Nasa gets $756m more than it asked for in proposed 2016 budget

[kevindavis]

Independent:

The budget, yet to be voted on by the House of Representatives, provides enough money to ensure that Nasa's operations with Boeing and SpaceX are successful

 

Nasa's proposed budget for 2016 has been decided after negotiations between the space agency and the US government - and it's $756 million (£504 million) higher than the amount they asked for.

 

In total, a spending bill for Nasa's budget in the fiscal year 2016 has been set at $19.285 billion (£13 billion), which is $756 million more than the budget Nasa requested and almost $1 billion above an amount that was put forward in June but never passed by the US Senate.

 

Now, the US House of Representatives is set to vote on the bill on Friday, settling Nasa's budget for the next year.

 

The budget is broken down into the number of different programs that make up the agency's work, and some got much more than they asked for - as Space News reports, the Space Launch System heavy lifting vehicle was given $2b, almost 50 per cent more than Nasa's original request for $1.36b.

 

Significantly, the commerical crew program was granted exactly the requested budget of $1.2b for the next year - this chunk of money will ensure that the spacecraft currently being built by SpaceX and Boeing for Nasa will get finished and be able to be used in 2017.

 

This will once again allow the US to send its own astronauts to space - rather than relying on Russian Soyuz crafts to take them to the International Space Station, as it has been forced to recently.

 

Nasa also got more than they asked for with their exploration system budget, which has been set at $3.6b.

 

At least $55m of this has been earmarked for the development and prototyping for a 'habitat augmentation module', which will be able to support astronauts on future deep space missions for extended periods of time.

This module would be used in Nasa's planned Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM), which will see a robotic craft redirect an asteroid to an orbit around the moon, where astronauts will later be able to visit it and collect samples for a return to Earth.

 

Some programs weren't given the requested budget, however - the construction and safety, security and mission services programs both received slightly less than Nasa asked for. However, with budgets of $388m and $2.76b respectively, they should still be able to do their jobs

.

Some of the surplus money has been reshuffled from certain programmes and given to others, but the total is well over what they asked for - giving them money to work with on planned future trips to Jupiter's moon Europa, and at some point, a mission to Mars.