NASA’s 2016 budget bigger than expected

The 2009-page omnibus spending bill announced Tuesday by House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), available to peruse on theHill.com, includes an allotment of $19.3 billion to NASA in fiscal 2016 – or $700 million more than the Obama administration requested earlier this year.NASA’s ambitious plans for exploring space in the next decade and beyond will require money. Lots of it. The space agency is looking to get the cash train rolling in 2016 with a proposed federal budget allocation representing a more-than-$1.3 billion increase from this year’s spending levels.

If passed by Congress and signed off on by the White House, the proposed budget would allow NASA to spend more than it requested on the next-generation Space Launch System (SLS) and its Planetary Science Division. Per the Planetary Society’s Casey Dreier, the proposed spending for the agency’s Commercial Crew program to develop crew capsules with private partners Boeing and SpaceX matches NASA’s request, while the allotment for the Earth Science Division and Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) comes in under the amount requested for each by Obama this past February.

Dreier highlighted budget allocations for several major NASA divisions and initiatives:

• Planetary Science Division: $1.631 billion (about $270 million more than originally requested)
• Commercial Crew: $1.243 billion (matching requested budget)
• Space Launch System: (about $640 million over requested budget)
• Earth Science Division: $1.921 billion (below original request but $149 million more than allotted in 2015)
• Space Technology Mission Directorate: $686 million (about $39 million below original request but $90 million more than allotted in 2015)

Here’s a more complete breakdown of the proposed NASA budget settled on in conference between the House and Senate:

NASA this week began recruiting a new class of astronauts to explore space aboard the next-generation Orion deep-space exploration vehicle, which the agency plans to use to send humans to the moon for the first time since the early 1970s, and eventually to Mars.

In recent years, the space agency has consistently stressed its commitment to crewed space exploration beyond our own planetary system even as some critics have argued that it’s too risky and expensive. NASA, however, is ready to move on from low-Earth orbit crew missions – specifically, the regular missions to the International Space Station (ISS) the agency has been funding and conducting for 15 years.

William Gerstenmaier, the agency’s chief of human spaceflight, recently said NASA plans to “get out of ISS as quickly as we can.”

NASA successfully tested Orion last December, blasting the long-haul crew capsule into space atop a Delta IV Heavy rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla. for a quick, four-hour jaunt in orbit some 3,600 miles above Earth before splashing down in the Pacific. The next big test mission will be an uncrewed flight to the moon in 2018. In September, NASA pushed back Orion’s first crewed flight, also a trip to the moon, by nearly two years to April 2023.

After conducting crewed Orion flights to the “proving ground of lunar orbit,” including a potential rendezvous with a captured asteroid in 2026, NASA plans to send astronauts on “longer duration missions,” which would culminate in a trip to Mars.