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MSFC Director Pleased with Fiscal Year 2021 NASA Budget

With the release of President Biden’s fiscal year 2021 appropriation, NASA’s budget increased 3 percent to $23.3 billion, with most of the additional funding allocated to its human exploration directorate.

sls evolvabilityAlthough the increase is short of the Trump Administration’s $25.2 billion aimed at landing astronauts on the moon in 2024, Marshall Space Flight Center Director Jody Singer said she is pleased with the bipartisan approach on moon to Mars

Singer also said the request provides NASA with the resources to continue the Marshall Center’s four main areas of focus: Traveling through and to space with an emphasis on cheating gravity; living and working in space, concentrating on the work performed here in Huntsville on the International Space Station and its commercial crew; understanding our world and beyond centered on the technology needed in the science world; and supporting agency mission operations, including science and information technology.

Singer has been on a whirlwind tour in the weeks leading up to the budget rollout speaking to the 2021 Tennessee Valley Corridor National Summit, and to the Army Additive Manufacturing Summit in Auburn. She met with  congressional representatives at the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans where she updated U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas, who is on the Senate Appropriations Committee, about the Marshall Center’s work with the Artemis I 4-stage hardware.

4 major focuses of budgetAnd she went to NASA headquarters in Washington to meet with new NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and Associate Administrator Robert Cabana concerning the 2021 budget rollout.

“We have a very diverse engineering workforce that supports all areas in human exploration, science technology and information technology and that is a critical part of the budget,” said Singer. “Marshall Space Flight Center will be moving to stage II in the NASA framework, which is our return to working onsite. Over 75 percent of us have been working from home … which means we were only turning on mission critical work (during COVID), but we can now turn on more work as people need to be onsite to do their jobs.

“Despite these setbacks, we are still seeing a lot of progress, especially since we delivered the Artemis I’s 4-stage hardware to Kennedy Space Flight Center. While both teams here in Huntsville and the teams at Kennedy are excited, there is still plenty of work to do on the Artemis II, Artemis III, and Artemis IV hardware being Block 1B in the budget.

According to NASA Authorization Act of 2010, the goal of expanding permanent human presence beyond low-Earth orbit requires the development of the Orion crew capsule and the heavy-lift Space Launch System. Orion will return to Earth at the end of each Artemis mission to be reused.

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NASA prepares to stack the moon rocket’s core stage. (NASA Photo)

The SLS, however, is an expendable rocket designed to carry Orion into space and set it on its initial trajectory. The SLS could potentially be used for other missions involving heavy payloads or requiring high thrust. But to do this, it is designed to be upgraded in stages known as Block 1, Block 1B, and Block 2.

NASA is developing Block 1B to replace the Block 1 upper stage and funding it is a major component of the four Artemis missions.

Artemis I is being processed at the Vertical Assembly Building at Kennedy and assembly begins this week. Singer said it will take two to three weeks to get it fully integrated and stacked, but it is still slated to launch by year’s end.

“We have delivered our hardware and we’re ready to go,” said Singer. “This will be a significant event this year, and then continued cadence.”

Also in the budget is the Human Landing System Program and Marshall is the designated program lead for the project. 

Three contractors – SpaceX, Blue Origin and Dynetics – presented their configurations for the first Artemis launch and landing on the moon some time in 2024. SpaceX was selected, but Blue Origin and Dynetics protested NASA’s decision to the Government Accountability Office.

While that puts the program in a pause over the summer while the GAO adjudicates it, Singer said it will not stop MSFC from moving forward with a parallel contract for sustained services.

“We are supposed to be getting a reading on the protests in the early August timeframe, but in the meantime, we are working a contract for sustained services that is really the foundation that will set all the different systems we get on the surface of the moon,” she said. “It is the ability to deliver multiple systems to the surface of the moon, and that is very critical.”

STEMIn the budgetary area of Understanding Our World and Beyond with a focus on the science and technology world, Singer said MSFC’s payload operations is continuing to work 24/7/365.

“We now have seven astronauts and cosmonauts who have completed the largest and longest duration crew mission in this outpost, and there has been a record amount of activity,” Singer said. “But we’ve had a lot of science going on to deliver on one of MSFC’s upcoming missions – the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer experiment, looking at the dark holes in our universe. We look forward to that being launched later this year or early next year.”

According to NASA, their partnership with Italy’s space agency paves the way for the IXPE breakthrough mission to explore some of the most turbulent and extreme environments in our universe, from the hottest, messiest star factories to violent jets screaming away from monster black holes. 

Singer said the 2021 budget also includes STEM engagement activity including the recent Student Launch Competition and a virtual version of the annual NASA Human Exploration Rover Challenge. 

sls configAnd the budget supports a team of 106 summer interns who will work at MSFC through August.

“These people are really a pipeline and a feeder for our future workforce,” Singer said. “Sustained funding and sustained progress. Our legacy is our people, but to keep a legacy for our people, you have to have pipelines of engagement.

“We need to make sure we have the right skills, the right workforce, and the ability to attract and retain a good diverse workforce, and the Huntsville community does that.

“But specific to MSFC, we must have a federal budget that supports us on SLS and the evolution of SLS, landing services, a habitat, a transportation habitat, environmental life controls systems, and that brings about a lot of the technologies we need to go not only to the moon, but on to Mars.

“Sustained services are critical to this and the continued work we do on payload operations, on the ISS, and not just the ISS. It also applies to us moving towards deep habitat systems and a continuous turning on of the next systems needed to explore the surface of the moon and to go on to Mars. 

“And these involve additive manufacturing, nuclear propulsion systems, and a lot of technology maturation. We have all of that here in the Huntsville community.”