It’s clear that the President’s budget officers really don’t want to fund a mission to Europa. Other than that, the proposed Fiscal Year 2017 budget submitted by the President last week to Congress would be great for planetary exploration.
The submission of the Fiscal Year 2017 proposed budget is just the
opening move in getting to what will be NASA’s actual budget for next
year. The proposal itself is the result
of negotiations between the budget managers in the President’s Office of Budget
Management and the space agency’s senior managers. Most of the proposed NASA budget is a simple
continuation of the 2016 budget. In the
few areas like Europa where the administration and Congress differ on policy,
though, there are significant changes from this year’s budget. In the next step in the process, committees
in the House of Representatives and the Senate will make changes to portions of
the budget to reflect their priorities and then will negotiate their
differences. Eventually a spending bill
will be passed and signed by the President.
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The proposed NASA planetary exploration budget would fund a fleet of
current and planned missions include Discovery and New Frontiers missions
expected to be selected in the next few years and several CubeSat missions (latter
three not shown).
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Excepting Europa (more on this later), there’s a lot to like in the
proposed planetary budget. Following
successive years of cuts early in the decade and a gradual series of increases
to rebuild the program, the top number for the FY17 planetary program is
proposed to be $1.52 billion. With the
proposed cut to the Europa mission studies, this number is down by $110 million
from this year’s FY16 budget.
The $1.52 billion would:
- Fully fund the continued development of the 2020 Mars rover and support the selection and development of new missions for the low-cost Discovery program and the mid-cost New Frontiers program.
- Fully fund all missions currently in flight or operating at their target worlds. Unlike the previous couple of years, the budget doesn’t propose to end the Mars Opportunity rover or the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter missions.
- Provide slight increases for the programs that fund planetary science research and develop technology to be used in future missions.
With the proposed budget, we should see a number of new planetary
missions launch in in the 2020s starting the launch of the ~$2.2 billion Mars
2020 rover.
If the funding levels suggested for the beginning of the 2020s were
continued through the next decade, then NASA should be able to launch several
low-cost (~$450 million) Discovery missions.
The budget proposal specifically talks about the desire to select two
missions from the Discovery competition in progress to launch in 2021 and
2023. The head of the Planetary Science
Division, Jim Green, has said he’d like to hold competitions approximately
every four years and select two missions from each competition, resulting in a
new mission approximately every two years.
That would support the launch of around five Discovery missions in the
2020’s.
The budget supports the launch of a mid-cost (~$850 million) dollar New
Frontiers mission in the mid-2020s. Dr. Green has said that he and his managers
are planning for launches approximately every five years going forward, meaning
that we should see two missions fly in the 2020’s.
NASA also plans to regularly fly several low cost (a few million
dollars each) of the cereal box-sized CubeSat spacecraft to lunar and planetary
destinations.
The budget would also fully fund NASA’s contributions to the European Space
Agency’s 2016 ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, 2018 ExoMars rover, and the JUICE
Jupiter system mission that will arrive in the late 2020’s.
NASA has also talked about a new orbiter for Mars for the early 2020’s,
although the budget is silent on funding for this mission.
And then there’s the Europa multi-flyby (previously called the Europa
Clipper) mission. While previous Presidential
budget proposals have called for this mission to launch in the mid to late 2020’s,
this budget proposal seems to call for a possible delay in that vague schedule
by suggesting a “launch as early as the late 2020s”. The proposal ignores language in the FY16
budget law (which governs spending only for this year) inserted by Congress
directing NASA to launch the mission by 2022 (and that also directed NASA to
add a lander to the mission, which also is ignored in this new budget
proposal).
The stark difference between what the President’s budget proposes and
what would be needed to launch the Europa mission in 2022 is shown by the
numbers in the following table (both sets of numbers are provided in the budget
proposal document).
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FY17
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FY18
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FY19
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FY20
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FY21
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Proposed spending
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$ 49.6M
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$ 24.2M
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$ 65.2M
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$117.5M
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$236.5M
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Required to launch in 2022
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$194.0M
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$272.0M
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$456.0M
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$678.0M
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$482.0M
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Under the President’s proposal, $493 million would be spent on the
Europa mission through 2021 versus the $2.1 billion needed to keep the mission
on track to launch in 2022.
In political terms, pushing the mission’s launch out a dozen or more
years may be the equivalent of postponing it forever. For the mission to fly, it would need
continuous support from at least two more Presidential administrations and as
many as six to eight new Congresses. It’s
hard to imagine any mission sustaining support for that long. It’s also hard to imagine how NASA could keep
a high caliber engineering and science team together for what might be fourteen
or more years (with a possible six or seven additional years of flight
following launch to arrive at Europa).
On a very practical engineering level, many of the technologies
available to design into a mission today will be obsolete and no longer
available by the late 2020s. The mission
design would need to be continuously tweaked to substitute new technologies.
Why might the President’s budget officials be opposed to the Europa
mission? The explanation given in the proposal
document is that launching a Europa mission before the late 2020’s would lead
to an unbalanced planetary program that would not support the program laid out
in the last Decadal Survey. This
statement assumes that the cap on the total planetary budget would remain fixed
at around the $1.5 billion proposed for this year.
Here are the possible explanations I’ve been able to think of for the
Administration’s lack of support for the Europa mission (the first two are
consistent with the explanation in the budget document):
Delaying the Europa mission prevents a bulge in spending
requirements. For the rest of this
decade, NASA’s new mission spending is dominated by the expensive Mars 2020
rover. The budget proposal also shows
sharp budget increases late in the decade for the Discovery and New Frontiers
programs. Launching the Europa mission
by 2022 as mandated by Congress would require either greatly increasing overall
planetary funding or cannibalizing other programs. (Note: I would like to see a much larger
planetary budget.)
The budget officials (and perhaps NASA’s senior managers) prefer
cheaper Discovery and New Frontiers missions to the Flagship Europa
mission. Experience has shown that large
Flagship mission are more likely to have large cost overruns that play havoc
with NASA’s budget. Countering this, the
generous money that Congress has provided the mission so far as matured the
design much more than is typical at this stage of development. That maturity makes cost overruns less
likely.
Europa isn’t Mars, and studying and eventually getting humans to Mars
is NASA’s current overriding goal.
Pure politics. Several of the
Congressional leaders who are strongly backing the Europa mission and planetary
exploration in general are highly conservative politically. While they favor spending more money on
planetary missions, they also want to cut funding for missions for NASA to
study the Earth, especially climate change.
Essentially proposing to push out the launch of a Europa mission to
forever may be part of a hardball negotiating tactic to trade more funding for
the Europa mission for also fully funding the President’s generous proposed
budget for Earth science missions.
At the moment, we are left with the Europa mission as a formally
approved mission on NASA’s books with an engineering and science team, a
selected suite of instruments, and no target launch date. The interesting politics will be whether or
not Congress forces the addition of the many hundreds of millions of dollars
into NASA’s planetary budget over the next several years needed to launch as
early as 2022 without cannibalizing other planetary programs. (For more on this, see this
previous blog post.)
The Europa mission isn’t the only areas in which the Administration and
Congress disagree on NASA budget and policy.
While outside the scope of this blog post, they also disagree on the
amount that should be spent on Earth science (as noted above), developing
commercial launch capabilities, and developing the Orion and Space Launch
System programs.
Outside of these areas, though, there is a consensus on spending
levels, and the final budget is likely to be similar to the proposed budget.
SpacePolicyOnline
has a very good summary of the overall NASA budget and areas where the
Administration and Congress are likely to disagree. For the planetary program, Casey
Dreier at the Planetary Society has good commentary on the proposed
planetary budget.
Budget Details
Each budget proposal comes in two parts. The first proposes spending for the next
fiscal year (FY17 in this case) and is the starting point for the eventual law
allocating funding for the next year.
The second part projects notional funding for four additional years
(FY18 to FY21 in this case). These
notional budgets are not acted on by Congress, but provide agencies with
guidance for future years. For agencies
like NASA whose projects typically take several years to implement, these
notional budgets take on particular importance.
The agency cannot issue multi-year contracts that are inconsistent with
the notional out year budgets. These
creates a problem if, for example, Congress provides generous funding for the
Europa mission next year but the notional budgets are inconsistent with the
necessary multi-year contracts.
The numbers for the following charts come from NASA’s budget documents
except as noted.
The FY17 budget proposal projects a onetime significant increase in the
Earth Science budget to pull in development of the next Landsat Earth observing
satellite. The dip in planetary science
funding comes primarily from proposed reductions in funding for the Europa
mission. Otherwise, the budget proposal
shows relatively flat projected budgets for NASA’s science budgets.
This chart shows projected budgets for budget proposals since 2010
(which proposed the FY11 spending) compared to actual allocated budgets. For the first several years of the decade,
the budgets proposed reduced planetary spending, reflected in cuts in actual
spending. Since the FY14 budget
proposal, projected budgets have been increasing.
NASA’s planetary budget also includes two essential programs that funds
scientists to analyze the data returned by NASA’s planetary missions and to
develop technology for future missions.
The latter is proposed to take a one-time hit to reflect a cut in
spending to develop technology for future Europa missions. Otherwise, both programs are projected to
have approximately flat funding for the remainder of this decade.
