President Obama sent his FY2014 budget request to Congress today, nine-and-a-half weeks late.   The $1.058 trillion request includes $17.7 billion for NASA.  Highlights will be discussed during a NASA media telecon at 3:00 pm ET this afternoon. An earlier media briefing, at 1:30 pm ET, will discuss the overall budget request for federal research and development, including NASA, NOAA, NIH and NSF.

The President continues to oppose sequestration and his FY2014 budget does not take it into account.  Consequently, NASA’s FY2014 budget request is about the same as its FY2013 request following the flat-line spending plan it assumed last year. 

NASA’s documentation accompanying the FY2014 request does not allow comparisons to what Congress appropriated for FY2013 — the current fiscal year — because the request was formulated prior to Congress completing action on the FY2013 budget.    The numbers in the tables accompanying NASA’s request are based on the first Continuing Resolution (CR) that passed Congress last September, not the second CR that became law in March and ultimately set government spending levels for this year.  That law cut NASA’s FY2013 funding from the $17.771 billion requested to something in the neighborhood of $16.6 billion.  NASA has not publicly stated even the total that it received for FY2013.   That and details of how it will be spent at the account and program, project and activity (PPA) level apparently will not be revealed until NASA submits a congressionally-required operating plan to Congress on May 10.

Leaving aside questions about current year spending, the FY2014 request includes three major changes.

• A new Asteroid Retrieval Initiative, with $105 million requested for FY2014, to study the feasibility of capturing a 7-10 meter diameter, 500 ton asteroid, bringing it to the Earth-Moon system using a robotic probe powered by solar electric propulsion, and sending astronauts to explore it perhaps as early as 2021.  The $105 million is split among three tasks:
  • Identify:  additional $20 million (on top of existing $20 million) for the Science Mission Directorate (SMD) to augment ground-based efforts to identify and characterize asteroids with the goal of identifying a candidate asteroid for this mission by 2016;
  • Redirect:   $45 million for the new Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) to accelerate development of high-power solar electric propulsion;
  • Explore: $40 million for the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate (HEOMD) to study how the Orion spacecraft could rendezvous with the asteroid and how astronauts could interact with it.
• Two significant changes to the Earth Science portfolio
  • NASA will assume responsibility for climate sensors that were to be incorporated onto NOAA’s Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS).   Congress has strongly encouraged NOAA to focus on its weather forecasting mission.
  • NASA will take the lead on determining how to ensure the continuity of the satellite land remote sensing data set tht began with the first Landsat satellite in 1972.   Landsat 8 (also called the Landsat Data Continuity Mission, or LDCM) was launched earlier this year and planning must begin for the next in the series to avoid any gaps in data acquisition.  The Obama Administration wanted to transfer the program to the U.S Geological Survey (USGS), which operates the Landsat satellites and is knowledgable about the user community for that data.  Congress rejected the idea because of concern that the cost would overwhelm over USGS priorities.
• Impacts on NASA’s education portfolio due a government-wide restructuring of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education programs.   The White House is consolidating most of the government’s STEM projects that are currently in 13 agencies into three agencies:  the Department of Education (K-12 programs), the National Science Foundation (undergraduate and graduate programs), and the Smithsonian (informal and in-situ education).   NASA’s FY2014 education request of $94 million will fund NASA-specific efforts such as Space Grant, EPSCoR, MUREP and GLOBE.  The $94 million includes “$67.5 million for high-performing existing programs, and an additional $26.8 million previously distributed throughout the agency’s mission directorates” according to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).  OMB also says that $47.5 million of NASA’s education programs were “redirected” to the other agencies.  NASA’s “education” budget request last year was $100 million, but it is difficult to compare that with the $94 million requested this year since that budget did not include the funding in the mission directorate accounts.

The Asteroid Retrieval Initiative is likely to be the focus of attention, although NASA officials stress that the agency must first complete a feasibility study before offering details.  A Mission Concept Review is expected to be completed this summer.   The concept was outlined in a 2012 Keck Institute for Space Studies (KISS) report that estimated the total cost of such a mission at $2.6 billion.   NASA officials caution against using that as a cost estimate for what the agency might do, arguing the cost might be lower because much of the work is already underway for other purposes.  The total request for this initiative in FY2014 is $105 million, but NASA categorizes only $78 million of that as “mission” funding.

The overall President’s budget request for the U.S. Government for FY2014 was officially released at 12:30 pm ET today.

Details of NASA’s FY2014 budget request will be posted on the agency’s website at 1:00 pm ET. 

NASA Administrator Bolden will be one of the participants in a press conference at 1:30 pm ET.  The press conference is led by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and will be webcast by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) on its website.   The other participants are the heads of NOAA, NIH and NSF, all of whom will join the President’s Science Adviser and Director of OSTP John Holdren.

A House Science, Space and Technology Committee hearing on the threat to Earth posed by asteroids and meteors whose orbits bring them close to Earth, called Near Earth Objects (NEOs), is scheduled to begin at 2:00 pm.  One of the witnesses, Don Yeomans, is from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, but it is not clear how much information he will provide about the Asteroid Retrieval Initiative in NASA’s budget request.   He is the manager of NASA’s ongoing effort to track and catalogue NEOs.  The hearing will be webcast on the committee’s website.

NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden will hold a media teleconference on the FY2014 budget request at 3:00 pm.  It will be broadcast on the agency’s news audio website.

President Obama will submit his FY2014 budget request to Congress tomorrow, Wednesday, April 10. 

Word is that the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) will hold a press conference at 12:30 pm ET to formally release the budget request.   NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden will hold a media teleconference at 3:00 pm ET that will be available on NASA’s news audio website.

NASA will post details of its request on the NASA budget website at 1:00 pm ET.

Unless it’s a short hearing, the House Science, Space and Technology Committee will be in the middle of part two of its hearings on the threat to Earth posed by asteroids and comets whose orbits bring them close to Earth (collectively called Near Earth Objects or NEOs), at that time.   The hearing is set to begin at 2:00 pm ET.   The budget request reportedly will include funds to further studies of the idea of sending a robotic probe to capture an asteroid, bring it to the Earth-Moon system, and send astronauts to study it.  Hopefully the hearing will elucidate what NASA has in mind.   JPL’s Don Yeomans is one of the witnesses. 

A House subcommittee will hold a third congressional hearing on the threat to Earth posed by asteroids and comets on April 10, the same day President Obama will submit his FY2014 budget request to Congress.   The hearings were catalyzed by the meteor that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia in February.

Asteroids and comets that come close to Earth collectively are known as Near Earth Objects (NEOs).  The April 10 hearing, before the Space Subcommittee of the House Science, Space and Technology (HSS&T) Committee, will feature Ed Lu, former astronaut and current head of the B612 Foundation; Don Yeomans, manager of NASA’s NEO Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Lab; and Mike A’Hearn of the University of Maryland who co-chaired a 2009 National Research Council study on the NEO threat.

Lu testified to a Senate Commerce subcommittee in March.   His B612 Foundation is trying to raise funds, primarily from philanthropists, to build a space-based inrfared telescope that would be placed in a special orbit around the Sun that affords a better view of NEOs in Earth’s vicinity.  Ground-based telescopes and those in Earth orbit can only see sections of the sky and B612 wants to create a more complete catalog of Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs).    Yeomans is one of the world’s leading authorities on identifying, tracking and cataloging NEOs as part of a NASA program that was mandated by Congress beginning in the 1990s.  The NRC study that A’Hearn co-chaired was requested by Congress in the 2008 NASA Authorization Act.   It looked at tracking and cataloging NEOs as well as how to mitigate the threat they pose to Earth.

The full HSS&T committee, which has led the charge over the past two deades in directing NASA to study NEOs, held the first of the three post-Chelyabinsk hearings on March 19.   Witnesses were Presidential Science Adviser John Holdren. Air Force Space Command Commander Gen. William Shelton, and NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden.   The next day, the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee’s Subcommittee on Science and Space held a hearing on space “threats” where Lu and Jim Green, Director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division, testified about the threat from NEOs.   The April 10 hearing, back on the House side, will continue the discussion.

The House and Senate committees hope to pass a new NASA authorization bill this year that may well address NEOs again.  While congressional interest in NEOs has been rather limited in the past to certain members of the House committee, the meteor that exploded over Chelyabinsk on February 15 stimulated much broader concern.  Over 1,000 people were injured, mostly from flying glass as windows broke from the shock wave created by the meteor passing through the atmosphere.   Asteroids are rocks in space.   When they enter Earth’s atmosphere, they are called meteors.  Any pieces that reach the ground are called meteorites.

In addition to tracking and cataloguing NEOs, NASA has sent robotic probes to study them.  The next U.S. probe, OSIRIS-Rex, is planned for launch in 2016.   President Obama also directed NASA to send humans to an asteroid by 2025.   A concept currently being promoted by a diverse array of groups as an alternative or adjunct is to capture an asteroid using a robotic spacecraft and tow it to a location close to Earth (perhaps placing it in orbit around the Moon) and send astronauts to study it there.    Aviation Week reports that the President’s FY2014 budget request includes $100 million to continue studies of such a mission.

The asteroid hearing is at 2:00 pm ET on April 10 in 2318 Rayburn House Office Buildkng.  The committee usually webcasts its hearings.