NASA needs to increase its annual average funding by $5 billion to almost $24 billion for the next decade to achieve its 2020 Moon and International Space Station (ISS) goals and be able to fly the Space Shuttles to 2015
The $5 billion prediction is from the NASA authorisation act 2008 mandated US Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) analysis of NASA’s forecasted budgets and its past programmes’ cost performance. The $5 billion figure is from 50% cost overrun estimates based on a 2004 CBO analysis of 72 past NASA programmes
The CBO also found that with no changes to NASA’s budget to achieve the 2020 Moon and ISS goals would mean cuts to the science and aeronautics budgets
In November 2008 a CBO analysis concluded that Orion-Ares’ costs could spiral by $7 billion and its first manned flight may be two years later than planned in 2017
Thanks to Jeff Foust and his tweet for alerting me to this report
