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Spaceflight is an expensive business and that money has to come from somewhere. The White House just released its budget for fiscal year 2025. What does that mean for NASA? They will receive $25.4 billion, the same as it received last year but $2 billion less than what it requested. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said the restrictions come from a debt ceiling agreement that limits non-defense spending. Unfortunately, the $2 billion shortfall means NASA will have to cut costs on several missions.
Nelson went on to place the blame squarely on a small handful of people in the House of Representatives. In his opinion, they would only agree to raising the debt ceiling (the maximum amount of money the US government can spend) if spending caps were implemented. While the shortfall in this year’s budget is $2 billion, for NASA that means a lot. Its budget figures included $7.6 billion for science, so NASA will have to take a hard look at its upcoming missions and spending over the next year to see what costs can be reduced.
One of the projects that looks like it could be canceled is the Geospace Dynamics Constellation mission. It plans to advance our understanding of the processes that govern the dynamics of Earth’s upper atmosphere. The layer is the region that is located at the very edge of space and includes the ionosphere and the components of the thermosphere.
It appears that the Earth System Observatory mission suite will also be restructured under the new budget. The project is a joint venture with the Japanese Space Agency and, in an effort to preserve the partnership, NASA is evaluating its options. These may focus on studies of precipitation and convection of aerosols and clouds.
Unfortunately, this reduction also means that NASA will have to reduce spending on the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Telescope. Given that Hubble has exceeded its original goals tenfold, it is perhaps not a surprise that it does not appear on the cut list with a 5% spending reduction. The reductions for Chandra are more substantial: $68.3 million last year was reduced to $41.1 million. During the period of its operational mission, several of the systems are degrading and require active management to remain operational. This means Chandra will conduct minimal operations to account for the cuts.
The Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission is now under scrutiny due to budget costs. The original budget proposal for planetary science was $2.7 billion, but this is listed only as TBD for MSR. A sad day given that the Perseverance Rover has been circling Mars collecting samples ready for MSR to collect and return to Earth. The mission is under review and should conclude by the end of March.
Fortunately, it appears that the Artemis program is not affected and the full amount requested was received. There will be one small change, however: Artemis 5 (which will use the Blue Origin lunar lander for the first time) will move back half a year to March 2030.
In the grand scheme of things and the challenges facing governments around the world, perhaps NASA should be content with losing just $2 billion of its total order. As Nelson said, “the current situation is not as bad for the agency as it was a decade ago, when a budget sequester led to deeper cuts,” he continued, saying, “I would say this is mild compared to back then.”
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