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President Donald Trump loves big ideas in space, but not enough to convince legislators he needs to fund them.
Last week, the White House submitted a late funding request for an additional $ 1.6 billion on an Artemis Moon program project to bring astronauts back to the lunar surface by 2024. Today 39, the House's appropriation committee has left this claim aside from its spending plan for NASA. and ignored many other spatial priorities of the administration.
Without this funding, any hope of accelerating the mission on the moon announced by Vice President Mike Pence is likely to disappear.
The situation was similar yesterday when the committee rejected plans by the White House to consolidate military space activities into a new service called Space Force.
These two projects could be funded if the Senate chose to make it a priority, but each would probably require the lifting of government spending limits that would otherwise cut more than $ 100 billion a year. next. Although both sides have reason to reach an agreement, the status of these negotiations remains fragile, especially after Trump left the meeting on infrastructure spending with congressional leaders today. hui, in protest against the continuation of their investigations into his behavior.
Political battles aside, it is not clear that the administration has attempted to set the stage for their space proposals with the legislators they need to approve them. The last-minute lunar program was announced before NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine, a former legislator, spoke to the chairs of the relevant committees.
In his NASA budget, Trump proposed reductions in satellite missions that gather important scientific data on the climate, put an end to spending on a new space telescope, and removed the agency's science education program. Legislators have restored all of these programs, as they have done in the past two years, and have refused to add new funding to develop a technology that will allow lunar landers and other staples to return more quickly. the immediate vicinity of the Earth.
The White House had offered to fund Moon's mission with money from the Pell Grants program, which provides scholarships to low-income students to finance their studies. No current student would have been affected, but the program relies on these funds in times of economic difficulty, when the demand for grants increases and tax revenues drop. Representative Nita Lowey, who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, described the proposal as an "abusive proposal".
On the front of the Space Force, it seems that the Ministry of Defense simply did not do its homework. "The plan leaves many unanswered questions and lacks important details and analyzes to justify the proposed size, scope, cost, roles and powers for the new military service," the legislators wrote in the report. accompanying their expenditure legislation.
Defense experts believe that it is useful to create a space force, but a large-scale bureaucratic reorganization will have to be carefully orchestrated. Yesterday, Trump asked Barbara Barrett, former head of a federal aerospace analysis group, to become Secretary of the Air Force, and insiders expect her plan to be fine-tuned first. rank of its priorities.
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