Congress Acts on Final NASA FY95 Bill: Science, Aeronautics & Technology
On September 12, the House passed the conference report (House Report 103-715) for H.R. 4624, the FY 1995 VA/HUD/Independent Agencies Appropriations Bill. The Senate is expected to act shortly. This FYI highlights selected provisions within space science.
Space science now falls under the account entitled Science, Aeronautics and Technology. This account will receive $5,901,200,000, equal to the budget request. Most of the major space science programs survived intact, although at reduced levels from their current budgets. The AXAF program receives its request of $234.3 million, $7.0 million less than current funding. STORE/Gravity Probe B, the Discovery and Explorer programs, and Landsat will receive their full requests. The request for the Cassini program was $255.0 million, down $11.6 million from current funding; the conference report cuts $7.0 million from Cassini launch services.
The following (selected) changes were also made to the budget request:
+$40,000,000 for the global geospace science mission.
-$15,000,000 from mission operations and data analysis for the global geospace science mission.
+$10,000,000 for mission operations and data analysis for the Hubble telescope “to be allocated as follows: $2,000,000 for the advanced camera instrument, $3,000,000 for the Space Telescope Institute, and $5,000,000 as a reserve...”
-$19,000,000 from the Mars Surveyor program, from a request of $78.4 million. “This decrease is offset by an identical amount in the recovered fee from the Mars Observer program.” +$5,000,000 to life and microgravity sciences, added to a request of $470.9 million,"for the NASA-NIH protocol.”
+$7,200,000 for spacelab payload development “to be applied to science experiments displaced due to the proposed termination of several spacelab missions.”
+$35,100,000 for the EOS program, added to a request of $455.1 million. “Of these funds, $25,000,000 should be allocated for secondary spacecraft development,... $1,500,000 for visualization techniques,... and an additional $8,600,000 for EOSDIS, to be used for program reserves.”
-$9,800,000 from space station attached payloads for SAGE-III.
