Comments on: NASA gets $17.8 billion in FY09 omnibus bill

By: Space Politics » Administration to propose $18.7B NASA budget for FY2010

Space Politics » Administration to propose $18.7B NASA budget for FY2010 — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 01:59:16 +0000

[…] for NASA for FY10. That would be nearly $1 billion more than what they agency is likely to get in the regular FY09 omnibus appropriations currently being considered by Congress. However, when the $1 billion in stimulus funding is added, it works out to about the same […]

By: red

red — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 12:59:27 +0000

Mark might be right in his status quo comment. It seems like that for the most part, at least as far as my non-legal reading eyes see.

As far as Obama is concerned, he does have a space policy position from the campaign.

http://www.barackobama.com/pdf/policy/Space_Fact_Sheet_FINAL.pdf

The question is whether or not that policy is for real or not. I’m sure it is in areas like education, Earth science, international collaboration, and aeronautics … but what about innovation and commercial space, and non-NASA efforts from his space policy like ORS and ITAR reform?

As for Congress, the previous bill (which didn’t see light) had a lot of emphasis on commercial space – COTS, commercial docking, prizes, etc. It’s a new Congress now … has that emphasis fizzled away?

By: H.R.1105: Making omnibus appropriations for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2009, and for other purposes « Res Communis

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 16:57:08 +0000

[…] Jeff Foust has a lot of information on this bill at Space Politics. […]

By: MarkWhittington

MarkWhittington — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 12:27:55 +0000

It seems, in absence of any spacepolicy position by the Obama administration, Congress is making it for him. And that position is the status quo, but with a little bit more money for science and aeronautics.

By: red

red — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 04:31:47 +0000

Wow … lots of earmarks. It’s interesting that after the recent Presidential campaign, the Adler Museum has a $900,000 earmark for planetarium equipment.

Education and Aeronautics get big boosts compared to what they’d been getting recently.

The brief OSTP section before the NASA one is also worth reading, as it’s about RTG material for NASA and a COTS-like effort with NASA and NOAA:

“working with NASA and NOAA, develop a plan and program to
encourage commercial solutions to meet space-based Earth and space weather observation requirements of the United States government, similar to the federal investments in NASA’s commercial orbital transportation services (COTS) program.”

In the NOAA section: “NOAA is directed to report … on its plans to obtain space-based scientific data from commercial sources over the next three years.”

There’s something outside the basics for Constellation … in the Science budget:

“… it will be critical that the Constellation program demonstrate unique capabilities to maintain synergies between free-flying scientific spacecraft and human spaceflight endeavors.Â· Accordingly, the bill provides $20,000,000 for NASA to undertake an assessment of the feasibility of using the Constellation architecture to service existing and future observatory-class scientific spacecraft, fully utilizing the unique, core expertise and competencies for in-space servicing developed by the Goddard Space Flight Center and its private sector partners for the Hubble Space Telescope.”