US President George W. Bush's administration has asked Congress for a modest increase in NASA's budget for fiscal 2007, a request that is bound to lead to belt-tightening at the US space agency.
In a budget blueprint unveiled Monday, the White House earmarked 16.79 billion dollars for 2007, an increase of only 1.02 percent.
For fiscal 2006, which ends on September 30, Congress gave NASA 16.62 billion dollars.
However, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin insisted that the proposed allocation represented a 3.2 percent increase over 2006, if 349 million dollars in emergency funds spent last year to repair two space agency facilities damaged by Hurricane Katrina are taken out of the equation.
At the same time, he acknowledged that the NASA budget was tight.
He told reporters that the space agency did not have the means to achieve everything that various interested parties wanted it to achieve.
Griffin said, however, that the 2007 budget showed Bush's commitment to implementing space exploration goals he set early in 2004.
Bush wants Americans to return to the moon by 2018 and later launch a manned mission to Mars.
NASA has trimmed about one billion dollars from its space science programs and 1.5 billion from space exploration to free up funds to maintain its three space shuttles, which are to be retired in September 2010.
The space agency is juggling funds among its different programs to cover a projected shortfall of three to five billion dollars in its space shuttle budget over the next four years.
Source: Agence France-Presse
