WASHINGTON -- NASA is heading into 2005 with nearly every dollar of its $16.2 billion budget request approved by Congress. To NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe, the hard fought budget victory is nothing short of a mandate to pursue the space exploration agenda articulated by President George W. Bush just over 10 months ago.

 

NASA was by far the biggest winner in the $388 billion omnibus spending bill Congress approved Nov. 20. Many federal agencies will have less money to work with next year as a result of Congress holding overall growth in domestic discretionary spending to less than 1 percent. NASA, however, is heading into 2005 with an $822 million raise, a 5.3 percent increase over 2004.

 

Three days after Congress voted to give NASA all but $44 million of the money Bush had requested, O'Keefe told reporters that the full funding of the agency's top priorities "was as strong an endorsement [of the space exploration vision] as any of us could have imagined."

 

Earlier that day, O'Keefe told NASA's 18,000 employees in an agency-wide telecast that NASA now has everything it needs to move on with a space exploration agenda that starts with returning the space shuttle to flight, leads back to the moon by 2020 and eventually to points beyond.

 

"We have a mandate, we have the president's direction [and] we have the resources now to go do it," he said. "There aren't any more excuses."

 

O'Keefe singled out for praise Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and House Majority Leader Tom Delay (R-Tex.) for the roles they played in ensuring that Bush got his full request for NASA. The White House, which had threatened to veto a bill moving through the House during the summer that would have cut $1.1 billion from NASA's request, leaned on appropriators during the closing days of the budget battle to make NASA a high priority.

 

Delay told employees during a Nov. 22 visit to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston that the budget battles only promise to get tougher in the years ahead.

O'Keefe told reporters he has yet to see a budget year that wasn't described as "worse than last year but better than next." He said he has every expectation that NASA will be able to stay the course, despite the budget battles that lie ahead for a Bush administration that says it is determined to cut the federal budget deficit in half in five years.

 

"The clear indication I have from all of our colleagues in the administration is that the trajectory that was anticipated not quite a year ago . . . will continue apace in the years ahead," O'Keefe said.

 

The five-year NASA budget plan Bush presented in February called for the biggest one-year increase in 2005 with slightly smaller increases the next two years. Starting in 2008, NASA's budget would be held flat at around $18 billion.

 

Despite a budget outcome better than many expected, O'Keefe and his top managers still have some tough choices to make in the coming weeks.

Since NASA's 2005 budget request was sent to Congress, NASA has seen its space shuttle return-to-flight cost estimates skyrocket. In addition, the agency also has embarked on a crash program to save the Hubble Space Telescope using a robotic spacecraft.

NASA also will have to wrestle with balancing its own stated priorities with those of lawmakers, who included in the budget more than $400 million in directed spending, also known as earmarks [see related story, page 11].

 

Congress also included $290 million for a Hubble servicing mission, saying it should be "one of NASA's highest priorities," but did not say what projects NASA should cut to accommodate it. NASA has not committed to a Hubble servicing mission, but does intend to spend the next nine months or so doing preliminary design and development work on a robotic approach with a decision on whether to proceed expected sometime after August.

Initial estimates for the mission range as high as $2.4 billion and would have to be launched by 2008. NASA public budget plans do not include funding for this mission.

 

NASA also is facing sharply higher shuttle bills in the year ahead as it prepares to fly for the first time since the February 2003 loss of Columbia and its crew. Congress provided NASA's full $4.3 billion request for the space shuttle program. But shuttle officials have been telling Congress in recent weeks that they need $5 billion for the year ahead.

 

O'Keefe said that funding the space shuttle program's return-to-flight efforts would be a top agency priority, but he did not say how he planned to deal with the $760 million shortfall. In the conference report accompanying the budget, Congress left open the possibility that NASA could submit a supplementary request sometime next year for any additional money it might need for the shuttle program. Congressional sources who follow NASA downplayed the significance of that invitation, however, noting that the administration is always free to send over supplemental spending requests.

 

These congressional sources said NASA and the White House fought hard to convince Congress to let NASA take the first stab at fitting the bigger shuttle bills, Hubble costs and the long list of lawmaker's pet projects into the agency's spending plans for the year ahead.

In the end, Congress agreed, giving NASA a remarkable amount of leeway to transfer money between accounts to take care of these and other emerging expenses.

 

O'Keefe told NASA employees the degree of transfer authority included in the bill might very well be unprecedented. "In my public service experience I have never seen -- ever -- the level of flexibility that's provided in this act," he said.

 

Congress should get the first glimpse at how O'Keefe intends to use that flexibility in February. NASA is required by law to submit a 2005 operating plan to Congress within 60 days of the president signing the omnibus bill.

 

O'Keefe said some agency projects face cuts and that priority would be given to fully funding efforts that support the space exploration vision. NASA's top priorities, he said, are returning the space shuttle to flight, completing the international space station, building the next generation of crewed spacecraft, and developing nuclear power and propulsion systems for spacecraft and outposts.

 

Notably O'Keefe did not explicitly mention the lunar robotic missions Bush called for back in January. One of those missions, a planned 2008 Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, took a big hit in the budget bill Congress sent to Bush. Of the $70 million that Bush requested for the mission, Congress approved only $10 million, directing NASA to use the money to solicit ideas for science instruments for the mission.

 

O'Keefe said final decisions about what to cut and what to keep have not been made. "I don't know that anybody has made a choice at this point in terms of what does or does not fall off the table," he said.

 

Some researchers are worried that long-standing NASA science priorities will suffer as the agency focuses on returning to flight, completing the space station and getting started on the other exploration goals.

 

The American Physical Society, for example, released a report Nov. 23 warning that the exploration initiative emphasis on human space flight could result in "indefinite postponement or serious delay" of programs the National Academy of Sciences assigned high priority in decadal studies performed for NASA. [see related story on page 17].

 

"The scope of the moon-Mars initiative has not been well defined, its long-term cost has not been adequately addressed and no budgetary mechanisms have been established to avoid causing major irreparable damage to the agency's scientific program," the report said.

 

Comments: bberger@space.com