NASA budget puts emphasis on getting astronauts into space again

WASHINGTON — NASA officials on Tuesday unveiled a $17.5 billion budget plan that makes launching astronauts into space a priority once again — though that goal still remains several years away.

Under the 2015 funding proposal, which still requires the approval of Congress, NASA would pour billions of dollars into two programs aimed at solving a problem that has existed since the last shuttle flew in 2011from Kennedy Space Center: NASA has no way of launching its own people into low Earth orbit, or beyond.

Instead, NASA has been forced to rely on Russia to ferry its astronauts to the International Space Station — an expensive arrangement that has drawn extra attention in recent days because of the standoff between Washington and Moscow over Ukraine.

“Weneedto get going with giving America its own capability … so we are not depend- ent on any other nation,” NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden said during a budget briefing.

But Bolden, a retired Marine Corps major general, emphasized that the crisis in Ukraine had not affected the relationship between NASA and its Russian counterpart, Roscosmos. He added that he saw “no reason” now to develop alternate arrangements in case the situation worsened, though he said “if we need to do contingency planning, we will.”

The NASA plan was part of an overall federal budget proposal released Tuesday by President Barack Obama.

NASA is paying Russia about $1.7 billion through 2017 for the astronaut flights, though the 2015 budget plan includes about $850 million to continue funding a program that would help U.S. rocket companies develop a new “taxi service” to take American astronauts to the station.

The goal is to launch those first flights in 2017, though Congress has balked in years past at giving the adminis- tration the full amount it has requested for the program.

Also included in the NASA portion was $2.8 billion to keep building NASA’s new rocket and crew capsule. A test flight of the Orion capsule is scheduled for later this year, with a first crewed launch planned for the early 2020s.

With these flights still several years away, activity at KSC remains steady — if not muted compared with the heyday of the shuttle era.

KSC Director Bob Cabana said he doesn’t expect any job growth or decline anytime soon. “I don’t see a significant change. It’s essentially flat, and I expect us to stay that way for a while,” he said. “There is not going to be any large increase in this budget. This allows us to continue with where we were and continue to make progress toward our transformation and to do all the things we said we would do.”