NASA FY95 Request: Mission to Planet Earth, Life & Microgravity

Below are selected highlights from background material supplied by NASA for its fiscal year 1995 budget request:

MISSION TO PLANET EARTH: The total program request for Mission to Planet Earth is $1.238 billion. “Mission to Planet Earth (MTPE) is studying how our global environment is changing. Using the unique perspective available from space, NASA is observing, monitoring and assessing large-scale environmental processes, focusing on climate change. MTPE satellite data, complemented by aircraft and ground data, is allowing us to better understand natural environmental changes and to distinguish natural changes from human-induced changes. MTPE data, which NASA is distributing to researchers worldwide, is essential to humans making informed decisions about protecting their environment.”

EARTH OBSERVING SYSTEM: "$455.1 million. Employing a series of satellites that will begin launching in 1998, EOS will document global climate change and observe regional- and global-scale environmental processes.”

EOS DATA AND INFORMATION SYSTEM: "$284.9 million. EOSDIS will collect, process and distribute data from EOS for use in modeling and understanding global processes.”

EARTH PROBES: "$82.0 million. A series of small, specialized satellites and instruments requiring special orbits and capabilities, the Earth Probes program will complement the broad studies of EOS with narrowly focused missions to study tropical rainfall, ocean winds and global ozone.”

In selected other programs under Mission to Planet Earth, Mission Operations and Data Analysis would receive $97.5 million, Interdisciplinary Research would get $4.6 million, Modeling and Data Analysis would get $41.2 million, Process Studies would get $119.4 million, and Space Station Attached Payloads would receive $9.8 million.

LIFE AND MICROGRAVITY SCIENCES AND APPLICATIONS: “A total of $470.9 million has been requested in the FY 1995 budget for the Office of Life and Microgravity Sciences and Applications, including $145.6 million for Life Sciences, $128.9 million for Microgravity Science Research, $112.4 million for Shuttle/spacelab payload mission, and $84 million for Space Station payload facilities. (Of these amounts, $156 million is included in the $2.1 billion Space Station funding plan).”

Action on the NASA budget now shifts to Congress. Speaking at a February 15 meeting of the Maryland Space Business Roundtable, Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Maryland), chair of the Senate VA/HUD appropriations subcommittee, noted that, of the agencies under her subcommittee’s jurisdiction, “In the President’s budget, HUD took a $4 billion cut, . . . [and] in an election year, nobody’s going to close a VA hospital.” She warned that “the forces between the budget doves and the budget hawks, I’m afraid, will converge on NASA.”