US President Donald Trump has made a proposal to stop providing federal funds for the International Space Station (ISS) by 2025, as part of a plan to hand over the station to private entities.
The proposal is a part of Trump’s newly revealed Nasa budget for the 2019 fiscal year.
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In order to materialise the proposal, the US Government intends to establish a $150m programme to help prepare private entities to take control of the ISS over the next seven years.
The latest budget has allocated $19.9bn for Nasa and prioritised the agency’s future manned mission to the Moon over Mars.
It has also proposed to cancel Nasa’s WFIRST mission in astrophysics and earth science missions.
Commenting on the budget, Nasa acting administrator Robert Lightfoot said: “We’ve used the ISS as the cornerstone for pushing human presence farther into space, with a horizon goal of humans to Mars.
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By GlobalData“This includes learning about the human physiology of spaceflight and enabling new industry partners to bring to bear their capabilities and emerge as leaders in their own right to help us on this journey. The commercial cargo and crew work continues through the life of the International Space Station in the budget.
“Further, this budget proposes for Nasa to ramp up efforts to transition low-Earth activities to the commercial sector, and end direct federal government support of the ISS in 2025 and begin relying on commercial partners for our low-Earth orbit research and technology demonstration requirements.”
The newly unveiled budget also proposes to develop new opportunities on and around the moon, including a new space station around the Moon called Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway.
Among other features, the budget has detailed Space Policy Directive-1, which seeks to support Nasa to ‘lead an innovative and sustainable campaign of exploration that will lead the return of humans to the Moon for long-term exploration and use followed by human missions to Mars and other destinations’.
