Officially, details about a President’s budget request are not supposed to be released by agencies prior to the White House giving the OK.  Except for the Department of Defense and perhaps some high level messages the White House wants to preview, that usually means waiting until the complete budget request for the entire federal government is released.  That event is scheduled for Monday, but information about what the request proposes for NASA has been leaking out.   Aviation Week reveals today that the total NASA request will be $17.711 billion.

Frank Morring writes today that the request is “only an $89 million cut,” but ends NASA’s plans to participate in a robotic Mars mission with the European Space Agency (ESA).  The impact of the FY2013 budget request on NASA-ESA Mars cooperation was publicized by the Washington Post yesterday, but that article did not include the total request for NASA.

While $17.711 billion is a small cut from what the agency received from Congress in FY2012, it is a substantial cut from the funding level that the Obama Administration projected for NASA last year.   NASA’s FY2012 appropriated level is $17.800 billion, so by comparison the cut is indeed modest.   In last year’s budget request, however, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) projected that NASA would get $18.030 billion in FY2013.  The White House allowed NASA to use higher projected spending levels in its own budget materials, keeping the agency level at $18.7 billion through FY2016.  So a $17.711 billion request can be interpreted as a small cut of $89 million from its current level, or a huge cut of $1 billion from NASA’s own projections a year ago at this time.

Agencies like NASA that conduct multi-year research and development projects benefit from having an idea of what to expect in the future so they can effectively plan their programs.  While any future year projection is just that, a projection not a promise, when it varies significantly from reality, the planning process becomes inefficient.

Aviation Week published additional details about the FY2013 budget request, which it says includes $830 million for commercial crew, $1.8 billion for the Space Launch System, $1 billion for the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, $3 billion for the International Space Station, $699 million for space technology development, and $500 million for aeronautics.  The total amount for science is not mentioned, only the $300 million cut to the planetary science program (from $1.5 billion to $1.2 billion according to yesterday’s story in the Post).

The administration’s budget request is the first step in a lengthy process to determine how much the government can spend in FY2013.  The new fiscal year starts on October 1, but few expect Congress to complete action on budgets before then.  Meeting that October 1 deadline is a difficult task every year and especially challenging in an election year. 

Editor’s Note:  It is interesting to observe that some members of the media are getting access to the NASA budget material on a non-embargoed basis prior to Monday’s release.  NASA had scheduled a meeting this afternoon where media representatives could learn about the budget if they agreed to an embargo where nothing could be published before Monday.   That embargoed briefing was canceled about two hours before it was scheduled to occur.  One cannot help but wonder who is leaking the information to favored publications without restrictions.  The obvious intent of the Washington Post story yesterday was to rally support for the Mars exploration program.  Today’s story in Aviation Week does not seem to have a bias, but does portray the cuts to NASA overall as being far less dramatic and may assuage some concerns.

It’ll be a cold weekend — in Washington, at least.   If you plan to curl up in front of the fireplace and read a good book, forget the novels!  Here are two reports and a book we recently posted to our “Top Picks” and “Other Reports of Interest” lists (on our left menu).

• James Clay Moltz, Asia’s Space Race: National Motivations, Regional Rivalries and International Risks. Columbia University Press, 2011.
• UN-SPIDER Report on Space-Based Information for Crowdsource Mapping, based on two meetings organized by UN-SPIDER (United Nations Platform for Space-Based Information for Disaster Management and Emergency Response), the Secure World Foundation and the Government of Austria, December 2011

• Lyn Wigbels, Using Earth Observation Data to Improve Health in the United States:  Accomplishments and Future Challenges.  Center for Strategic and International Studies, September 2011.

Rumors ahead of the release of the FY2013 budget request paint a gloomy picture for NASA’s planetary science program.   The Washington Post reports today that the budget request will drop from $1.5 billion to $1.2 billion for FY2013 with additional cuts in later years.

NASA planetary science division director Jim Green has hinted as recent meetings of the NASA Advisory Council’s (NAC’s) planetary science subcommittee that such cuts were more than likely.  Without getting into specifics — which is officially prohibited prior to the President releasing the budget request — Green alerted the planetary science community that it had to make its case as to why planetary science is important to the nation.

The story in the Washington Post this morning suggests that the community got the message.  It quotes Jim Bell, a member of that subcommittee and President of The Planetary Society, calling the proposed cuts “devastating ” to U.S. robotic Mars exploration plans.  Scott Hubbard, a member of the parent NAC Science Committee and who was NASA’s first Mars program director and later Director of NASA’s Ames Research Center, went further:  “It’s a scientific tragedy and a national embarrassment.” 

Such cuts would impact not only the U.S. program, but Europe’s.   In 2009, NASA and the European Space Agency signed what was thought to be a revolutionary international cooperation agreement where the two agencies essentially merged their Mars exploration programs.   Instead of cooperating on a mission-by-mission basis, now the programs themselves would be merged to get the most payoff from investments on both sides of the Atlantic.   

Early indications last fall that the budget outlook was dimming led NASA to pull back from committing to the next two merged missions — in 2016 and 2018 — that themselves were just the first in a string of missions with the ultimate goal of returning samples from Mars.   ESA’s science director Alvaro Gimenez told the BBC earlier this week that it had been told NASA participation in the missions had become “very unlikely.”   ESA is also talking to Russia about cooperating on those missions.  Russia’s Mars probe, Phobos-Grunt, was lost last fall because of computer design and programming errors. 

The Washington Post quotes Rep. John Culberson (R-TX), a member of the House appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA, as condemning the proposed cut and asserting it will not be approved by Congress.    Those comments, however, illustrate the painful choices that will have to be made not only in FY2013 but for the rest of the decade to reduce the deficit, especially if the reduction must be accomplished only through spending cuts, as the Republicans insist, and not with revenue increases.    At the moment, influential Senators and the Obama Administration apparently have agreed that the top science priority for NASA is completing the over-budget James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), not planetary exploration.   The planetary program is just one of five divisions within NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.  JWST was separated from the rest of NASA’s astrophysics division last year to improve management of the program, so planetary science must compete for resources with JWST, the rest of astrophysics, heliophysics, and earth science.   The planetary program itself must choose priorities among Mars and the rest of the solar system.  

Choosing science priorities is only the first step.   Prioritizing NASA’s science programs versus human exploration and aeronautics is another level of decision-making, then NASA versus other agencies in the same appropriations bill (including the Department of Commerce and its weather satellite activities, the Department of Justice, and the National Science Foundation), and then all of those against the rest of domestic discretionary spending.

The FY2013 budget request will be released on Monday.   NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden will participate in a press conference at NASA Headquarters at 2:00 pm that day, which will be webcast on NASA TV.

The National Research Council (NRC) issued its report today on whether NASA should make a modest hardware contribution to Europe’s Euclid dark energy mission valued at about $20 million in exchange for one seat on Euclid’s 12-person science committee and early access to Euclid data.  The NRC endorsed NASA’s plan.

The report was requested by NASA and executed by the NRC on an expedited basis because the European Space Agency (ESA) needs an agreement to be signed through the U.S. State Department by the end of April if the United States wants to participate.  Consequently the committee was able to meet only once.   At that meeting, several committee members expressed concern about whether even a small contribution to Euclid would negatively affect plans for a U.S. dark energy mission.   The most recent NRC decadal survey for astronomy and astrophysics identified the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) as its highest priority large space mission, which has dark energy research as one of its three objectives.

Plans for building WFIRST are being delayed because of cost overruns on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).   The earliest WFIRST launch date now is about 2022 while Euclid is planned for launch in 2019.   By providing the hardware for the Euclid mission, U.S. scientists will get early access to Euclid’s data and one of 12 seats on the Euclid science team.  The agreement does not involve any exchange of funds between the United States and Europe.  NASA will pay for the hardware development and provide the hardware to ESA.  Exactly what hardware NASA will provide still must be negotiated, but ESA is particularly interested in U.S. near-infrared detectors.

The committee was careful to state that the contribution to Euclid “should be made in the context of a strong U.S. commitment to … WFIRST….”  and its “intent has been clear that this report does not alter … plans for implementation of the [decadal] survey’s priorities.”

The NRC committee that produced the 2010 decadal survey, New Worlds New Horizons, and recommended development of WFIRST was aware of ESA’s plans for Euclid, but ESA had not yet selected Euclid for development.  That occurred last fall.    By then, the depth of the cost overrun on JWST had crystallized and, coupled with the outlook for sharply constrained budgets for many years, NASA began looking for other ways to pursue dark energy research.   Dark energy is thought to comprise more than 70 percent of the universe.  It is called “dark” because scientists do not know what it is.   They know the universe is expanding at a rate faster than earlier theorized and coined the term dark energy to refer to the force or phenomenon that is fueling that expansion.

NASA earlier proposed a greater U.S. contribution to Euclid, but the U.S. astrophysics community was not supportive for fear it would drain resources from WFIRST or other U.S. space science priorities.   The $20 million proposal that NASA offered this time apparently was the right order of magnitude to win that support.  An internal NASA advisory subcommittee earlier had approved the idea as well.  The $20 million represents about 10 percent of the cost of Euclid’s instruments and is usually referred to as NASA having a “10 percent role in Euclid,” but it is not 10 percent of the cost of the project overall.