TOKYO — A House spending bill would direct NASA to begin work on an asteroid mission in partnership with industry, as well as an orbital debris inspection mission.
The House Appropriations Committee released a report accompanying its Commerce, Justice, and Science (CJS) spending bill on July 8, one day before the full committee markup. A CJS subcommittee favorably reported the underlying bill on June 26 without discussing many of the details of its provisions.
The report includes additional details on spending on NASA programs and other provisions. Among those details are provisions calling on NASA to at least begin studies of missions not included in the agency’s request.
The report directs NASA to spend $5 million to “plan a public-private partnership exploration mission to Apophis prior to its 2029 flyby.” Apophis is a near-Earth asteroid that will make a close approach to Earth in April 2029. NASA plans to visit the asteroid after a flyby with the OSIRIS-APEX spacecraft, an extended OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission.
But scientists are interested in visiting the asteroid before the flyby to see if the close approach — closer to Earth than the geostationary belt — will change the asteroid’s physical properties in any way. A workshop in the Netherlands in April discussed several potential missions to visit Apophis in the months or weeks before the flyby, including concepts from companies such as Blue Origin and Exploration Labs. However, NASA officials noted that budget constraints made it difficult to commit to any mission beyond OSIRIS-APEX.
The House report said appropriators “concern that NASA may miss a unique opportunity presented by the close approach of asteroid Apophis to Earth in 2029.” It indicates that the committee believes that such a mission could be accomplished through a partnership with the private sector rather than as a traditional mission.
“The committee emphasizes the importance of effectively prioritizing resources to ensure the success of this mission and encourages NASA to explore funding mechanisms that balance the need for scientific exploration with budget constraints, including new and innovative approaches that leverage the expertise of small companies, not traditional partners, and the potential benefits of resource exploration in the private sector,” the report states.
At NASA’s Space Technology Directorate, the report would allocate up to $25 million in the agency’s Small Satellite Technology program for what it calls orbital debris inspection missions.
“The committee supports the demonstration of technology that tracks, characterizes and controls multiple objects in space,” the report said, but provided little other guidance for such a mission. NASA’s 2025 budget request included $41.2 million for space sustainability efforts in general “to better understand and mitigate the hazards of orbital debris,” the proposal said, but did not specifically include an inspection mission.
While space agencies in other countries are conducting orbital debris technology demonstration missions, NASA has yet to find funding for any missions that would either characterize the debris or test active debris removal technologies. For example, the Japanese space agency JAXA collaborated with Astroscale on the ADRAS-J inspection mission, which is currently flying near the upper stage, as a precursor to a mission to remove the upper stage from orbit.
The report sidestepped some other key issues in the budget proposal. On Mars Sample Return, the committee supported NASA’s efforts to obtain input from industry on alternative ways to conduct the mission. But it said it was concerned about “serious losses of NASA’s highly skilled workforce and leadership in areas critical to the planetary sciences as well as NASA’s future missions” and ordered NASA to spend at least $650 million on the MSR. NASA is seeking $200 million for the program while it explores how to overhaul it.
The committee’s report also expressed support for NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, whose budget NASA is considering cutting due to relatively high operating costs. Astronomers have fought any cuts because they fear they could lead to the shutdown of the 25-year-old spacecraft. However, the report did not indicate any funding levels for either Chandra or the Hubble Space Telescope, which are also facing potential budget cuts.
The report indicates that the committee is interested in potential changes in NASA’s approach to its Commercial Low Earth Orbit Development, or CLD, program to stimulate the development of commercial stations proposed by several companies. The report calls on NASA to provide a briefing on “its plans to achieve rapid and cost-effective CLD capabilities.”
This briefing would include an assessment of whether the program’s goals can be met by “a mix of different services from CLD delivery teams rather than requiring near-identical services from providers”, as well as “making incremental steps towards more advanced CLD capabilities over time”.