NASA leader highlights goals for exploration
Budget proposal calls for return trip to the moon, ‘with eye toward Mars’
Robert Lightfoot envisions a world 12 years from now where astronauts further study the moon, scientists have determined if oxygen can be harvested from the Martian atmosphere, and samples have been collected from Mars for study.
All this and much more is possible if Congress approves President Donald Trump’s $19.9 billion request for NASA’s fiscal year 2019 budget, said Lightfoot, the space agency’s acting administrator.
“We are once again on a path to return to the moon with an eye toward Mars,” Lightfoot said Monday.
“This time we are lever-
aging the multiple partners both here at home and internationally in developing a sustainable approach where the moon is simply one step on our truly ambitious long-term journey to reach out farther into the solar system to reap the economic, societal, and expanding knowledge benefits such an endeavor will bring,” he said during a State of NASA presentation.
The $19.9 billion request — about a $370 million increase from the current budget year — would allocate $10.5 billion for human exploration. But that increase for exploration comes at some costs, Lightfoot said.
It would eliminate a number of science missions as well as end federal funding for the International Space Station after 2024, the year funding for the space station is already scheduled to stop. For fiscal year 2017, NASA’s budget for the space station was $1.45 billion.
In addition, Lightfoot said, the agency’s Office of Education — which receives $99.3 million in the current budget — would be eliminated under the plan. He did not elaborate on what exactly that would mean.
Allard Beutel, a NASA headquarters spokesman, said in a statement Monday that the agency still supports education, but that the fiscal environment is tight. That’s why the agency will be creative about how to engage students if the budget proposal is approved, he added.
Through “mission directorates,” Beutel said NASA will focus on:
• Creating unique opportunities for students and the public to contribute to NASA’s work in exploration and discovery.
• Building a diverse future science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) workforce by engaging students in authentic learning experiences with NASA’s people, content and facilities.
• Strengthening public understanding by enabling powerful connections to NASA’s mission and work.
Internships and fellowships maintained outside the office would continue, he added.
The James Webb Space Telescope, the $8.8 billion successor to Hubble, would remain on track to launch next year, according to budget documents, but its successor, the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), would be canceled “due to its significant cost and higher priorities within NASA,” according to a budget document.
WFIRST was being built to study dark energy, exoplanets and infrared astrophysics, and the National Academy of Sciences recommended that it follow Webb, according to NASA.
But the cost of the project, set to be launched in the mid-2020s, has ballooned to $3.6 billion, well above initial projections, according to a 2017 Science Magazine article.
Several Earth science missions also would be canceled. Among them: a program that answers questions about the consequences of climate change on oceans, an observatory on the space station that studies the Earth’s atmospheric carbon cycle, and an instrument that measures Earth’s reflected sunlight and emitted thermal radiation.
“We had to make hard decisions, but we’re setting the stage of an exciting decade in the 2020s,” Lightfoot said during a presentation from NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama that was livestreamed to NASA facilities across the country, including Johnson Space Center in Houston.
The Trump administration would transition the activities on the International Space Station to commercial entities, ending federal government support in 2025.
But the budget also proposes $150 million to help industry create space habitats that could be used in place of the station.
“It proposes to stimulate the commercial opportunities by providing an off-ramp for government-led opportunities,” Lightfoot said. “Hopefully we’ll begin relying on our commercial partners.”
Under the budget proposal, the first unmanned flight of the Space Launch System rocket and the Orion spacecraft (both built to transport astronauts to deep space) would be 2022, followed by Americans around the moon in 2023.
“This will be the first human mission to the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972,” said NASA’s acting Chief Financial Officer Andrew Hunter.
In his address, Lightfoot also said the proposal would allow the agency to begin working on the foundation of a Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, to “give us a strategic presence in the lunar vicinity that will drive our activity with commercial and international partners and help us further explore the moon and its resources and translate that experience toward human missions to Mars.”
The budget still must be approved by Congress.