“The Office of Education has experienced significant challenges in implementing a focused NASA-wide education strategy, including challenges in providing oversight and integration of Agency-wide education activities,” the OMB document stated. The budget also includes plans to close NASA’s Office of Education, providing $37.3 million for closeout and transition costs. “It becomes a matter of priorities, and it was a budget-related decision,” he said of the decision to cancel RBI. Hunter didn’t specify why those particular missions were selected for cancellation, beyond the “schedule and technical difficulties” with RBI. “The terminations are due to budget priorities and the need to adjust agency’s budget to match the nation’s current fiscal position,” Andrew Hunter, the acting chief financial officer at NASA, said in a May 23 media briefing about the budget proposal. The measurements RBI would have made can be provided by other existing and planned missions, the document stated, adding that RBI has also experienced cost growth. The fifth project, not previously mentioned, is the Radiation Budget Instrument (RBI), which would have flown on a future weather satellite to measure the Earth’s reflected sunlight. The White House identified four of the projects in its budget blueprint, issued in March: the Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) satellite, the Climate Absolute Radiance and Refractivity Observatory (CLARREO) Pathfinder and the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) 3 instruments for the International Space Station, and Earth-viewing instruments on the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), launched in 2015. “The proposed termination of these five missions restructures the NASA Earth science portfolio within the available budget in a way that causes the least impact to NASA’s ability to execute a balanced, comprehensive Earth science program that meets the highest priorities of the science community,” the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) said in a document outlining overall reductions in the federal budget request.
Administration documents noted that included a savings of $191 million by cancelling five Earth science instruments and missions deemed low-priority.
The budget proposal includes $1.754 billion for NASA’s Earth science program, a cut of $167 million from what it received in 2017.
NASA DAILY BUDGET FULL
“There are some positive elements, like full funding for commercial crew, and some not-so-positive elements, such as the cuts to Earth science, education and to exploration,” he noted, saying that he expected members of Congress of both parties would work together “to make sure the agency gets what it needs.”
Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee, during a statement at the beginning of a May 23 hearing by the committee’s space subcommittee on regulatory issues. “The spending plan simply does not go far enough for NASA or for various space centers,” said Sen. However, one key senator criticized the overall request.
“What this budget tells us to do is keep going, keep doing what we’ve been doing,” he said. Lightfoot, in a “State of NASA” speech at NASA Headquarters May 23, emphasized in his address the overall continuity in the budget request, which continues major science and human spaceflight programs with modest funding changes. “At $19.1 billion, we have a very positive budget that retains the same parameters we saw in March, and which reflects the president’s confidence in our direction and the importance of everything we’ve been achieving,” NASA Acting Administrator Robert Lightfoot said in a statement. That amount matches values in a leaked spreadsheet last week, indicating cuts to NASA science, exploration, space operations and other major accounts. The proposal, released May 23, offers $19.092 billion for NASA, $561 million less than what the agency received in a fiscal year 2017 omnibus spending bill enacted earlier this month. WASHINGTON - The White House’s fiscal year 2018 budget proposal seeks to cancel five NASA Earth science projects and confirms plans to shut down the agency’s education office as part of more than $560 million in cuts from 2017.
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