Space.com has the highlights of the 2005 budget request for NASA, the first to reflect the change of policy for the agency.
What’s interesting here is that the spending tracks the new policy. Money is being shifted from Earth science programs and non-aligned ISS research to planetary exploration activities, including increased funding for the Mars Science Laboratory nuclear-powered 2009 rover. Meanwhile, JIMO survives (though it slips three years to the right) as does New Horizons.
Easily overlooked is the reduction in funding for space technology development. This could be good or bad, depending on what sorts of programs that actually affects — good if it results in the remaining resources being focused on those near-, middle-, and long-term technologies with realistic prospects for yielding useful hardware; bad if it means those technologies get thrown out with the pie-in-the-sky stuff, or if all of the technologies currently being investigated are starved equally rather than being put through programmatic triage.
The request also provides $10M in the ISS budget to fund flight demonstration of startup launch services. It doesn’t seem like $10M would go very far in that arena, but NASA need not fund such flight demonstrations in full — providing a small subsidy or the incentive of a “bonus check” for a successful flight could help startups obtain financing from other sources, especially if the initiative is truly structured as a first step towards a market for such services.