The new NASA budget request pulls the plug on two long-planned joint missions to Mars with the European Space Agency, but agency managers say they are already in touch with their ESA counterparts about a smaller-scale Mars mission in the 2018 planetary launch window.
Mars exploration would be cut $226.2 million in fiscal 2013 under the new NASA budget request released Feb. 13, down from $587 million in the current fiscal year. The remaining $360.8 million will go for the nuclear-powered Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) now en route to the Red Planet, and the upcoming Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission (Maven) orbiter scheduled for a launch in 2013 to study the planet’s upper atmosphere.
The agency’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD) also will join forces with the Human Exploration and Operations (HEO) directorate and the Office of the Chief Technologist (OCT) to work up a medium-sized mission that meets the needs of all three units and draws on resources from all three.
The OCT, for example, may be able to provide a high-bandwidth communications link in Mars orbit that would advance that technology while adding to the infrastructure that future robotic and human missions will use at the planet. Briefing reporters and “citizen journalists” broadcasting on their Twitter accounts Feb. 13, Administrator Charles Bolden said the agency still intends to put humans “in the vicinity of Mars” by the mid-2030s.
But getting there won’t include the combination of NASA’s Mars Sample Return effort and ESA’s ExoMars rover in 2016 and 2018 that was hammered out between the two agencies over the past few years. Instead, ESA is now working with Russia on a joint mission that will probably involve Russian launches for European probes, at the most basic level.
“Tough choices had to be made,” Bolden said of the agency’s $17.7 billion budget request, which includes funds to finish and launch the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), continue development of the heavy-lift Space Launch System and Orion multi-purpose crew vehicle, and maintain the already delayed schedule for seeding a commercial space transportation industry to low Earth orbit. “We’ll develop an integrated strategy to ensure that the next steps for Mars exploration will support science as well as human exploration goals, and potentially take advantage of the 2018-2020 exploration window.”
John Grunsfeld, the associate administrator for science, said science and human exploration have many of the same goals at Mars, noting that robotic and human geologists and astrobiologists would be seeking the same information on possible life and habitability at the planet. And William Gerstenmaier, the HEO associate administrator, noted that MSL already is gathering radiation data on its way to Mars that will aid in the design of future human spacecraft, and will collect more data on atmospheric entry with its large heat shield when it arrives on the night of Aug. 5-6.
While NASA — and potentially ESA — will work over the next few months to devise a New Frontiers-class Mars mission, with a total cost capped at $700 million, in the 2018 window, there may actually be another NASA Mars mission launched in 2016. The Geophysical Monitoring Station, a relatively simple lander designed to study the structure and composition of the interior of Mars, is one of three candidate missions for the next Discovery-class award by NASA.
Flat outlook
Aside from the change in the Mars program, and the funding necessary to meet a 2018 launch date for the JWST, most of the NASA budget is fairly flat compared to the funds actually received in 2012, according to Beth Robinson, NASA’s chief financial officer. But compared to earlier projections, it’s off by about $700 million, Robinson said.
Because NASA is “protecting the civil service workforce,” she said, resulting job losses will be felt among contractor personnel and at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is run by the California Institute of Technology. Contractor job cuts are already well understood, according to Robinson, but the effect of changes in the Mars work at JPL remains to be seen. Overall, some 300-400 jobs that would have been lost as development on MSL wound down may not be preserved with new work, she said.
In the big picture budget lines, NASA wants $4.911 billion for Earth science in fiscal 2013; $551.5 million for aeronautics; $699 million for space technology; $3.933 billion for exploration, including $829.7 million for commercial spaceflight; and $4.013 billion for space operations, of which $3.007 billion would go to operating the International Space Station.
Photo: NASA
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