White House Wants Devastating Cuts To NASA's Mars Exploration

The Bad Astronomer writes "The White House released its proposed NASA budget for FY13, and while much of it remains the same from last year, one particular program got devastating news: Mars exploration got a crippling $226 million cut, more than 38% of its budget. This means killing two future missions outright and threatening others. The reasons for this are complex, including huge cost overruns on James Webb Space Telescope and the Curiosity Mars rover, but it also points to a political lack of valuing science in America." A followup to news from before the budget was released, this has details on the actual proposed cuts and re-allocations.

Comments

Re:Confused

[Trepidity]

NASA's budget was left close to intact, at $17.7 billion, down from about $17.75 billion this year. The main change wasn't overall funding for NASA, but reallocating where the money is spent within NASA.

This is NOT about devaluing science

[WindBourne]

In fact, Obama calls for spending a lot more money on NIH and NAS. The issue here is that republicans have called for cuts to private space development in hopes of pushing the monster SLS. To do that, the neo-cons will fund russia to the tune of .5B a year from 2015-2018 as well as pay 20-30B for SLS development which will finally launch 70 tonnes to LEO in 2020 (yes, it is already 2 years late).
OTH, NASA wants the economical approach so that they can make a great deal more launches in the future. As such, NASA is cutting several missions that will cost billions, but is spending money on getting human launch going by 2014. However, with that, they will also be able to put red dragon (spaceX's dragon) on Mars with a 1 ton payload of equipment for .5B. So, should NASA spend several billion to get one mission to Mars, OR should they spend money today to be able to get a number of CHEAP missions to mars a year earlier?

I do not like seeing NASA's budget cut, HOWEVER, kudos to Bolden. He is doing the right thing in getting ECONOMICAL private space going.

Re:It's a good thing the military is still funded.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh look it's this lie again. Payroll tax. Sales tax. The "46% pay no tax" myth comes from income tax only.