Congressional Budget Office Report on NASA Released | NASA Watch

By Marc Boucher, NASAWatch, Posted 04/16/09

Link: http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2009/04/congressional_b.html#more

"In response to a directive in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Act of 2008, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has updated its 2004 report analyzing the budgetary implications of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) vision for the nation’s space exploration program."..."According to NASA, its current plans will require an average of $19.1 billion of funding annually from 2010 through 2025, with the Constellation program accounting for about half of the total by 2017. Under its current plans, the agency also intends to conduct 79 new robotic science missions through 2025, requiring funding of $4.7 billion annually, and to perform aeronautics research, at a cost of about $460 million annually." Commercial space appears to be evident only in the near future for support of crew and cargo transport operations. Operations is an area to be drastically cut in favor of space exploration funding expansion. Considering that the ISS operations are scheduled to continue and lunar operations to expand initially as Earth-based monitoring and then on the surface using directed robots, this budget shifting seems problematical.