One small stip(ulation) for NASA, one giant burden for exploration

The Super Strypi rocket blew up during its maiden launch in November, 2015. The Air Force gave up on it, but now a US Senator has told NASA to try again. (credit: US Air Force)

Amid the vast firmament of NASA’s $19 billion portfolio, with its exploration aims spanning from planet Earth to the edge of the visible universe, $30 million may not seem like all that much money. Yet sometimes principle matters, especially when that principle illustrates the political headwinds buffeting the space agency as it seeks to push humans outward into deep space.

When appropriators were writing a budget for NASA last month, Senator Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) designated $30 million in spending for “small launch technology” for the coming fiscal year. The stipulation was tucked into the space technology program, a relatively new area of NASA’s budget that President Obama created in 2010 to invest in “bold, broadly applicable, disruptive technology that industry cannot tackle today.” The central objective of this program is to bring forward advanced technologies needed to land humans on Mars.

But Congress has disdained the space technology program almost from its inception. During every subsequent budget cycle, the Senate and House have cut the president’s request—the money NASA says it needs that year to ensure Mars technology development is proceeding apace. The last couple of years, however, the US Senate has added a new wrinkle. Appropriators not only cut the space technology budget, they further squeezed the remainder by specifying what NASA must work on rather than leaving those decisions to the agency’s rocket scientists.