But hidden in the President's speech and the supporting documents is clear evidence that the funding plan for the New Space Order underwent major surgery, probably in the last 2 days before the speech. There are artifacts of three different plans for obtaining the billions of dollars needed over the next five years to develop the Crew(ed) Exploration Vehicle:

The first plan, leaked to the news media several days ago, was for a ~%5 annual increase in the NASA budget each year for the period FY05-FY09. Given a current budget of $15.4B, this works out to ~$12B of new money over the remainder of the decade.

This is about in the middle of the cost range estimated for the old OSP program by independent analysts. For the post-2009 era, "senior officials" spoke of massive savings from the termination of Shuttle and Station -- and also "making hard choices between manned and unmanned programs in the future".

A second funding plan appears as one of the talking points in the White House press release:

# From the current 2004 level of $15.4 billion, the President's proposal will increase NASA's budget by an average of 5 percent per year over the next three years, and at approximately 1 percent or less per year for the two years after those.

This implies a major reduction in new money from the leaked plan of continous %5 increases.

Yet a third funding plan is given in the President's actual speech:

"NASA's current five-year budget is $86 billion. Most of the funding we need for the new endeavors will come from reallocating $11 billion within that budget. We need some new resources, however. I will call upon Congress to increase NASA's budget by roughly a billion dollars, spread out over the next five years."

This dramatically different funding plan is confirmed in two more bullets in the press release:

# The funding added for exploration will total $12 billion over the next five years. Most of this added funding for new exploration will come from reallocation of $11 billion that is currently within the five-year total NASA budget of $86 billion.

# In the Fiscal Year (FY) 2005 budget, the President will request an additional $1 billion to NASA's existing five-year plan, or an average of $200 million per year.

So in only four days, the amount of new money the Bush Administration plans to spend on its Crewed Exploration Initiative has dropped by $11B, and this missing money is now to be obtained from existing NASA programs at the rate of ~$2B/yr.

Someday we may learn of the last-minute political logrolling that produced this astonishing change (and the staff bungling that left two wildly contradictory bullets on the same page of a White House press release). But right now let's look at the possible impact of Plan 3 on NASA.

The first question to ask is: Will this massive redistribution of funds come from other elements of the manned program, or from the rest of NASA?

There is essentially no possibility of squeezing this kind of money out of the existing manned programs. There can't be any significant scale back in Shuttle or Station in the FY05-09 time frame, because we will still be assembling the Station. Possibly there will be some small reduction in the Shuttle flight rate from the former 5/yr. But as NASA never tires of mentioning, cutting back the flight rate of Shuttle doesn't save a lot because the marching army of support people have to be kept on salary anyway. Implementing the CAIB reccomendations will increase cost and staffing levels, not reduce them. Maybe they can save some money by letting VAB and the rest of LC-39 decay away, but not very much.

So there is really no alternative to cutting over $2B/yr out of the non-manned-space half of NASA's budget. That's a ~%35 cut if you assume it is equally distributed over the five years 2005-2009!! If it is ramped in like most big budget cuts, the final cut by 2009 would be much larger. Goodbye aeronautical research, goodbye Webb Space Telescope, goodbye planetary probes to boring places like asteroids.

Do we really want to trade all this in for Apollo Mark II? A lot of people will say no. Even a lot of Space Cadets will say no. We lost ten years of solar system exploration to pay for the Shuttle and it left a bloody wound that still drips. A lot of influential people will fight this proposal to the last round, and then fix bayonets and keep on fighting until it is defeated.

I could go on for pages with minute analysis of the Bush space plan, but what's the point? This plan reminds me of what they said in the Congress about Ronald Reagan's budgets -- "Dead On Arrival".

Jeffrey F. Bell is Adjunct Professor of Planetology at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. All opinions expressed in this article are his own and not those of the University.

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