NASA’s exploration programs receive $7.469 billion, effectively the full request. That includes $227 million for the OSAM-1 satellite servicing mission formerly known as Restore-L and $110 million for nuclear thermal propulsion. The bill provides NASA’s space technology programs $1.2 billion, less than the request of nearly $1.45 billion but a $100 million increase from 2022. The report provides $20 million for closeout costs and says that, should the instrument itself be completed with the remaining funding, NASA should find an alternative way to fly it as a mission of opportunity. The report affirms NASA’s recent decision to cancel the GeoCarb mission to monitor greenhouse gases that suffered delays and cost increases after its original plans to fly as a hosted payload on a commercial communications satellite fell through. Planetary science and heliophysics get slightly more than requested, while astrophysics, Earth science and biological and physics sciences suffer cuts. Science overall gets $7.795 billion in the bill, nearly $200 million below the request.

The $90 million, though, is not sufficient to keep the mission on its earlier schedule to launch in 2026, according to agency sources.

The report accompanying the omnibus notes appropriators’ “concern about NEO Surveyor’s proposed launch slippage into 2028 and reminds NASA of its mandate to detect 90 percent of objects greater than 140 meters in size that threaten Earth” from an earlier NASA authorization bill. NASA proposed only $40 million for NEO Surveyor, one-fourth of its previously projected funding for 2023, and sought to delay its launch to 2028. That includes providing no less than $90 million for the Near Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor mission, a space telescope to search for potentially hazardous objects. The report accompanying the bill followed many of the directions in the House bill on specific NASA programs. That is slightly below the current rate of inflation, however. The amount provided for NASA in the omnibus is a 5.6% increase over the $24.041 billion the agency received in fiscal year 2022. A draft Senate bill released in July matched that request. It is, though, significantly less than the $25.974 billion that the White House requested for NASA in its fiscal year 2023 budget proposal in March. That amount is slightly less than a House bill in June that offered $25.446 billion for NASA. That bill, slated to be taken up by the House and Senate in the coming days, includes $25.384 billion for NASA in the fiscal year that started Oct.

WASHINGTON - A fiscal year 2023 omnibus spending bill will provide NASA with nearly $25.4 billion, an increase of more than 5% from 2022 but less than what the agency requested.Ĭongressional appropriators released the final version of the omnibus spending bill early Dec.

Planetary omnibus