Posted on 01/21/2004 8:03:23 PM PST by anymouse
In a presentation now being delivered to NASA employees across the country, the space agency is providing details of how it plans to implement the broad new space goals announced by President Bush last week. The presentation, a copy of which was obtained by MSNBC.com, includes a list of guiding principles, specific program plans and details of budgetary rearrangements.
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It also directly challenges the most widespread criticism of the new plans, which is that they are too expensive. The report stresses that NASA;s annual budget (about 0.7 percent of the federal budget), at about 15 cents per person per day, is equivalent to the cost of "a month of cable" or "a family trip to a movie".
Without Bush’s new “exploration vision,” the report claims it was likely that next year’s budget “would have been considerably reduced” and would have lost even more ground through inflation. Instead, NASA now expects the budget to increase by 5 percent per year over the next three years, and thereafter at about 2 percent annually to cover inflation.
NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe said Wednesday that the agency's proposed budget for fiscal year 2005 would be $16.2 billion, which is a 5.6 percent increase over the 2004 budget of $15.4 billion. The proposed increase for FY 2006 would be 4.8 percent, with a 4.7 percent increase in FY2007 before dropping to a 1.5 percent increase in FY 2008.
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The biggest budgetary shift is scheduled for fiscal years 2010 to 2012, when annual space shuttle spending drops from $4.5 billion to zero and the allocation to “exploration missions” doubles. A near-billion-dollar category called “ISS Transport” continues for years beyond this date.
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This will not be Apollo redux, however. Rather than “flags and footprints,” this new wave of exploration is aimed at developing "sustainable, affordable, and flexible strategies,” the report says. “The vision is not about one-time events and, thus, costs will be reduced to maintain the affordability of the vision.”
While NASA’s next budget, due Feb. 6, will include some realignment of funding, the biggest re-allocations will not occur until the FY06 budget, which will “address uncertainties in implementing the vision.”
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However, the presentation promises that a detailed “Exploratory Vision Document”, linking the plans with actual programs, will be released with the FY 2005 budget on Feb 2.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
No kidding. Heck, let's have China build it. Why not? They work cheap. It's not like we're a country anymore or anything like that. We're just an economic zone populated with economic widgets called "citizens", that is in name only.
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