The U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives on Friday approved the $17.9 billion 2015 budget for NASA. The budget would ensure continuity of NASA's two pet projects-- the Orion Multi-purpose Crew Vehicle and the Space Launch System (SLS).
The SLS project would replace the retired Space Shuttle and would carry astronauts and heavy space loads to near-Earth destinations such as asteroids, the Moon, Mars, and most of the Earth's Lagrangian points while the Orion Crew Capsule would serve as a virtual space taxi that would carry up to four astronauts to their near-Earth destinations and return them as well.
The approved budget was $250 million more 2013 and nearly $440 million more than the amount requested by the White House.
The appropriations committees in both chambers doubted that U.S President Barack Obama's proposed $1.05 billion for Orion and $1.38 billion for the SLS would have both programs ready for a test launch by the end of 2017, which is three years ahead than the planned 2020.
Although both houses agreed on the priorities, the two differed on details. The U.S. Senate, for instance, gave Orion $87 million more than the requested amount while the additional funding for SLS was $220 million more than the requested budget. The proposed budget was submitted to the President for signature.
In contrast, both houses slashed $43 million from NASA's commercial crew program. Present plans called for the U.S space agency to have third-party service providers that would ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS). At the moment, NASA is dependent on Russia's service which is soon as both the United States and Russia expressed their plans to cut their space agreements in height of the Russia-Ukraine crisis. The lawmakers allocated $805 million for NASA to develop its own ferry system.
"Budgets are about choices," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden told a House subcommittee on space in March, quoted by SpaceFlight Now. "This committee -- this Congress -- chose to rely on the Russians because they chose not to accept the president's recommendation and request for full funding for commercial crew."
