In October, a report by a White House panel headed by former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine said NASA would be unable to support meaningful human space exploration without at least $3 billion more per year.
More recently, there have been rumours that the Obama administration is set to cut NASA funds as part of an overall tightening of the US federal budget.
But John Logsdon, former head of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University in Washington, DC, and a Washington insider, said he believes the White House will give NASA a budget boost.
"There will be more money," he told reporters following a forum on the Augustine report at MIT on Friday.
"It is becoming clear that the White House is willing to put some more money into the space programme," he continued. "That's derivative of the fact that [President] Obama does not want to be the person that abandons a future-oriented programme."
Middle ground
In his comments during the forum, however, he said the space agency would not get the full $3 billion increase suggested in the Augustine report. "There's no inclination in the current economic and political situation to put NASA on a path of that much of a budget increase," he said. "NASA is intensely working on options somewhere in between" its current budget and one with a $3 billion increase.
A decision on NASA's future is likely to be made in the next few weeks, he added. The decision would have to be made before the proposal for the 2011 federal budget is sent to printers at the end of December, he said.
It is not yet clear whether the decision would be announced before the budget proposal is made public in early February. "That could come as a separate statement, it could come in the State of the Union [address to Congress], but all the readings I'm getting is that this will be a presidential decision … and the president will want to take credit for it," said Logsdon.
If NASA gets less than the $3 billion needed according to the Augustine committee, it might still manage to engage in human space exploration by working cooperatively with international partners, Logsdon said.
by David Shiga, Boston
