12/6/2023 0 Comments Nasas budgetAs initially conceived, ARM would have moved, via robotic spacecraft, a small asteroid to lunar orbit to be explored by astronauts. NASA further revised these plans by proposing the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) in its fiscal year 2014 budget request. In addition to referencing the recent NRC report, the budget request leveraged the new direction for human spaceflight to justify this decision, saying that NASA "will significantly expand efforts to find and characterize asteroids and comets approaching Earth which may be destinations and resources for our exploration of the solar system." Later that year, the Obama Administration released its national space policy, which directed NASA to send humans to an asteroid by 2025. The congressional budget justification for fiscal year 2011, released months after this report, canceled the lunar program and stated that NASA would lay "ground work that will enable humans to safely reach multiple potential destinations, including the Moon, asteroids, Lagrange points, and Mars and its environs." This same budget request also proposed a significant budget increase in NEO observations. The report, released later that year, declared the current program "unsustainable" and proposed a "flexible path" for human exploration, including a visit to a near-Earth asteroid as an interim destination. In 2009, the Obama Administration convened the Review of United States Human Space Flight Plans Committee to evaluate NASA's human spaceflight efforts, including Constellation, the over-budget and behind-schedule effort to return humans to the Moon. I believe it is no accident that 2 significant jumps in funding-from $3.8 million to $20 million as proposed in fiscal year 2011, and from $20 million to $40 million in fiscal year 2014-both align with major changes in the human spaceflight program that involved near-Earth asteroids. However, in repeated congressional budget proposals, NASA reached beyond the NRC report to its human spaceflight program to justify funding increases for NEO observations. It included examples of how increased budgets would enable improved detection and mitigation efforts. In the absence of new arguments, we should look to politics: why would the NEO observations suddenly warrant increased political attention required to drive funding?Ī key report from the National Research Council (NRC), released in early 2010, helped establish the scientific and policy foundations for increased NEO funding. Everyone knew that getting hit by a big asteroid would be bad and that we needed to search for potential threats that's why Congress passed the law it did. The arguments in favor of an extensive NEO survey program are not any different today than they were in 2005. This growth happened only in the past few years: in 20 NASA will spend as much on planetary defense as it did in the entire previous decade combined. This year, NASA will spend $150 million on planetary defense, 40 times more than in 2009. That's when the White House, for the first time, proposed a 5-fold funding increase for NEO observations, kicking off a decade-long trend that transformed the effort from a limited, ground-based sky survey into a full-fledged planetary defense program with its own flight line for space missions. This money supported observation time on ground-based telescopes around the world-an important but ultimately inadequate method for detecting the extremely faint signatures of near-Earth objects. For five years after the 2005 law, NEO survey efforts at NASA limped along with an annual budget of less than $4 million per year-roughly 0.02% of the space agency's total expenditures and less than the travel budget for employees at NASA headquarters.
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