The President’s FY2007 budget proposal has been officially released, including a six-page discussion of the NASA budget. This document offers only a few details; more information will have to wait until NASA’s budget press conference later today. One detail included in the budget narrative is that the budget “further trims the space nuclear program, which will continue as a research and development effort until its technologies are needed in later years.”
As reported Friday, the top-line figure for NASA is $16.792 billion, compared to $16.274 billion for FY06 (a figure that excludes hurricane supplementals and rescissions). Exploration systems gets the biggest increase, from $3.114 to $3.978 billion, or over 27%. Science gets a modest increase, from $5.254 to $5.330 billion (+1.4%). Space operations (shuttle and ISS) slips about 5%, from $6.578 to $6.234 billion. Aeronautics gets the worst of it, going from $929 to $724 million (-22.1%).
The priorities sound about right, but the devil is in the details. How a five percent decline is supposed to get the Shuttle out of its bind will be interesting to see. But as a pure priority, yes, I believe the Exploration increase is far more important than throwing more good dollars after bad on the Shuttle program.
— Donald
Clark Lindsey at Hobbyspace has it just about right: we’ve spent $13 billion on the shuttle over the last three years and seen two launches, it’s time to retire the fleet. We’ve already been without space access for a few years, what will be a few more if in the end we get something cheaper and more reliable?
I will be interested to see the full details after the press conference.
It’s long, long past time to retire the shuttle fleet. Indeed, just about any point in its history was past time to do so.