Hunter said that, for now, work on that platform will continue since funding was specified for it in the fiscal year 2019 appropriations bill. The decision to defer work on the SLS Block 1B would also appear to imperil plans to build a second mobile launch platform intended for use with that version of the rocket. “Getting EM-1 and EM-2 launched as fast as technically possible is a prime objective of this budget, something that more money will not accelerate,” he said. “We’re having an assessment underway to get to a realistic launch readiness date,” which he said would be done in the spring. “We’ve had schedule challenges with the core stage,” he said. In a briefing with reporters later March 11, Andrew Hunter, the deputy chief financial officer at NASA, said that the date of the EM-1 mission was under review. Overall, the budget seeks $1.78 billion for SLS, about $375 million less than what the program received in 2019. exploration objectives and speed up the timeline for lunar surface exploration,” the budget document stated. “This approach would accelerate commercial lunar delivery capabilities critical to U.S. Instead, according to the budget document, those components will be launched on “competitively procured vehicles, complementing crew transport flights on the SLS and Orion.” NASA had previously planned to use the Block 1B version of SLS to launch elements of its lunar Gateway, using a “co-manifesting” capability enabled by the rocket’s greater performance. The first SLS/Orion mission, without a crew, is now planned for the “early 2020s,” according to the budget, an apparent slip from the planned 2020 launch of Exploration Mission (EM) 1. The budget “instead focuses the program on the completion of the initial version of the SLS and supporting a reliable SLS and Orion annual flight cadence,” the OMB budget stated. 15.Ī major element of the proposal is to defer work on the Block 1B version of the SLS, which would increase the rocket’s performance by replacing its existing Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage with the more powerful Exploration Upper Stage. The proposal, released by the Office of Management and Budget March 11, offers a total of $21.02 billion for the space agency, a decrease of $480 million over what Congress appropriated in the final fiscal year 2019 spending bill signed into law Feb. WASHINGTON - The White House’s fiscal year 2020 budget request for NASA proposes to delay work on an upgraded version of the Space Launch System and would transfer some of that vehicle’s payloads to other rockets.
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