[____] [____] New NASA projects take funding from other agencies. Funding will not be taken from within NASA’s budget itself. Jeffrey Mervis, deputy news editor, Science Magazine, 2/5/2010, http://www.wbur.org/npr/123410020/president-obamas-science-spending But more broadly, Congress isn't going to go for all of these things. Congress, as you'll talk about laterwith NASA, is not going to be happy with that reallocation and savings. And the reason that's important to the rest of the science budget is because NASA is funded by the same committee that funds the National Science Foundation, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Commerce, which has NOAA andNIST. And so if they have a fixed amount of money, the more they give to one agency, the less there is for everybody else. So sometimes Congress makes decisions not because they're opposed to research, but because they have other higher priorities.
[____] Congress is considering taking funds from other agencies to fund NASA, which proves there would be no tradeoff. Amy Svitak, Senior writer for space.com, 3/29/2011, “NASA’s Budget Could Get Infusion From Other U.S. Departments,” http://www.space.com/11247-nasa-budget-funding-commerce-justice-departments.html Congressional appropriators could tap the funding accounts of the U.S. departments of Commerce and Justice to help cover what some see as a $1 billion shortfall in NASA’s $18.7 billion spending plan for 2012, which allocates less money for a heavy-lift rocket and crew capsule than Congress directed last year. “There’s over a billion-dollar difference between the budget request and the authorized levels in [20]12 for the launch system and the crew vehicle, and now that falls squarely back on the shoulders of [the appropriations committees] to try and figure out where to come up with that money,” said a panelist at a March 23 breakfast on Capitol Hill. Sponsored by Women in Aerospace (WIA), the breakfast was held under the Chatham House Rule, an 84-year-old protocol fashioned by the London-based nonprofit think-tank to promote frank discussion through anonymity. [What Obama and Congress Should Do for Spaceflight] The panelist, one of six whose names and job titles were circulated by WIA prior to the meeting, said funding requested in NASA’s 2012 spending plan does not square with levels Congress set in the NASA Authorization Act of 2010 that U.S. President Barack Obama signed into law in October. Specifically, the request called for spending $1.2 billion less than the $4 billion Congress authorized for the heavy-lift launch vehicle and crew capsule in 2012. At the same time, the request includes $350 million more than the $500 million Congress authorized to nurture development of commercial vehicles to deliver cargo and crews to the International Space Station after the space shuttle retires later this year. Consequently, the panelist said, it is now up to congressional appropriators “to find a billion dollars in other places in NASA to pay for those activities or to decide to make those tradeoffs and take that money out of the departments of Commerce or Justice or the other agencies that are funded in the same bill as NASA.” NASA’s annual appropriation is part of a broader spending package totaling nearly $65 billion that funds the U.S. Commerce and Justice departments, the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Standards and Technology and related agencies.
No Link – Budget Flexibility now
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[____] The retirement of the shuttle means there is a lot of extra money in NASA’s budget to be spent.
Clara Moskowitz, Senior Writer for Space.com, 4/15/2011 “NASA's 2011 Budget Should Allow Flexibility Despite Cuts,” Space.com, http://www.space.com/11411-nasa-2011-budget-cuts-constellation-funding.html The new budget at least frees NASA from a stifling provision under its 2010 budget that prevented it from cutting funding to the moon-bound Constellation program. Yet that program was canceled by President Barack Obama in early 2010, and NASA has been targeting new goals ever since. Now the space agency will finally be free to stop spending money on canceled Constellation projects. "The elimination of the Constellation provision will free up resources otherwise committed," Handberg said, saving NASA some of the money that it loses in the reduction of its annual budget. NASA leaders expressed gratitude that the agency can now move forward fully toward its new direction. "This bill lifts funding restrictions that limited our flexibility to carry out our shared vision for the future," NASA administrator Charles Bolden said in a statement. "With this funding, we will continue to aggressively develop a new heavy lift rocket, multipurpose crew vehicle and commercial capability to transport our astronauts and their supplies on American-made and launched spacecraft."
[____] The end of Constellation frees up money and creates new budget flexibility.
The Economist 6/30/2011 “The space shuttle Into the sunset” http://www.economist.com/node/18895018 So, although the shuttle—which has been the icon of America’s space effort for a generation—will be missed, harder heads will be glad to see the decks cleared. Last year Barack Obama outlined his plans for the future of America’s space programme. Its most striking feature is to delegate the humdrum task of ferrying people and equipment to low-Earth orbit to the private sector. Rocketry is a mature technology, and NASA has always relied on using contractors to build its rockets and spacecraft. In future, private firms will run the missions as well. Later this year two spacecraft, one which has been designed by Orbital Sciences, a Virginia-based firm, and another by SpaceX, a Californian company run by Elon Musk, an internet entrepreneur, will make cargo runs to the ISS. The hope is that such craft will soon be able to carry humans too, and at a far lower cost than NASA’s efforts. Liberated from the burden of having to service the ISS(which Mr Obama wants to keep until 2020, six years longer than originally planned), NASA will be free to concentrate on loftier goals. In 2010, when Mr Obama outlined his ideas, he spoke, somewhat vaguely, of a manned trip to a near-Earth asteroid, to be followed at some unspecified date in the 2030s by the ultimate space-cadet dream—a manned mission to Mars. To that end, NASA will spend billions of dollars developing new engines, propellants, life-support systems and the like. Even the shuttle will live on, in some sense, since the Space Launch System—the unromantic name of the beefy rocket needed to loft astronauts and cargoes into high orbits or farther into the solar system—will be built partly from recycled shuttle parts in an effort to save money and use familiar technology. And spending will be managed through fixed-price contracts instead of the “cost-plus” deals that helped to inflate the price of the shuttle.