But hidden in the President's speech and the supporting documents is clear evidence that the funding plan for the New Space Order underwent major surgery, probably in the last 2 days before the speech. This hasty and ill-prepared operation has eliminated whatever chance may have existed that this program will actually be executed.

To determine this, we have to act like archaeologists and dig down through successive layers of planning that are accidentally preserved in the publicly available documentation. This search reveals artifacts of three different plans for obtaining the billions of dollars needed over the next five years to develop the Crew Exploration Vehicle:

Plan 1, leaked to the news media several days ago: was for a ~%5 annual increase in the NASA budget each year for the period FY05-FY09. Given a current budget of $15.4B, this works out to ~$12B of new money over the remainder of the decade. This is a reasonable number for developing an "Apollo Mark II" version of the CEV. It is in the lower part of the cost range estimated for the old OSP program by independent analysts.

Plan 2 appears as one of the talking points in the White House press release

# From the current 2004 level of $15.4 billion, the President's proposal will increase NASA's budget by an average of 5 percent per year over the next three years, and at approximately 1 percent or less per year for the two years after those.

This implies a major reduction in new money from the leaked plan of continuous %5 increases. The wedge chart of future budgets posted by NASA HQ seems to be another fossil of Plan 2, judging by the slopes of the total budget envelope over FY05-09.

Plan 3 is given in the President's actual speech:

"NASA's current five-year budget is $86 billion. Most of the funding we need for the new endeavors will come from reallocating $11 billion within that budget. We need some new resources, however. I will call upon Congress to increase NASA's budget by roughly a billion dollars, spread out over the next five years."

This dramatically different funding plan is confirmed in two more bullets in the press release:

# The funding added for exploration will total $12 billion over the next five years. Most of this added funding for new exploration will come from reallocation of $11 billion that is currently within the five-year total NASA budget of $86 billion.

# In the Fiscal Year (FY) 2005 budget, the President will request an additional $1 billion to NASA's existing five-year plan, or an average of $200 million per year.

So in only four days, the amount of new money the Bush Administration plans to spend on its New Vision for Space has dropped by $11B, and this missing money is now to be robbed from existing NASA programs at the rate of ~$2B/yr.

Someday we may learn the details of the last-minute political logrolling that produced this astonishing change (and the staff bungling that left two wildly contradictory bullets on the same page of a White House press release). But right now let's look at the possible impact of Plan 3 on NASA.

The first question to ask is: Will this massive redistribution of funds come from other elements of the manned program, or from the rest of NASA?

There is essentially no possibility of squeezing this kind of money out of the existing manned programs. There can't be any significant scale back in Shuttle or Station in the FY05-09 time frame, because we will still be assembling the Station. Possibly there will be some small reduction in the Shuttle flight rate from the former 5 per year.

But as NASA never tires of mentioning, cutting back the flight rate of Shuttle doesn't save a lot because the marching army of support people have to be kept on salary anyway. Implementing the CAIB recommendations will increase cost and staffing levels, not reduce them.

The NASA wedge chart for Plan 2 confirms this: the Shuttle funding wedge continues to be huge right up to its retirement date end in 2010, and at a reduced level for two more years (to cover demolition and clean-up costs for LC-39?).

So there is really no alternative to cutting over $2B/yr out of the non-manned-space half of NASA's budget. That's a ~%40 cut to "Aeronautics and Other Science" if you assume it is equally distributed over the five years 2005-2009!! If it is ramped in like most big budget cuts, the final cut by 2009 would be much larger. Goodbye wind tunnels, goodbye Webb Space Telescope, goodbye planetary probes to boring places like asteroids.

Do we really want to trade all this in for Apollo Mark II? A lot of people will say no. Even a lot of Space Cadets will say no. We lost ten years of solar system exploration to pay for the Shuttle and it left a bloody wound that still drips. A lot of influential people will fight this proposal to the last round, and then fix bayonets and keep on fighting until it is defeated.

I could go on for pages with minute analysis of the Bush space plan(s), but what's the point? This situation reminds me of what they said in the Congress about Ronald Reagan's budget proposals -- "Dead On Arrival".

Jeffrey F. Bell is Adjunct Professor of Planetology at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. All opinions expressed in this article are his own and not those of the University.

Related Links
SpaceDaily
Search SpaceDaily
Subscribe To SpaceDaily Express

Thanks for being here; We need your help. The SpaceDaily news network continues to grow but revenues have never been harder to maintain. With the rise of Ad Blockers, and Facebook - our traditional revenue sources via quality network advertising continues to decline. And unlike so many other news sites, we don't have a paywall - with those annoying usernames and passwords. Our news coverage takes time and effort to publish 365 days a year. If you find our news sites informative and useful then please consider becoming a regular supporter or for now make a one off contribution.
SpaceDaily Contributor $5 Billed Once credit card or paypal		SpaceDaily Monthly Supporter $5 Billed Monthly paypal only