NASA’s slightly better deal with Congress in 2015

NASA’s Science division would receive about $5.6 billion, which is almost $300 million more than what the Obama administration asked for. The House and Senate still have to vote their approval, and that’s not expected to happen until Friday.

NASA is ready to move forward with the development of the Space Launch System – an advanced heavy-lift launch vehicle that will provide an entirely new national capability for human exploration beyond Earth’s orbit.

The American space agency NASA’s next Mars spacecraft has arrived at the Vandenberg Air Force base, California.

SpaceX and Boeing would ferry astronauts to the space station, and the program is vital for the future commercial exploration and use of space.

We can go to Mars now! The bill directs NASA to send both an orbiter and lander to the Jovian moon before 2022. “We have a lot of different logistical suppliers, we have people living on it and the space station has really become an industrial hub on the frontier”.

With $19.3 billion included for NASA in the omnibus spending bill, the civilian space program is on the verge of a relaunch. “That’s something that has not existed in the past”, MacDonald said.

“Once certified by NASA, the Boeing CST-100 Starliner and SpaceX Crew Dragon each will be capable of two crew launches to the station per year”, the press release quoted Kathy Lueders, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, as saying. He traveled aboard a Soyuz rocket along with Russian astronaut Yuri Malenchenko and Tim Peake, the first British astronaut to visit the ISS, who tweeted about his first meal on the space station.

NASA’s Commercial Crew Program manages the CCtCap contracts and is working with each company to ensure commercial transportation system designs and post-certification missions will meet the agency’s safety requirements.

However, with the new budget, NASA will be able to turn its attention on one of its more urgent issues: the dependency on Russian Federation.

After years of penny-pinching from a lack of federal funding, the folks over at NASA woke up to a bit of pleasant news this morning when Congress announced a $1.3 billion increase for its 2016 budget. The Orion crew capsule, the astronaut-carrying portion of the Space Launch System, will have a $1.27 billion budget of its own.