NASA Spending Bill Boosts Webb Funds

The U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee approved a spending bill Sept. 15 that would cut NASA’s budget by 2.5 percent while boosting spending on the massively overbudget James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and tying the release of hard-fought commercial crew money to the start of work on a congressionally mandated heavy-lift rocket.

Overall NASA’s budget would drop to $17.9 billion — a $510 million reduction — if the Senate version of the 2012 Commerce Justice Science Appropriations bill becomes law.

While that is roughly $1 billion more than NASA would get under the House version adopted in July, it would leave the agency with its smallest budget since 2009 as it embarks on development of the biggest rocket ever built and recommits to a JWST now expected to cost $8 billion by the time it launches in 2018.

Sen. Barbara Mikulski, the Maryland Democrat who chairs the Senate Appropriations commerce, justice, science committee, said she and her Republican counterpart, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (Texas), faced tough choices in drafting the NASA spending bill.

“We’ve gone beyond frugality. We are now into austerity,” Mikulski said in presenting her bill to the full committee. “This means NASA will once again be asked to do more with less.”

NASA’s other science programs were largely spared in the Senate’s hunt for more money for JWST, which stands to get $530 million next year, or about 40 percent more than NASA budgeted. But the agency’s nascent Space Technology program was not so lucky, losing nearly $400 million from its $1 billion request.

NASA’s human space exploration budget would remain essentially flat for 2012, with $1.8 billion carved out for the heavy-lift Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and $1.2 billion designated for its companion Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle. 

The bill would cap total spending on SLS and Orion at $17 billion through 2017, the year NASA plans to conduct the launch system’s first unmanned test flight. 

Read more about the budget changes here