NASA budget 2014 FY

[czokletmuss]

Source: http://nasawatch.com/archives/2014/01/is-charlie-bold-3.html

ISS and SLS are eating almost half of NASA budget. Considering that SLS have no missions scheduled or payload and that the SpaceX Dragon and other commercial spacecraft are going to make Orion presence in LEO pointless I'm afraid that money going to SLS is wasted. Wouldnt it be better to increase the funding for commercial programs? What's funny is that Roskosmos is making a lot of money thanks to this mess:

(CNSNews.com) – Russia will charge the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) $71 million to transport just one American astronaut to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard its Soyuz spacecraft in 2016.

That’s more than triple the $22 million per seat the Russians charged in 2006, according to a July 8 audit report by NASA’s inspector general. (See NASA IG-13-019.pd)

Source: http://cnsnews.com/news/article/71m-russia-triples-price-fly-us-astronauts-space-station

So NASA will be paying Roskosmos more or less the same amount of money ($71 million x 3 astronauts = $213 mln) which they didn't get in the budget for commercial flights (Bolden said they need $800 million, they got $696 million). Huh.

Edited January 16, 2014 by czokletmuss

[Comrade Jenkens]

The SLS is needed for any larger scale manned operations and isn't meant to compete with commercial spacecraft. They do to different jobs.

[czokletmuss]

The SLS is needed for any larger scale manned operations

Like what? There are no money and no projects, beside the Asteroid Retrieval Mission which probably won't happen at all.

[Comrade Jenkens]

Like what? There are no money and no projects, beside the Asteroid Retrieval Mission which probably won't happen at all.

That's not an SLS problem that's just the fact that NASA's funding is so low and they don't seem to have serious goals set for the future.

[czokletmuss]

Exactly - they are building HLV but they don't know what to do with it. Moon fly-by? Mission to L-points? Mars? With commercial spacecraft build for LEO, Orion going to LEO doesn't make sense. So I agree with you: it should be used for other things. But there are no plans. And even worse, there is no money to build hardware for such missions. And without the hardware and real goals there is no need for HLV. So why NASA is building it in the first place? I'm afraid that this mainly about jobs and transferring money to the aerospace industry, nothing more.

[Simon Ross]

Exactly - they are building HLV but they don't know what to do with it. Moon fly-by? Mission to L-points? Mars? With commercial spacecraft build for LEO, Orion going to LEO doesn't make sense. So I agree with you: it should be used for other things. But there are no plans. And even worse, there is no money to build hardware for such missions. And without the hardware and real goals there is no need for HLV. So why NASA is building it in the first place? I'm afraid that this mainly about jobs and transferring money to the aerospace industry, nothing more.

Unfortunately I have to agree, SLS is simply a vehicle without a real mission in the pipeline. Given ISS has recently had a life extension and the only real missions are simply to crew rotate and resupply to the ISS, the SLS just makes no sense at all

About the only mission that would make any real sense for SLS is an unmanned Mars sample return and no one is even talking about that

Edited January 16, 2014 by Simon Ross

[Comrade Jenkens]

I'm not really sure what NASA should do then as they can no longer compete commercially with the private companies and don't have the budget or vision to do longer ranged an more ambitious missions.

[deadshot462]

The SLS is basically a program to keep thousands of Space Shuttle contractors from losing jobs after the Shuttle program ended and the Constellation program was cancelled. The asteroid retrieval mission was the most likely goal for the SLS but that mission is either cancelled or so under-funded that it won't happen for another 20+ years.

Like many others, I think the SLS should be cancelled so more funding can go to science missions like Curiosity, Cassini, and a future Europa explorer. Maybe keep the Orion capsule as a backup manned ship that can be put on existing commercial launch vehicles for LEO in case commercial crew ships don't work out.

SLS being cancelled would cause trouble to many districts and companies who depended on it, but they should have been more diversified int heir work so they ddin't depend on a single project.

[Kryten]

About the only mission that would make any real sense for SLS is an unmanned Mars sample return and no one is even talking about that

MSR is officially the number one priority of the planetary science division, and with the 2020 rover there's now a fully funded mission to do the caching. There have been suggestions for MSR launch as a secondary payload for SLS, but it simply wouldn't be big enough to justify a mission on it's own.

[SuperFastJellyfish]

I'm not really sure what NASA should do then as they can no longer compete commercially with the private companies and don't have the budget or vision to do longer ranged an more ambitious missions.

NASA isn't competing with private companies. That chunk of the pie in the OP that is labelled CC Dev is money given to the private companies(I.E. SpaceX, Sierra Nevada, Boeing, etc) to help develop their manned spacecraft. Their hope is to stimulate the creation of private manned spaceflight. I do agree that NASA's budget is shamefully low, and the way politics work in the US makes it painful to get any kind of long range goal to last longer than a presidential term.

[Comrade Jenkens]

I definitely think that the problem of dwindling budgets could be helped if more space programs cooperated towards single goals rather than each one following their own agenda.

[Themohawkninja]

Wow, the JWST get's almost as much funding as the entire astrophysics division does.

Also, all of these numbers are millions of dollars, right?

[czokletmuss]

I definitely think that the problem of dwindling budgets could be helped if more space programs cooperated towards single goals rather than each one following their own agenda.

NASA have lots of money. They just spend it on pointless SLS instead on missions to Europa or Titan. I mean, does anyone believe there will be a manned program like Apollo once was? Probes is all we can count on.

Wow, the JWST get's almost as much funding as the entire astrophysics division does.

Also, all of these numbers are millions of dollars, right?

Yup.

[architeuthis]

I have mixed feelings about the SLS. On the one hand it could be an amazing platform for all sorts of missions, even if only the block I ever flies 70 tonnes to orbit is pretty impressive. It enable missions that could otherwise only be performed using propellant depot architectures (which unfortunately are no where close to being mature technologically). If you're looking at variable costs SLS should cost $7million USD per tonne to LEO, which way outperforms both the Space Shuttle or the Saturn V as HLVs go.

On the other hand they are talking about launch rates so low that there isn't going to be any economies of scale, and they will not be able to amortize the (substantial) development costs over many launches. Also as people have pointed out it already looks like, given the current budget environment, that NASA will get trapped into the same cycle they were stuck in with STS, which is that the launch system and its support infrastructure is so expensive that they won't be able to afford developing any interesting payloads that could actually use the rocket's considerable capability to its full potential. Part of me sees that for many American politicians the SLS is a useless jobs program, and that makes me want to ditch it just on general principle. Another part of me knows that if SLS gets cancelled NASA won't have a HLV for probably another decade or two, and though I have lots of faith in Elon Musk and SpaceX I don't see the Falcon XX coming to the rescue anytime soon. These things take a while to develop, even if there is a mandate and a solid budget, which currently there is not. There aren't really any serious efforts to develop flight qualified NTR or propellant depots systems that we would need to say, go to mars for real using only Falcon Heavy class launchers. Do we abandon the progress that's been made (and the 2030 Mars timeline) and try to stick it out by putting our faith in capitalist enterprise? Or do we keep chugging along in the imperfect reality? ... Difficult question for me personally.

Edited January 16, 2014 by architeuthis

[Comrade Jenkens]

One reason I just want to stick with the SLS despite its many flaws is to stop NASA being back at square one again with launch vehicles. there just seems to be so many things that are started and then cancelled and imo its a colossal waste of money doing that!

[Skyler4856]

Why do so many people against SLS. SLS will take man past LEO for the first time in decades

[Thiel]

Why do so many people against SLS. SLS will take man past LEO for the first time in decades

No, it CAN take man past LEO, but there's no missions in the pipeline to actually do that.

[Skyler4856]

No, it CAN take man past LEO, but there's no missions in the pipeline to actually do that.

Once NASA has the capability, the missions will come.

[Thiel]

Given how far ahead you have to plan these things that means we're looking at what, 2025 at the very earliest?

[mdatspace]

The SLS is meant to launch Orion. That can be done on a Delta IV heavy. As has been said before, the launch rates are very low. That means high costs.

However, it looks like a very capable launcher.

[Simon Ross]

Once NASA has the capability, the missions will come.

I'm sorry, but what missions ?

That's the whole problem with SLS, there is NO programme that is set in stone.

At the moment it almost feels like NASA is building a system in the hope that an administration change might grow some balls and actually commit to funding a real life mission for the system

Edited January 16, 2014 by Simon Ross

[architeuthis]

an administration change might grow some balls and actually commit to funding a real life mission for the system

Unfortunately that's not how it works. Look at how President Geroge W Bush's Constellation Program turned out. The White House doesn't get to fund anything, that's Congress's job. Which is exactly the problem. For the most part they see space exploration only as a source of federal money for their districts, and that alone predisposes their support or lack thereof for it. Hence SLS. Apollo was an exception to the normal rule, a one time thing, beating the Russians was an ideological test for representatives back then in a way not dissimilar to support for the Iraq invasion was in 2003. If we're lucky we might get another one time thing out of China when congress's sensitive nationalistic pride starts to feel threatened. IMO not a very sustainable paradigm for space exploration in general.

Edited January 17, 2014 by architeuthis

[Sun]

Just swap NASA's budget with the military. Europa & Mars colonization, here we come! Volcano scientists, get ready to move to Io!

[m4rt14n]

The government is spending $ 65 bn/month shoring up Big Banks in the name of the economy. Imagine if they put that up for NASA....

[Rakaydos]

Please tell me those budget numbers are in thousands of dollars. $17,646.00 is less than I earned during a 6 month stay in afganistan. :/