Future missions out of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to explore the surface of Europa, to bring an asteroid to lunar orbit and to study Earth’s carbon dioxide levels could end up on the chopping block if Congress backs a proposed budget released by the White House Thursday.
President Donald Trump’s budget blueprint for 2018 requests $19.1 billion for NASA’s budget, a less than 1 percent decrease from the budget Congress approved last year. Trump’s proposal calls for increased public-private partnerships and a shift in focus from Earth-centric research to deep space exploration.
“This is a positive budget overall for NASA. I want to reiterate that we are committed to NASA’s core mission of exploration — in all the ways we carry that out,” said Robert Lightfoot, NASA’s acting administrator, in a statement. “As with any budget, we have greater aspirations than we have means, but this blueprint provides us with considerable resources to carry out our mission, and I know we will make this nation proud.”
Both the Senate and the House of Representatives will propose budgets for NASA and other federal agencies before a final version is sent to the president for his signature. Cuts do not always survive the process. Early budgets last year zeroed out funding for the Mars Opportunity rover, for example, but the now teenage robot explorer, originally meant to last only 90 days, ended up with a two-year extension instead.
The White House’s budget outline is mostly vague on how the $19.1 billion would be spent. The document requests the end of three JPL missions, while also supporting two others from the La Canada Flintridge facility, namely the Mars 2020 rover and a robotic flyby of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa.
However, a separate JPL proposal to put a lander on Europa to study potentially life-bearing oceans beneath the icy surface found no love from the administration.
“To preserve the balance of NASA’s science portfolio and maintain flexibility to conduct missions that were determined to be more important by the scientific community, the Budget provides no funding for a multi-billion dollar mission to land on Europa,” according to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget.
At least $102 million in cuts would come from the elimination of four Earth science missions — including JPL’s planned Orbiting Carbon Observatory 3 — and research grants. The OCO-3 would have followed the successful launch of OCO-2 in 2014 and was expected to be hosted aboard the International Space Station, according to JPL’s website. It did not have a launch date.
Trump’s blueprint calls for the cancellation of NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission, a dramatic proposal to snatch a 400-meter in diameter asteroid 64 million miles away and bring it to lunar orbit for study by humans, citing “increasing development costs.”
JPL would have handled the five-year robotic mission to retrieve the asteroid.
NASA’s acting administrator said they utilize the work already completed on ARM for other projects.
“We will continue the solar electric propulsion efforts benefitting from those developments for future in space transportation initiatives,” Lightfoot said in a statement. “I have had personal involvement with this team and their progress for the past few years and I am extremely proud of their efforts to advance this mission.”
The president’s budget also calls for a strengthening of NASA’s cybersecurity capabilities. Ironically, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, during Trump’s travel ban, in February, was criticized for allegedly detaining a U.S.-born Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer at the airport and then pressuring him into giving access to his NASA-issued phone.
