The National Space Policy outlines a series of broad goals to guide the planning of ongoing and future U.S. programs in space, including the need “to expand knowledge of the Earth, its environment, the solar system, and the universe,” and “to preserve the United States preeminence in critical aspects of space science.“ Our new space policy is the result of a careful planning process that recognizes the need for immediate action to revitalize the U.S. space science enterprise.For the last several years, and particularly since the Challenger accident, the SSWG has maintained that this nation must act to correct the serious erosion in the health of U.S. space science. In its testimony to Congress last year the SSWG presented four overarching issues that must be addressed to resolve the present crisis: frequent and assured access to space for scientific exploration, the vitality of the space science infrastructure, particularly at universities, the timely development of advanced technologies, and the continuing pursuit of new science.

Reagan Endorses a Two-Phase Space Station

Reagan Endorses a Two-Phase Space Station

THE GRAYING OF AMERICAN ASTRONOMY

ABSTRACT We consider the distribution of scientific ages of professors in ten astronomy departments in the United States and find that the average astronomer is growing older at a rate of about 6 months per year at present. This aging will continue through the end of the 1990s, at which time we predict that the average professorial astronomer will be around 50 years old. The cause of this aging is the expansion of the profession that began in the late 1960s, an expansion that was not maintained for more than one decade. As a consequence, perhaps as many as one-third of all the professor-level astronomers in the country obtained doctorates between 1964 and 1970, inclusive. For comparison we briefly consider the distribution of ages of physicists and physiologists. The number of physiologists as a function of date of doctorate has been slightly increasing since around 1960; thus this profession has also been slowly getting older with time. The average age of physicists is significantly greater than that for astronomers. Because of the significant influence of social and political forces on university decisions, we find that the total budget for NASA has been a good predictor for the past demand for professorial astronomers, but the total NSF budget is not. We predict the future demand for astronomers in the U.S. and suggest, as a result of the expansion in the 1960s, that demand will increase significantly near the end of the 1990s, making employment easier to obtain and suitable job candidates, particularly postdoctoral associates, more difficult to find. We point out that because of greater average age, the physics community will have to find solutions to the problems of an elderly population before astronomers will. Furthermore, there may be a small increase in the demand for astronomers as large numbers of physicists retire in the early- to mid-1990s. Additional consequences of a graying astronomy are briefly considered.

Evolution and logistics of an early lunar base

The planned construction of a permanently manned space station in low earth orbit has reopened the discussion about the establishment of a manned lunar base within the next 25 years for exploration of the Moon and space. Several studies demonstrate that a lunar base very modest in size may cost $50 to 90 billion spread over 25 years which would fit into the expected NASA budget for this period. Having these cost in mind the authors present a concept having a greater effectiveness based on the following operational characteristics: (1) The development of a low cost heavy-lift launch vehicle for cargo transportation and propellant supply reduces the specific transportation cost by one order of magnitude compared to the existing Space Shuttle system. (2) Orbital transfer vehicles with LOX/LH2 technology should be preferred over advanced propulsion systems because of proved technology and cost reduction by utilization of lunar produced LOX. (3) The evolution of the lunar base towards a lunar colony and manufacturing facility could only be initiated by a powerful transportation system allowing for cost-effective space construction projects and manned spaceflight to other planets. The lunar base program of this paper is based on a schedule considering a 8 years development, 5 years lunar base assembly and 20 years operational phase during which the lunar crew will increase from 60 to 180 people. Launch rates will be 10 shuttle launches and 10 HLLV launches p.a. at the average. Development costs of the transportation and lunar base system will amount to $29 billion. Adding hardware and operational costs for lunar base assembly results in the acquisition cost of $49 billion. Total life cycle costs are estimated to be in the order of $101 billion considering a 20 years operational phase which will cost $2.6 billion p.a. at the average. For the 2508 man-years spent in lunosphere the relative cost will be $40.2 million per man-year of which space transportation will cost $25.0 million per man-year.

NASA budget freeze in prospect?

NASA budget freeze in prospect?

Venus mapper resolution

NASA program managers for the Venus Radar Mapper (VRM) mission have decided to make improvements to the spacecraft's Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) system that will increase its mapping resolution by one and a half times over the original design. The changes, including a doubling of the system's range bandwidth, will add a total of about $5 million to a project budgeted at $350 million. VRM is scheduled for launch toward Venus in April 1988 and will map more than 90% of the cloud‐veiled planet's surface during its 8‐month mission.The decision by the VRM program office at NASA headquarters in Washington was based on recommendations from the mission's project office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. When VRM was included as a new start in this year's NASA budget, the stated goals for the mission were to provide a near‐global map of Venus at resolutions better than 1 km, or roughly equivalent to the resolution of the Mariner 9 mission that first revealed the geological richness of the Martian surface. The actual best radar resolution was to have been about 180 m (equivalent to an optical line‐pair resolution of 360 m) attainable for more than half the surface of the planet. VRM will travel an elliptical orbit and so will only be able to map the surface for a fraction of each day. The highest resolutions will come in the equatorial regions when the spacecraft is closest to periapsis and the radar “look angles” are the greatest.

APS and the international physics community in 1983

World War II was a turning point in the fortunes of American science. The many scientific contributions to the winning of the war—radar, the proximity fuse, the atomic bomb—led a grateful nation to expand greatly its support of basic research at universities, from which the bulk of wartime researchers had come and to which they returned. Since physicists had played such a prominent role in the war effort, it was not surprising that physics was one of the chief beneficiaries of the new public policy. It is worth recalling that the first Federal agency to provide substantial funds for academic physics was the Office of Naval Research, which, among other things, provided the funds for the first high‐energy machines. By the early 1950s, the Atomic Energy Commission and the National Science Foundation were fully established and began to assume increasing responsibility for support of basic research in the physical sciences. After Sputnik in 1957, NASA joined NSF and AEC (now DOE) as one of three key civilian agencies funding physics research. The actual figures for FY 1984 may be of interest. The DOE budget, the largest, is $1.38 billion (under the categories of “high‐energy physics,” “nuclear physics,” “basic energy sciences” and “magnetic fusion energy”), the NSF budget is $208 million (under the categories of “physics program” and “materials research program”) and the NASA budget is $324 million (under the categories of “physics and astronomy” and “planetary exploration”), for a grand total of $1.85 billion; incidentally, this represents a healthy 12.5% increase over the corresponding figure for the previous year.

Economy of Fusion

By DIETRICK E. THOMSEN A s 1984 begins, so do the inevitable reminiscences of George Orwell. But while Orwell was composing his pessimistic view of his future (our present), others were advancing optimistic ones either to boost the morale of those involved in a war or to amaze those attending a world's fair. The optimistic genre tended to share certain assumptions: Clothing would be light and abbreviated. Giant domes built over whole cities would control microclimates. Public transport would be readily available and well patronized. And power for all this would be generated by smokeless means. Of these predictions the only one that has come true is the one about abbreviated clothing. In any North American city, numbers of people can be seen running around the streets or lying in parks in their underwear (or what seems to be less), an activity for which they would have been arrested during the 1940s. Nobody has yet domed a city. Public transport in the United States is in terrible shape. And most of our electricity still comes from fossil fuels. The smokeless power was supposed to come from nuclear fission or nuclear fusion. Fission reactors were available in the 1940s and were expected to sweep the power industry. They have not done so. Ironically the economics seem more against them than for them. Fusion reactors don't yet exist, though by 1940s predictions they should exist by now. Scientific difficulties and the example of nonproliferation of fission power reactors have led to questioning of the fusion program. People wonder particularly whether fusion economics would be similarly disappointing. Even most researchers in the field tend to talk diffidently about its prospects. One who is not diffident is John Nuckolls, who was recently promoted to be director of physics at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif. Nuckolls has called for a crash program, like the Manhattan District Project that got us both fission bombs and fission reactors, to get us fusion reactors. Having made that call, he decided to study what the economics of fusion power are likely to be. He discussed that study in a recent interview with SCIENcE NEws. Nuckolls is concerned that his colleagues in the fusion effort, who are busily working toward a scientific demonstration of the feasibility of fusion, are not paying enough attention to what happens afterward. If! were in [Presidential Science Advisor George A.] Keyworth s position, he says, I would get the fusion community together and say, people have to worry that you're going to get into the same boat as NASA was when it got a man on the moon. It will be a great triumph when the tokamak works and you get breakeven or whatever it is... But what comes after that? If you look at what happened to the NASA budget for the next decade, it didn't go up, it sort of went down, and people haven't been back to the moon since. I'm afraid that fusion is racing toward another anticlimax because they're not putting enough effort into what happens after [breakeven]. The is going to need increases in available power, he contends. Even assuming that the population levels off after another doubling and that the average person makes only a modest increase in power demand, he quotes estimates of 10,000 fission reactors. Multiplying by an estimated unit cost of a billion dollars means $10 trillion are at stake. All those world of tomorrow brochures assumed that the smokeless power was going to be cheap. When fusion was first getting started, why it was cheap, clean and inexhaustible. Fusion and fission were both the same, except that fission wasn't clean.... They weren't even going to charge you for it. Now we're in a where economics really matters. It is more of a zero-sum game. Its not sufficient for fusion to be the same price as fission or coal or whatever the competition is. It has got to be substantially cheaper, or the utilities are not going to want to go to the trouble to install a new energy system....I think the nature of technology is that nobody can make a perfect product. You sort of do it by iteration, by trial and error, and its pretty expensive to do that on half billion and billion and two billion dollar facilities, particularly when you've got environmental groups nipping at your heels. Coal is not going to escape. All these developing countries are not going to rush to buy an expensive fission or fusion plant if they can burn their own coal, which they mine with cheap labor. The is doomed to fall into the CO2 trap [the i-1

Physics does well in NASA budget

Physics does well in NASA budget

A Program for Planetary Exploration

On the basis of a two-year study, the NASA Solar System Exploration Committee recommends a core program of planetary missions through the year 2000. By incorporating a number of cost-saving measures, an exciting program of planetary exploration can be achieved within a highly constrained NASA budget.

NASA budget cuts planetary programs

NASA budget cuts planetary programs

Nasa budget: Small is necessary

Nasa budget: Small is necessary

Budget cuts jeopardize space exploration

In the light of 12% across‐the‐board cuts in the second round of federal budgetary action, the announcement by the Office of Management and Budget that the cut to be absorbed by NASA is only 6% appears to be good news. But this is not at all the case, even though the reduced NASA FY 1982 budget would still be above the FY 1981 budget by about 4%, because the first round of budget cuts trimmed NASA to a bare minimum. The budget had been strained after absorbing the huge first‐mission costs of the space shuttle. The portion of the budget for the shuttle still seems to be reserved, untouchable, basically as it was after the first budget‐cutting round. Further, the shuttle's costs are rising, and NASA's budget for the following year (FY 1983) is subject to larger cuts—a figure of about $1 billion has been mentioned.