Proposed 2017 planetary budget: Great except for Europa

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.

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).

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).

	FY17	FY18	FY19	FY20	FY21
Proposed spending	$ 49.6M	$ 24.2M	$ 65.2M	$117.5M	$236.5M
Required to launch in 2022	$194.0M	$272.0M	$456.0M	$678.0M	$482.0M

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.

Within NASA’s planetary program, the budgets that fund current and future missions show projected shifts in future years as development of the Mars 2020 rover mission nears completion.  Funding shifts to the low-cost (~$450M per mission) Discovery program, the mid-cost (~$850M per mission) New Frontiers program, and the outer planets program, which includes the Europa mission.   Final funding levels at this level of detail haven’t been set for FY16, and I show estimates in this chart and the next from Casey Dreier and Jason Davis with The Planetary Society.

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.

Europa Budget Bulge

Casey Dreier with The Planetary Society made substantial contributions to this post.

In the children’s book, The Little Prince, there is a delightful drawing of a boa constrictor that has a bulging stomach because it swallowed an elephant.  In the coming year, I believe that the key development for NASA’s mission to Europa will be an agreement on how the agency plans to accommodate the monetary bulge that will come from funding this mission.  The results of the negotiations between the agency’s managers, the President’s budget managers, and Congress likely will determine when this and other new missions will fly in the coming decade.

(I had hoped to include the drawing from the book, but it appears that the copyright is still in effect in the United States and France.  You can see it at this webpage or a picture of a real constrictor after it swallowed a goat on this page.)

Summary of the planned Europa multi-flyby mission from a 2013 presentation.  This chart is the only one I know of that provides a cost estimate from an independent review.  The official budget for the mission has yet to be established and may differ from this estimate.  Since this slide, the actual instrument payload has been selected and Congress has mandated that the mission also carry a Europa lander.

 

So why does the boa-elephant analogy work for understanding the funding for the Europa mission?  Think of NASA’s planetary science budget as a hose – or snake if you prefer – that’s of relatively similar width from year to year (except for the attempted 20% cut 2013, but that’s another story). Generally, the overall amount of money available to fund all future and existing planetary missions is relatively consistent over the near future.

But when you’re building a spacecraft, your funding needs are not consistent year to year. Over the course of the development, costs grow substantially, peak, and then tail off. In the first years of developing a mission, spending is lower as much of the work is designing and validating technology needed for the spacecraft.  Spending rapidly increases as parts are built, greater numbers of engineers and technicians are assigned the project, and pieces are assembled and tested. Most projects actually peak in funding needs a year or two before they launch, creating the equivalent of an elephant’s bulge in a boa constrictor.  Spending typically drops before launch, finally reaching a low and steady pace that represents the costs of operating the mission in flight.

Because the overall amount of funding available for new missions is generally flat, NASA’s project managers carefully stagger the development of new missions in order to prevent different projects from peaking at the same time.

 

The actual and planned spending for planetary missions in development this decade showing the characteristic bulge in spending in the years leading up to launch (2016 for the OSIRIS-Rex asteroid sample missions, was to have been 2016 for the InSight Mars geophysical station, and 2020 for the Mars 2020 rover).  As the development funding bulge for one mission ramps down, the bulge for the next mission can ramp up without creating the need for wide swings in the overall Planetary Science Division’s budget.  Figures are from actual budgets through FY16 and are the projected funding from the FY16 budget proposal.

For the last several years, Congress and NASA have sparred over when the Europa mission should be staggered in respect to other missions. Supporters in Congress want to see the mission launch by 2022, and are willing to increase the overall funding available to Planetary Science to help incorporate the Europa bulge. NASA has only committed to sometime in the to the mid-to-late 2020s, and has shown little desire to increase overall funding to planetary science. To efficiently develop the Europa mission, the two will have to reach an agreement on a funding plan and launch date.

If a Europa mission is to launch by 2022, its funding peak will occur around the same time as the funding peak for the Mars 2020 rover, NASA’s other major planetary mission. NASA’s Mars 2020 rover and Europa missions are both Flagship missions with an expected cost of around $2 billion.  Congress, however, has stated that the Europa mission must utilize the Space Launch System booster (cost unknown) and include a lander that could add upwards of $700M to the mission’s total cost.  The net result is that Congress has mandated two large simultaneous bulges be funded at once for the 2020 rover and Europa mission.

Absent an increase in the budget for the Planetary Science Division in the late 2010s, these large missions could crowd out other, smaller missions.  Both Congress and the White House have shown interest in ramping up the low-cost Discovery program over the next few years in an attempt to restore the cadence destroyed by cuts earlier in the decade. There is also the next New Frontiers mission, a medium-class planetary spacecraft that would launch by 2024.  The funding bulges for these missions could overlap those of the Mars 2020 and Europa missions, creating more competition for funding.

To achieve everyone’s goals would require an increase of funding for NASA’s Planetary Science Division significantly above what the White House has proposed in recent years. 

 

Jason Callahan and Casey Dreier of The Planetary Soceity have estimated what future NASA planetary budgets might look like if all the missions planned for development in the next few years are budgeted.   The result is a substantial increase over the current planetary budget for Fiscal Year 2016 of $1.63B.

First, some background. Unlike Congress, which only appropriates money on an annual basis. Budgets proposed by the President’s budget officers (in consultation with NASA’s managers) project out five years, with the first year the actual request for the next year’s funding from Congress and the subsequent years being notional, but indicative of the agency’s planning. For NASA to issue the multi-year contracts needed to develop a mission, there has to be a clear, long-term commitment from the agency that is reflected in the official budget request. It is very rare for a spacecraft to successfully come to fruition without appearing in the official President’s budget.

We will soon see if there is agreement for the Planetary Science budget to increase to accommodate this new mission. The President’s FY2017 budget request will be released in early February, we will see if it contains the larger proposed funding to include a Europa mission launch in the early 2020s.

But if the overall budget of planetary science doesn’t increase, there are several alternatives that the Administration could pursue:

• Delay the launch of the Europa mission to the mid-2020’s to push out its spending bulge well after the Mars program needs
• Delay the smaller Discovery and New Frontiers missions and use that funding for Europa, which would result in an unbalanced planetary program with just two Flagship missions launching in the next decade. And this wouldn’t provide all the funding needed for the two Flagship missions.
• Take the additional funding from elsewhere in NASA’s budget (which would result in either hurting the human spaceflight program that has strong political backing, or hurting one of NASA’s other science program such as the Earth Science program (the latter of which has been proposed by various members of Congress, but which I oppose – we are rapidly modifying our planet and need satellites to identify and monitor the changes))

Any of these alternatives represent solutions typical of those made in budget negotiations, which assume a flattish overall budget with the individual line items being traded off.

I’m hoping that this year represents a new possibility.  The public has repeatedly shown its interest in planetary exploration through its avid following of missions in the press and the internet.  Congress has noticed that interest and been willing to support increases in the NASA’s planetary program for several years.  Several key members of Congress also are personally interested in planetary exploration specifically and space science in general and have consistently added money for Europa over the past few years. Congress has also consistently increased NASA’s budget since 2013, providing a surprising (and welcome) 7% increase in 2016.

This seems to be the year to attempt to create a political consensus for a new, higher spending rate for NASA’s planetary program.  The set of proposed missions is compelling.  Congress is willing.  For the next year, before the next President changes the players with the resulting delay in dealing with new policies, we have stable management teams in the President’s budget office and at NASA.  And public interest groups like the Planetary Society have shown that they can demonstrate the public’s support for increased funding and build the political case for the needed funding.

These budget issues aren’t unique to the Europa mission.  They occur with any large mission as NASA’s budgets are planned.  In a zero-sum game, something has to give.  In recent years, though, Congress has shown its willingness to increase the size of the budget to match the vision.  Perhaps it will be possible to have a dream line of up missions in development: Mars 2020, Europa, two or more Discovery missions, and a New Frontiers mission.  It’s worth working for.

Appendix: Estimated Europa mission costs

I have seen just one official cost estimate for the Europa multi-flyby mission (previously called the Europa Clipper) in a mission definition update.  That estimate was for $2.1B without the launch (and was made by the Aerospace Corporation, which NASA uses to provide independent mission cost estimates).  To estimate total spending that must be done before a possible 2022 launch, we need to add in the possible costs of the newly required Europa lander and the launch vehicle.  We should also subtract the costs of post launch operations (which seem to run $50M to $70M a year for Flagship missions) and money already spent or appropriated through FY16.

Here’s what the budget swag looks like:

              +$2.1B  Multi-flyby spacecraft

              +$0.5B  SLS launch vehicle*

              +$0.7B  Europa lander*

              -$0.3B   Post launch operations*

              -$0.4B   Already spent/appropriated

This back of the envelope calculation results in approximately $2.6B remaining spending before launch.  If launch is in 2022, then that leaves six years after FY2016, for an average spending rate of $440M per year.  More likely, there will be a higher peak spending rate for a couple of years with lower spending in the beginning and end of this period (based on spending patterns of other missions).  A possible average, though, is as far as I can push this thought experiment.

*SLS cost estimate from another Europa mission presentation; lander costs from a press account and may not be firm; operations costs assume a five year prime mission at a swag of $60M per year.