NASA Seeks Cuts to Unmanned Missions

(The Wall Street Journal) - President Barack Obama is releasing a flat $17.7 billion NASA spending plan for 2013, including deep cuts to unmanned planetary missions and sharp increases in commercial space programs that are likely to prompt congressional opposition, according to people familiar with the matter.

Details of the proposal were posted Monday on the NASA website and provided to lawmakers, industry officials and scientists.

For the first time in three years, these people said, NASA's budget request is expected to closely track previous appropriations of $2.9 billion for developing new heavy-lift rockets and spacecraft for manned missions beyond Earth's orbit.

Since 2010, arguments over those programs have stalled the agency's progress and sparked major legislative fights between the White House and lawmakers.

This time, however, according to the people familiar with the matter, NASA's proposed budget is intended to avoid a repeat of those same fights. Total funding for a planned heavy-lift rocket and space capsule, both of which NASA wants to develop under traditional government contracts, is expected to mirror current funding of just under $2.9 billion, according to these people and preliminary figures released by the agency.

But in other areas, the agency's latest spending blueprint sets up what could be heated debates on Capitol Hill.

To develop private taxis to transport astronauts to the international space station for example, the latest White House budget requests a total of $830 million for the coming fiscal year. That is the same request NASA made last year, when it argued that any lower funding would seriously inhibit commercial work on such initiatives. But after much debate, lawmakers cut that back to about $400 million currently.

"We are committed to ensuring that our astronauts are once again launched from US soil on American-made spacecraft," she said, "and this budget provides the funds to make this a reality," Deputy Administrator Lori Garver said in a statement.

NASA is looking to give commercial space companies, including closely held Space Exploration Technologies of Hawthorne, Calif., rare freedom and scaled-back government oversight to develop such transportation systems for low-earth orbit.

NASA's proposed budget, as expected, also calls for significant cuts in unmanned exploratory efforts, particularly two joint US-European missions originally slated to reach the surface of Mars by the end of the decade. The White House wants to allocate less than $1.2 billion for high-profile robotic missions, some $360 million less than projected in previous years, these officials said.

Read more: The Wall Street Journal