After a Decade of Cuts, NASA to Get a Budget Boost

The Bush administration said Monday that it had agreed to seek a significant increase in the budget for NASA’s space shuttle program even before Saturday’s disintegration of Columbia, but the space agency’s own figures cast doubt on the size of the hike.

Budget director Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. said in unveiling the administration’s $2.2-trillion budget for fiscal 2004 that President Bush had decided weeks before the disaster to end “a decade of cuts and flat spending” for NASA, which runs the program, and to focus special attention on the shuttle.

“Spending on shuttle maintenance and life extension ... goes up very sharply” in the proposed budget, Daniels told a briefing.

But the precise dimensions of the proposed increase remained unclear Monday.

Both Daniels and White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said that while NASA’s overall budget would rise about 3% to $15.5 billion, the shuttle’s portion would climb a considerably more generous 22%, to $3.9 billion.

But NASA documents released later in the day showed that by its measure, the agency is already spending about $3.7 billion on the program.

Confusion over the budget numbers came as officials with both the Bush and Clinton administrations prepared to deflect expected criticism that inadequate funding contributed to the disaster that took the lives of Columbia’s astronauts.

Speaking at a previously scheduled event at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., Bush lauded Columbia’s crew and said he remains committed to human space travel.

“While we grieve the loss of these astronauts, the cause in which they died will continue. America’s journey into space will go on,” the president said.

Bush met privately Monday with NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe, and aides said the president would travel to Houston today to attend a memorial service for the astronauts.

Meanwhile, former Clinton science advisor John H. Gibbons said that Bush’s predecessor did not compromise safety in reducing NASA’s budget during the 1990s.

“Safety had to be number one, even at the expense of some other things we wanted to do,” he said.

Gibbons said that members of Congress and officials of other government agencies have regularly viewed NASA’s budget as a place where cuts could be made.

“Budget pressures on technology and science are always fairly high,” he said. “You always have a delicate balance of where you put your space dollars.”

In fact, said independent analysts, the approach of both the Clinton and Bush administrations has been similar: to do more with less.

“The space program has not been at the top of the national agenda,” said Brian Chase, executive director of the National Space Society, a nonprofit advocacy group.

Fleischer, at his Monday briefing, acknowledged that NASA “funding for the last decade was relatively flat.” In fact, there was a decline over the last decade.

He added: “And now there is an increase in the funding.”

But the dollar figures that Fleischer cited showed a bigger boost in funding for the shuttle program than NASA’s figures.

According to the press secretary, the president proposes to increase spending to $3.9 billion next fiscal year.

According to NASA, the agency is already spending $3.7 billion on the program. The confusion over the amount of the boost in shuttle funding arose because the White House chose to compare its fiscal 2004 proposal with the amount that the president sought for the shuttle in his fiscal 2003 budget, which still is stalled in Congress.

Meanwhile, NASA officials said their figure represents what they actually expect to spend on the shuttle program this fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. Such discrepancies are commonplace in the government budgeting process.

Asked which is more representative, a spokeswoman for the White House Office of Management and Budget said, “You can use either number.”

Even if one uses the White House’s higher figure of a $600-million to $700-million increase in the shuttle budget, the amount is modest by comparison with the program’s tremendous costs. “That’s about what it costs to send a shuttle up once,” said Donna Shirley, an engineering professor at the University of Oklahoma and former director of NASA’s Mars exploratory mission.

Shirley said a budget increase of $600 million-plus would be enough only to overhaul NASA’s remaining fleet of three shuttles if the agency agreed to cut the number of space missions in half for several years while it works on the spacecraft. But NASA budget documents show that, at least until Saturday’s disaster, the agency was planning for a regular complement of four to five missions next year.

Besides the shuttle budget, the administration proposes to make modest increases in several of NASA’s comparatively small scientific projects. But it seeks to cut to $1.7 billion from $1.85 billion the amount the U.S. will spend next year on the international space station, an almost 8% reduction.

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Times staff writer James Gerstenzang contributed to this report.