NASA Releases Detailed FY 2019 Budget Information Minus Some Details
Keith’s 14 Feb note: Note that the all of the entries for this Solar Electric Propulsion project are blank (as is the case for RESTORE-L listed just before it in the document) and that there is a place holder image of a mountain with “Caption for Picture (No more than 10 lines)”.
OMB and NASA do not know what this thing does, are not certain what it looks like (SEP looks like a mountain?), but they know exactly how much money they want to spend on it ($96 million). But they are also certain that NASA does not need to spend $99 million on an Education Office.
Keith’s 15 Feb update: Well NASA quietly updated the PDF file and removed the empty/blank template stuff for RESTORE-L and SEP but they never bothered to fix the document’s table of contents. Now the page numbering does not match. What else is screwed up? Amateur hour.
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NASA FY 2019 Budget Estimates, NASA
(Excerpts below)
“… NASA will continue its existing operations and further expand partnerships on the ISS. Direct federal support for ISS will end in 2025, though industry could potentially continue to operate certain elements or capabilities. NASA will expand international and commercial partnerships over the next seven years in order to ensure continued human access to and presence in low Earth orbit.”
“… The Moon is a stepping-stone, a training ground, and a venue to strengthen our commercial and international partnerships. As the nation turns its attention back toward our nearest celestial neighbor, we will renew our exploration of Earth’s natural satellite.
“… NASA will establish a Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway in cislunar space, to include a power and propulsion element by 2022, and habitation, airlock, and the required logistics capabilities soon after. NASA will use this infrastructure as part of a broader strategy to explore and utilize the Moon and its surface.
“… SMD will partner with industry to send robotic lunar missions to further explore and utilize the surface of the Moon. SMD will also continue to study and explore Mars. As it prepares for a potential sample return mission, it will explore technologies that will inform future crewed missions and launches.”
“… To accomplish these exploration activities, demonstration landers will be needed, with the capability to deliver payloads in the ~500 kg range to the lunar surface to obtain information on a diverse set of surface locations to be identified for potential utilization. These landings will be in addition to extensive landing missions to be planned and conducted by the SMD led Lunar Discovery and Exploration Program.”
“… NASA is pursuing a new campaign in Advanced Cislunar and Surface Capabilities (ACSC) that will once again establish U.S. preeminence to, around, and on the Moon.”
“… Starting in FY 2019, NASA is prioritizing its investments to maximize alignment with the new Exploration Campaign objectives with an emphasis on: advanced environmental control and life support systems & ISRU; power and propulsion technology (including space fission reactors, nuclear thermal propulsion, and high powered Solar Electric Propulsion); advanced materials; communications, navigation and avionics technology (including laser communications, disruption tolerant networking and high performance spaceflight computing); entry, descent and landing (including lander technologies); and autonomous operations.”
“… Consistent with the FY 2018 request, the budget assumes termination of four Earth Science missions — Pre-Aerosol, Clouds, and ocean Ecosystem (PACE), Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO)-3, Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) Earthviewing instruments, and Climate Absolute Radiance and Refractivity Observatory (CLARREO) Pathfinder — and the Carbon Monitoring System. Following a detailed internal review, NASA has canceled the Radiation Budget Instrument (RBI) due to cost overruns that cannot be accommodated within the current budget.”
“… Given its significant cost and higher priorities within NASA, the budget proposes termination of the WFIRST mission. Remaining WFIRST funding is redirected towards other priorities of the astrophysics community, including competed astrophysics missions and research.”
“… NASA’s Earth Science Research program pioneers the use of both space-borne and aircraft measurements in all of these areas. NASA’s Earth Science Research program is critical to the advancement of the interagency U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), established by Presidential Initiative in 1989 and mandated by Congress in the Global Change Research Act of 1990 to develop and coordinate “a comprehensive and integrated United States research program which will assist the Nation and the world to understand, assess, predict, and respond to human-induced and natural processes of global change.” NASA’s Earth Science Research program also makes extensive contributions to international science programs, such as the World Climate Research Program.”
“… An efficient and effective transportation system is fundamental to the future of the U.S. economy. Aviation is a highly visible and forward-looking component of transportation. Aviation moves the world, and the U.S. is a global leader in aviation technology.”
“… The FY 2019 Budget proposes the termination of NASA’s traditional education portfolio of domestic assistance awards (grants and cooperative agreements) that are fully funded in the year of the award or annually funded with a performance period of three to five years.”
“… No funding is requested for Space Grant, EPSCoR and MUREP. NASA proposes to use unobligated balances previously appropriated under this heading to support the termination of these activities, including but not limited to, ongoing administration, oversight, monitoring, and funding of grants previously awarded by the Office of Education. Moving forward, it is expected that a new focused functional office funded by Agency Management and Operations will oversee agency-wide coordination of STEM engagement efforts.”
At least it’s a reasonably nice placeholder image…
Actually, there are many things in this budget that seem odd me. Specifically, there seem to be numerous reorganizations I haven’t seen reported or announced before. The Space Technology Mission Directorate is eliminated (as a Directorate) and merged with Exploration Advanced Exploration Systems to form “Exploration Research and Technology.” A whole Lunar science program, with a budget a bit over $200 million appeared within the Science Mission Directorate. I don’t know the prior structure of the human spaceflight directorate well enough to be sure, but it looks like it’s been juggled around pretty substantially.
I’m not saying these changes are a bad thing (that’s a separate issue.) I just don’t expect to see things like this “announced” somewhere around page 300 of a 765-page budget document. I also wouldn’t expect this sort of thing from an agency which currently lacks an Administrator. (To me, an “acting” position usually means a caretaker position, who keeps things going without major changes until the position is filled permanently.)
A few other fun details from the planetary science perspective: The administration wants are delaying the Europa Clipper launch to 2025 and launching on a “commercial” vehicle rather than SLS (to safe money and to use all the SLS’s for returning humans to the Moon.) The plans for the Lunar program are vague but interesting. They talk about commercial contracts to get NASA-developed payloads to lunar orbit and the surface. They also imply that Mars sample return would be done in a similar way (which may make some people scream…)
In other happy news, the ROSES 2018 announcement of opportunity came out yesterday. That’s the omnibus AO for almost all NASA science grants. If a scientist is funded by NASA grants and it isn’t tied to a flight project, it’s probably through those $100-$200,000 per year, 2-4 year grants in ROSES. Last year, of the “A” (Earth science) program elements, 26 out of 52 were listed as “not solicited this year.” The year before it was 17 out of 51. That isn’t too uncommon if they can’t fund it every year; the people involved find it easier to keep the same list of elements instead of adding and removing them. But this year, 30 out of 45 are either “not solicited” or TBD. I’m sure there is some good, official reason for each and every one, but this seems ominous to me.
In a more normal setting, OSTP plays a major role in the review of the NASA budget in the context of US science and technology policy. And a missing permanent NASA Administrator doesn’t help either. Currently we’re rudderless in this regard.
Much of the changes that have been proposed seems to not have a lot of thought or depth behind. Have their been market studies to back up plans to commercialize? If so, where’s the data? Just saying that we’re going to commercialize something doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.
Lack of thoughtful analysis has certainly been made clear with blank budget “details.” Very unprofessional and borderline embarrassing.
For the idea of using commercial services to get a science payload to the Moon, they did at least put out a Request for Information last year. And it sounds like it’s more modeled after commercial cargo services to ISS.
For the sections they forgot to fill out, when I’m on a review panels, the NASA people in charge usually tell us not to cite poor grammar, spelling errors and similar things as a weakness. I once tried getting around that by saying, “without being a weakness in and of itself, the lack of attention to these details raises concerns that the proposers might be equally inattentive to detail in carrying out the proposed work.”
well said
Using commercial contracts doesn’t equal “commercialize”, there’re NASA study shows even if NASA is the sole customer, using commercial contracts reduces R&D and service cost significantly.
Yes, and also remember that by law NASA is suppose to use commercial launchers when available. Also limiting SLS to just Orion flights will make it easier to kill off both, so it’s good it’s being taken out of the critical path of missions like the Europa Orbiter.
The fact that theses important changes are taking place without an Administrator just highlights how unimportant positions like that really are in a bureaucracy. Most bureaucratic organizations tend to be run by staff rather the the short time political figureheads. They may look like they are steering the ship, but the ship is really being controlled below decks.
Off-topic, but you were curious about this before, and I don’t know if you’ve seen this paper:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802….
Statistical analysis of the FH-Tesla’s future chances of collision, “The random walk of cars”.
“… No funding is requested for Space Grant, EPSCoR and MUREP. NASA proposes to use unobligated balances previously appropriated under this heading to support the termination of these activities,”
So what happened to the inspiring justifications these programs once had? Were they just wrong?
The real world. The best stimulation for STEM is the availability of jobs. It’s really sad to encourage kids to prepare for a field like astrophysics where jobs only exist for half of the Ph.D.s that graduate and the rest are doomed to be recycled as high school science teachers or be retrained for a field where there is a demand for workers.
Well, sure, but if we don’t fund projects like WFIRST where will those jobs be?
I suspect you are thinking of private industry, or wealthy patrons?
Regardless of what he was thinking of, it’s worth considering what you are funding and what sort of fields you want students going into. Whether it’s government funded or funded by wealthy patrons, people will vote with their feet.
In the case of most NASA projects (and I suspect also of WFIRST), the large majority of the budget goes into designing and building the hardware, not using it. Lots of well-funded flight projects provide career opportunities for far more engineers than astrophysicists. Which may or may not be a good thing, but it’s important to realize when talking about using career opportunities to promote STEM education.
But this does also produce its own constituency. If the money and the career opportunities go to people who design and build things, rather than people who use them, you get a workforce that wants to do that. So you get things like ISS, which isn’t well handled when it comes to utilization, and SLS, which is a program more focused on building than using, and I’m not sure that’s a good way to go.
What, nobody has yet mentioned the numerous references to Nuclear Thermal Propulsion? Now this is exciting! It is part of the Technology Maturation budget under the Exploration Research and Technology account. It is at least part of the $1 Billion ERT 2019 budget. This makes me happy.
https://www.nasa.gov/center…
This may be another area where the low cost of a Falcon Heavy makes a big difference. One of the real problems for developing nuclear thermal rockets is testing. The exhaust is quite radioactive and we aren’t allowed to vent that into the open air of New Mexico or Idaho anymore. At traditional launch costs, the idea of a development program without ground tests would be difficult to imagine (I was about to write, “insane”, but that might be going to far.) But if you can lob test articles into a very high Earth orbit for under $100 million, maybe you can do your nuclear thermal rocket testing that way.
I believe that the test plan is to capture the exhaust, so it will be a completely closed system. Probably will be conducted somewhere in the NNSS. However, you are quite right about the Falcon Heavy being the ideal vehicle for launching missions that might employ NTR into GTO.
I don’t know what the current plan is. But, yes, past proposals have involved a closed system and capturing the exhaust. Unfortunately, that’s very expensive and one of the things which prevented developing nuclear thermal rockets. I was wondering if, given sufficiently low launch costs, it might be cheaper to do the testing in space. At least the testing which involves lots of exhaust.