This week’s print edition of Space News has a couple of interesting articles about some budget problems that some military space programs are facing:
- The Defense Department has asked Congress for permission to reprogram $102 million of the $271 million that had been appropriated for FY2004 for the Mobile User Objective System (MUOS), a satellite communications system. The Pentagon wants to use the money instead to cover costs associated with Iraq “and on terrorism in general”, according to the report. In addition, House and Senate appropriators have trimmed the Pentagon’s FY2005 budget request of $571 million for MUOS by $100-110 million. The combination likely means that MUOS will be delayed at least a year, pushing out the first satellite launch to 2010 or beyond. The reprogramming request is particularly ironic, the article notes, because MUOS is designed to provide battlefield forces with much greater bandwidth, something the Iraq war proved was desperately needed.
- Senate appropriators have also zeroed out funding for the Operationally Responsive Spacelift effort, a program to develop a small launch vehicle (SLV) that could launch on short notice, as well as a common aero vehicle (CAV) payload for the launchers. No reason was given for the cut. House appropriators, in contrast, added money to both programs, increasing the $35-million SLV budget by $5 million and the $21.6-million CAV budget by $10 million.
These issues, as well as other military space efforts like Space Based Radar and Transformational Communications, are being worked on by conferees this week as they try to reconcile the House and Senate versions of the Defense Department budget.
“Senate appropriators have also zeroed out funding for the Operationally Responsive Spacelift effort, a program to develop a small launch vehicle (SLV)”
Will this influence the RASCAL/FALCON program being run by DARPA?
This reminds me of the school funding issues and the budget process. The school boards issues a lump sum figure for operations for the coming year, the budget board wants to lower this figure so they ask for the itemized budget listings or line items. Once the nearly anywhere from 3 months to 6 months process has concluded a batch of warrant articles are place on the voters ballots each usually with lots of extra funding specifics and what if type senerios for adaptive funds needed.
Long and short of this is that the school board designs into the figures of a budget a way to budget float savings on line items for shuffling of funds capability for short fall. That is undermined by the budget board trimming of the lump sum number initially give and finally by the posted warrant articles.
Congress currently controls all line item expendetures and is constantly asked for more money. Make the military and Nasa both do there own shuffling of funds for they must stay within there budgets not keep asking for more funds.
Military space is suffering some severe problems at the moment. The SBIRS-High saga is the most dramatic issue and it appears to have destroyed the Air Force’s credibility on milspace on Capitol Hill. But the Space-Based Radar issue has also clearly created a lot of heat as well. The Air Force has repeatedly tried to push an operational system even though Congress has repeatedly told them to produce a demonstration program first.
Frank,
Yes, this is the FALCON (Force Application and Launch from CONUS) program. Here’s some information from the Pentagon on the FY05 budget requests for the SLV and CAV components of FALCON:
http://www.dtic.mil/descriptivesum/Y2005/AirForce/0604856F.pdf (CAV)
http://www.dtic.mil/descriptivesum/Y2005/AirForce/0604855F.pdf (SLV)
RASCAL, I believe, gets its funding from a separate account; so it would not be affected by this. I have heard a rumor, though, that there’s been some consideration about transferring funds from RASCAL to FALCON, perhaps because a FALCON SLV would be about as responsive as RASCAL but carry larger payloads. I’ve seen nothing to substantiate that rumor, though.
Make the military and Nasa both do there [sic] own shuffling of funds for they must stay within there [sic] budgets not keep asking for more funds.
In the case of MUOS, the Navy is not asking for more money, but instead asking permission to reprogram money originally appropriated for it to more general operations. I’m not sure what the point of your criticism is here.
I missed the opening lines of permission but that still implies that they will be asking for that money back sometime in the future above the current budget figures.
During the 80’s and most of the 90’s we were not at war. We had many a base closure in the efforts to reduce operation budgets of the military. So were are the savings? It certainly was not with a reduced budget request in those years.
So let me see if I have it right. The military budget does not plan for possible future war, or conflicts, Upgrades of infrastructure, or for advancement of a military presence in space. So when they ask of a budget of X they spend all of X with no savings for the future.
Didn’t congress already approve of 2 such appropriation of extra funds for the wars. Are they bad at estimating the cost or what?
To rob Peter to pay Paul in this case is not the right thing to be doing. This only hurts the Navy programs in this case.