NASA chief defends 2013 budget in Congress

NASA chief defends 2013 budget in Congress "I am committed to commercial being a part of our future, but not at the expense of our vital NASA employee sector and the building of the next vehicle that's going to take us beyond where we are," Hutchison said during a hearing before the Senate's Commerce, Science and Transportation committee. Bolden acknowledged that a challenging fiscal environment forced NASA to make difficult decisions. "The budget we submitted supports an ambitious exploration program," Bolden told the House committee. Half a penny on the dollar While the whole federal government is strapped for cash lately, one presenter at the Senate hearing argued that a significant increase to NASA's total funding would pay off dividends in the future. If all you do is coast, eventually you slow declining while others catch up and pass you by. "I need to get American crews to station on American vehicles, and decreasing the amount of money will not help close that gap," Bolden said. At the House hearing, however, Bolden reminded lawmakers that the $406 million allocated to commercial crew last year was less than half of what NASA requested. The agency is hoping that outsourcing this job to commercial American companies will allow the agency to focus on the more ambitious goals of building Orion and the SLS to take astronauts to an asteroid and to Mars. Bolden stressed that NASA's deep space vehicles would still get the funding they needed to stay on schedule, and that those spacecraft are comparatively further along than their commercial counterparts. "I am a lot more confident about SLS and MPCV, and that could be the reason that it appears that I'm not passionate about it," Bolden said. The senators agreed that the commercial crew program is worthy of funding, but charged that any boost to its budget must come from somewhere other than the NASA vehicles in the works. "With a limited amount of money, we know we're asking you to do an awful lot," Nelson said. "I say take it to a penny," astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the American Museum of Natural History's Hayden Planetarium in New York, testified before the Senate. A major boost of funding to NASA "would reboot America's capacity to innovate as no other force in society can," Tyson argued. 30, 2013. "Those are hard dates, and they're evidence that we are pushing forward," Bolden said during the Senate hearing in Washington, D. A second session that focused on NASA's budgettook place in front of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology later in the day. But the senators weren't satisfied with that answer. "I don't doubt your sincerity in shared goals, but what I'm very concerned about is the implementation that is reflected in the numbers of the budget that the president released," Hutchison said. "The gap between now and 2017 is excessive," Bolden said. Cutting planetary exploration At the House hearing, several congressmen took issue with other parts of NASA's proposed budget for fiscal year 2013, which runs from Oct. Specifically, they decried the fact that the budget request cuts funding for robotic planetary exploration by $300 million, a 20 percent reduction from last year's levels. NASA chief defends 2013 budget in Congress. NASA chief defends 2013 budget in Congress Trade News selected by Local Linkup on 09/03/2012