NOAA has its own array of Earth-observing satellites that would also be useful in the fight against climate change. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) would also get a $500 million boost to bring it’s total budget to $2 billion. These include the National Science Foundation, which funds a significant amount of planetary science, which has a requested increase of 20% to bring it’s funding to $10.2 billion. Other aerospace related agencies would also benefit from increased budgets in the new proposal. It also happened to do a video on the details of the proposed budget.
This Week at NASA is one of the programs sponsored by the Educational Outreach arm of the space research organization. The research and development NASA will fund for will focus on providing technologies to empower the commercial space industry as well as create more efficient aerospace tools in order to fight climate change. Other funding categories specifically called out in the proposal were Space Technology R&D, STEM workforce training, and ISS support. Artist’s depiction of the Roman Space Telescope, which is explicitly funded as part of the new NASA proposed budget.Ĭredit – NASA WFIRST Project and Dominic Benford Also the budget specifically calls out the Roman Space Telescope, supporting a project that had previously been on the chopping block. These include the Europa Clipper, Dragonfly, and Mars Sample Return mission that is the follow-up to Perseverance. The Artemis program selected three commercial landers for its first phase, pictured above from left to right are the Peregrine by Astrobotic, Nova-C by Intuitive Machines, and Z-01 by OrbitBeyondĪlthough a specific funding number wasn’t mentioned for any individual project, various robotic missions were mentioned as part of the budget proposal. It’s unclear whether the current funding level is capable of supporting the program’s mission to land a person on the moon by 2024. While this funding level is an increase of $325 million over the previous year, in that previous year NASA had asked for almost double the current amount provided for this program. The program reached a deal with SpaceX today to provide it’s lunar landing module. The biggest chunk of the budget ($6.9 billion) will go to the Artemis program, the US’s effort to land astronauts on the moon again. $2.3 billion is earmarked to go directly towards understanding and alleviating climate change, a 10% increase over the prior year. NASA is also being roped into the effort, as it is well placed to help contribute to this priority through it’s combination of satellite monitoring and Earth Science research. The administration had already released an infrastructure plan that focused on alleviating climate change. Some of that money will go to one of the administrations biggest focal points – climate change. Banner from a NASA Facebook account showing its interest in climate change science. In order to fulfill that role, the administration plans to spend $24.7 billion on the agency, an increase of 6.3% over the funded level last year.
The section regarding NASA is only about a page long, but has some useful hints at how the new administration views the role of its space exploration arm. The proposed budget was released on April 9th, and, at 58 pages, goes into high level details about almost every part of federal spending.
With a new year and new administration comes a new budget and with the 2021 proposed budget comes a nice funding increase for NASA. Especially because that budget affects NASA, the largest space funding agency in the world. Which is why, when US presidents release their budget proposals, the space community takes notice. The biggest source of that funding for that space research is usually the US government. Space research, like much else in capitalist societies, is driven by funding.
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