In 2017, the agency hopes to complete its commercial-crew development program with SpaceX and Boeing, which will once again launch allow crewed missions to fly to the International Space Station from American soil. Dreier said he was not sure whether NASA would obey the report.)īeyond planetary science, the coming years are likely to be busy for NASA. (A Congressional report attached to the 2016 budget encouraged NASA to make the Europa mission a rover, rather than a lander or an orbiter. will not have a robotic presence in the giant planets of the outer solar system” at that time, said Dreier.Īfter 2020, NASA is expected to launch new robotic missions to Mars and Europa, a moon of Jupiter believed to be more amenable to life than other worlds in the solar system. “For the first time since the early 1970s, the U.S. Dreier said this was “the longest gap in planetary science in at least 20 years.”Īt the end of that period, as well, the one-year Juno mission at Jupiter and the 11-year-old Cassini-Huygens mission at Saturn will draw to a close. Dreier noted that the 2016 budget restores historically normal levels of funding to NASA planetary science, which had seen its budget sliced by 25 percent in the early part of this decade.īecause of those cuts, no new planetary-science missions will fly from the end of 2016 to the beginning of 2020. The New Horizons probe that visited Pluto this year was also a planetary-science mission. OSIRIS aims to eventually touch down on the surface of the asteroid Bennu, spend almost two years there, then send a capsule home to this planet with asteroid samples.Īll three of these missions are planetary-science missions, housed in the only NASA division which visits worlds beyond our own. If all goes well, the geological mission InSight will land on the surface of Mars, the robotic orbiter Juno will reach Jupiter, and OSIRIS-REx will launch from Earth. NASA did not return a request for comment.Ģ016 will be a busy year for the U.S. “Everyone who supports space should be very pleased with this, if it passes as is,” said Casey Dreier, the director of advocacy at the Planetary Society. That’s $700 million more than the funding requested by the White House. NASA will be able to spend $19.3 billion next year, according to the budget, an increase of more than $1.3 billion over 2015 funding levels. If Congress passes the omnibus spending bill that it’s now considering, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration will enjoy a larger budget in 2016 than it has had in at least half a decade.
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