NASA will take only an $89 million cut in its topline spending request for fiscal 2013 compared to this year’s operating plan, sources said Friday, but the $17.711 billion NASA budget proposal due out Feb. 13 will axe the joint effort with Europe to return samples from Mars, to pay for development overruns on the James Webb Space Telescope.
Human-spaceflight budgeting continues pretty much as expected, with an $830 million request for commercial crew development (CCDev) work and only a slight drop in the $2.8 billion NASA is spending this year on its heavy-lift Space Launch System (SLS) and Orion multipurpose crew vehicle.
The SLS would get another $1.8 billion under the new request, which must clear an election-year Congress focused on deficit reduction. The exploration-vehicle figures track with last year’s budget runout for fiscal 2013, with the Orion budget tweaked downward to keep it in pace with launch vehicle work.
NASA is “metering” spending on the congressionally mandated deep-space human vehicles to stay within the flat budget, and apparently has decided not to try to recover the deep congressional cut in CCDev work this year. For fiscal 2012, the agency sought $850 million and got $406 million, which set back its target for operational commercial crew flights to the International Space Station (ISS) from 2016 until 2017.
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