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http://www.space.com/news/nasa_budget_040121.html

WASHINGTON -- In the months preceding U.S. President George W. Bush’s decision to chart a new course for the U.S. space program, NASA -- like nearly all U.S. federal agencies -- found itself facing flat budgets “as far as they eye could see,” NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe said today.

The president’s forthcoming plan for cutting the growing national deficit by half within five years would entail some serious belt tightening for all federal agencies with two exceptions: the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security. NASA, O’Keefe said, would have seen its spending power decline by about $11 billion between 2005 and 2009 when accounting for inflation.

But as a result of the president’s decision to back a new vision and direction for NASA, the space agency not only avoided what would have amounted to an $11 billion cut, it also became one of the few federal agencies to secure a presidential promise of increasing funding in the years ahead.

Bush, in submitting his 2005 budget request to Congress on Feb. 2, will ask for a $1 billion increase in NASA’s budget between 2005 and 2009.

NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe told reporters Wednesday that in real terms, the agency would see its $15.4 billion budget grow to $16.2 billion in 2005 -- an increase of 5.6 percent. A planned 4.8 percent increase for 2006 would grow NASA’s budget to $16.9 billion and a 4.7 percent increase planned for 2007 would push NASA’s budget well above the $17 billion mark to $17.7 billion. After that, the raises would slow down, O’Keefe said, with only a 1.5 percent increase planned for 2008.

Over roughly the same period, NASA plans to redirect about $11 billion of its budget towards the new space exploration goals outlined by the president. The bulk of that money -- about $6 billion, according to O’Keefe -- will come from NASA’s now obsolete Orbital Space Plane and Next Generation Launch Technology programs.

“The single largest offset is the Orbital Space Plane and Space Launch Initiative,” O’Keefe said. Most of that money, he said, would be put toward a new project, the Crew Exploration Vehicle.

Prior to the rollout of the president’s vision, NASA had hoped to accelerate the development of its planned Orbital Space Plane, which was supposed to be a replacement for the space shuttle. The goal of that program was to have a vehicle by 2008 that would be capable of transporting crews to and from the International Space Station. The idea was to eliminate the need for the shuttle or Russian-built Soyuz rockets to service the space station.

By 2010, under the old plan, NASA had hoped to be ready to use the Orbital Space Plane as a rocket-launched crew taxi and thus dramatically cut back on the number of astronauts that would have to fly on the shuttle.

But that plan would have been costly, requiring about $7 billion more than NASA had in its five-year budget for the program.

In charting a new course for NASA, Bush pledged the agency to build a Crew Exploration Vehicle that will someday ferry astronauts beyond Earth’s orbit. It is in some ways a more ambitious goal, but NASA has more time to meet it -- about six years more. The president’s vision does not call for putting humans aboard the Crew Exploration Vehicle until 2014. Under the old plan, astronauts would have flown on the Orbital Space Plane for the first time in 2008.

Two aerospace contractors, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, had been competing since 2002 for the prime contract to build the Orbital Space Plane. That competition is now on hold as NASA plots its next moves. But O’Keefe said the work the two companies have done to date on Orbital Space Plane designs -- some $334 million worth -- would not be wasted.

“We’re not going to start with a clean sheet of paper,” O’Keefe said of shifting its focus from the Orbital Space Plane to the Crew Exploration Vehicle. “It’s not a matter of Orbital Space Plane being cancelled, it’s a question of how do we evolve it to the Crew Exploration Vehicle.”