NASA funding for the space station program is projected to be $1 billion short of previously approved budgets through fiscal 2029, ISS Program Manager Dana Weigel said Tuesday morning in an email reviewed by the Houston Chronicle.
Addressing this shortfall will require the agency to have three crew members on the station instead of four starting next year, dropping the station's overall crew to six people, as Russia will continue flying three cosmonauts.
NASA will also have astronauts stay onboard longer. Losing a crew member also will reduce station research by half, according to the email.
These changes are separate from last week's White House budget request to cut $500 million, roughly a third of the station's estimated operating budget, in fiscal 2026. Weigel said in the email that the president's budget request will go through Congress and then NASA's appropriated funds "will dictate any additional ISS reductions."
The program has already shrunk what was once a multi-billion dollar shortfall by canceling cargo missions and pushing out flights, Weigel wrote. But the program's leaders are still looking for additional ways to cut funding.
"The longer we wait to implement savings, the more funding we continue to use and the deeper we eventually have to cut in order to safely fly ISS," she wrote.
NASA leads its space station operations and missions from the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston. The agency's astronauts live and train in the Houston area.
The crew reduction will begin on the agency's SpaceX Crew-12 mission that's expected to launch in the first quarter of next year. In addition to U.S. astronauts, the NASA openings on the International Space Station are shared with Canada, Japan and Europe. NASA astronauts ride to space in either the SpaceX Dragon capsule or Russia's Soyuz capsule. Astronauts and cosmonauts will continue to ride both vehicles into space.
Astronauts typically spend about six months on the space station. The number of people onboard has fluctuated over the years, though the station has consistently held seven people since SpaceX began flying operational missions in 2020.
The International Space Station has been continuously sheltering humans since 2000. It is expected to be retired at the end of 2030.
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