NASA budget proposal widens divide between White House and Congress

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden delivers his "State of NASA" speech at Langley Research Center on Tuesday. (credit: NASA)

Each year President Obama submits a budget for NASA to Congress, and each year the House of Representatives and Senate essentially toss out those numbers and come up with their own figures. Now that the President has submitted a $19 billion NASA budget for fiscal year 2017, we can expect the same scenario to play out again this year.

The macro battle with Congress will likely remain over the direction of the space agency. NASA sees itself as being on a journey to Mars. On Tuesday Charlie Bolden, the agency’s administrator and a four-time astronaut, reiterated that point. “We are closer today than ever before in human history to sending humans to the red planet,” Bolden said during a State of NASA speech. “Our plan is clear, affordable, sustainable and attainable.”

However Congress has become increasingly skeptical about the viability of NASA’s plan to go to Mars. During a hearing earlier this month, Republicans openly questioned whether NASA was, in fact, on a path to Mars. The chairman of the House Science Committee, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), called it an "imbalanced proposal [that] continues to tie our astronauts’ feet to the ground and makes a Mars mission all but impossible,” in a statement to Ars.