Budget woes for NASA in ’07?

Bloomberg News reported late yesterday that the Bush Administration’s proposed FY2007 budget “would carve savings from programs such as Medicare, NASA and agriculture.” The article quotes Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH), chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, who believes that any budget increases are “going to be below the rate of inflation” for everything other than defense and homeland security.

For NASA in particular, the Bloomberg article says that the administration “aims to reduce spending on the Space Shuttle program, slicing as much as $6 billion from the projected cost of almost $70 billion in the next four years.” That $6-billion figure is about the same as the high-end estimates on the projected gap in shuttle costs that emerged late last year, so this “cut” may be a decision not to provide the shuttle program with any additional funding. Shuttle advocates have warned that not increasing the shuttle budget could result in reducing the number of projected flights through 2010 and possibly even mothballing an orbiter. Suffice it to say, it appears that NASA’s earlier requests to OMB for a budget increase of as much as nine percent in 2007 won’t be fulfilled.