FY 2001 NASA Budget Request: Earth Science, Human Space Flight

As reported in FYI #19 , NASA’s budget would increase by 3.2 percent, to a total of $14,035.3 million under the FY 2001 budget request. While Space Science and Life and Microgravity Sciences and Applications would see growth in the ten-percent range, Earth Science funding would drop by 2.6 percent. Funding for Human Space Flight would increase by 0.6 percent, and within that account, the budget for the International Space Station would be reduced by 9.0 percent. FYI #19 provided details on the Space Science and Life-Microgravity budget requests. Below are details on the requests for Earth Science, and Human Space Flight.

EARTH SCIENCE REQUEST: $1,405.8 million; down 2.6 %

The Earth Science budget would be reduced by $37.6 million. The budget documents state that “NASA has restructured the Earth Science Budget in FY 2001 to display the resources being allocated to Research and Technology requirements in a way that can be more readily understood by NASA’s customers. As a result, the Research and Technology requirements have been allocated into three categories: Earth Science Program Science, Applications Commercialization and Education (ACE) and Technology Infusion.” The EOS missions Aqua (formerly PM-1) and Chemistry-1 “remain on track for launch in 2000 and 2002, respectively. The EOS program also includes several small spacecraft such as the US-French TOPEX/Poseidon follow-on mission known as Jason-1, QuikScat, ICESat, SORCE, and ACRIMSAT.” In addition, “currently approved Earth Probes include the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer-EP, Triana, and the Earth System Science Pathfinder missions.”

HUMAN SPACE FLIGHT REQUEST: $5,499.9 million; up 0.6 %

The International Space Station (ISS) is funded within the Office of Space Flight. Under the FY 2001 request, funding for the Space Station would drop by $208.6 million, or 9.0 percent, to $2,114.5 million. NASA’s budget documents note that the ISS budget is slated for a reduction, through F 2005, of $1.2 billion. The document adds that “roughly $0.8 billion of this reduction is due to the movement of funding for the Phase 2 production of the ISS Crew Return Vehicle (CRV) to the Science, Aeronautics and Technology budget account...pending a decision in the next two years on whether to proceed with an X-38-based CRV design...” Over the same time period, there is also “an approximate $0.4 billion reduction in other ISS funding, largely implemented by reduced reserves.”

The documents also report that, according to recent Russian projections, the Russian-built Service Module “will not be launched until Summer 2000. This delay in the SM launch is not anticipated to affect the vehicle budget in the near-term.... Some reallocation may become necessary as we move through the assembly sequence; the degree of impacts will be assessed over the coming months.” In the meantime, “NASA is doing the necessary preparations to prepare the Interim Control Module for [a possible] launch in December 2000.”