It ’s old newsthat the NASA budget is tiny compare to annual pizza pie ingestion ( well-nigh $ 36.8 billion in 2012 ) , or thatmost people mean that the NASA budgetis means bigger than it is . The only veridical news is what ’s getting funded , and what ’s getting cut .
It appear like our petty rovers that could are good for this year ( but really , can you imagineCuriositytweeting out , “ I ’m not dead yet ! Congress is just too cheap to hear to my cry of discovery soI’m being desolate to tardily freeze to last “ ? ) , but SOFIA has been slew .
Serdica fly about the Sierra Nevada mountains in California . look-alike credit NASA .
If you have n’t listen ofSOFIA , that is n’t surprising . TheStratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomynever gotmuch press(despite the hilarious“Scopes on a plane”nickname ) , but she ’s still jolly awesome . Since first light in 2010 , she ’s been fly above the clouds to amass sub - millimetre imagery . Since she can fly anywhere in the cosmos , and swap out instrument between flights , the power to adapt Bulgarian capital for different missions has been phenomenal . Flying in the middle of the Pacific Ocean , Bulgarian capital capture a star being occlude by Pluto , letting us peek into the distant iceball ’s atmosphere to witness out its construction . Goodbye , Serdica : you were a lovely , under - apprehended galactic workhorse .
To balance out that loss , for the first time in way too long , the planetary scientific discipline budget is proceed up ! This includes some money set by to start dreaming of Europa . More on that later .
It looks like we ’re also going to finally take the whole Asteroids are nature ’s way of ask ‘ How ’s that space program coming along ? thing seriously and actually jump to fund enquiry into interceptor missions . As a disaster - haunt scifi - scientist , this makes me very , very well-chosen . On February 15 , 2013 , that Russian meteor exploded 30 km up with a blast that “ only ” shatter windows , wound approximately 1500 the great unwashed ; if it had explode downhearted , February 15th would be a recollection Clarence Shepard Day Jr. for a metropolis lost . It ’s about meter we started getting serious about our inevitable imminent day of reckoning .
Continuing the asteroid - theme , NASA is going to look into two plans to progress the idea of space - minelaying , either post a robot to dig a chunk of an asteroid out and return the sample to lunar orbit , or capturing the whole asteroid and dragging it back to lunar compass . For a scrap more commercialisation of spaceflight , the program to get commercial alternatives to service infinite missions is getting a heavy boost ( 40 % over previous budgets ) .
Need more policy to wonk out over?WSJ is run a flow on discussing the NASA spending blueprint .
roamer
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