How Nasa Is Going To Make Use Of Its Budget

President Bush has offered the program US$ 1 billion spread out of over the next five years, plus a reallocation of US$ 11 billion already in NASA budget. The first victim of the budgetary shakeup would be the Hubble Space Telescope. It had been scheduled for a maintenance visit next year by space-shuttle astronauts. Now with no money for the mission and no shuttle after 2010, Hubble will probably wink out sometime in 2007.

“It is not a financial issue,” said Bruce Murray, former director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “The NASA budget doesn't have to increase dramatically for this to take place. But we'd have to keep our eyes focused on what we're doing for a long time. And that, for American, is a new experience.”

"Based on the budget profile projections that will be submitted, with the horizon through fiscal year '09, thereafter, in order to sustain this effort, the working assumption is that it be a program that can be sustained at an annual rate that would increase by not more than the rate of inflation,” said NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe. “That's projected throughout the course of the next decade. So as a consequence, the primary resources that are necessary are occurring in this period, from '05 to '09, and then expanding as a consequence of the transformative efforts that are involved."

Allocation of budget for 2004

Information Sources

1. Mission to Mars, TIME Magazine, Janurary 26, 2004
   An interesting article that discusses what it will take to send men up to Mars.