What NASA would do with an extra half-billion dollars

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, left, discusses the agency's fiscal 2016 budget with reporters at the Kennedy Space Center while spaceport director Robert Cabana, right, looks on. William Harwood/CBS News

The Obama administration's fiscal 2016 budget includes $18.5 billion for NASA -- a half-billion-dollar increase -- that continues development of a new mega-rocket and capsule for deep space exploration and significantly boosts funding for commercial spacecraft to ferry crews to and from the space station, agency officials said Monday.

The budget proposal also includes funding to continue studies of a proposed crewed mission to visit an asteroid in the 2020s, to pay for ongoing and planned robotic Mars missions and to keep the $6 billion James Webb Space Telescope, the long-awaited successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, on track for launch in late 2018.

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"President Obama today is proposing an FY 2016 budget of $18.5 billion for NASA, building on the significant investments the administration has made in America's space program over the past six years," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden told Kennedy Space Center workers.

Standing in front of an Orion deep space exploration capsule that completed an initial test flight in December, Bolden said the budget represented a "half billion-dollar increase over last year's enacted budget, and it is a clear vote of confidence to you, the employees of NASA, and the ambitious exploration program you are executing."

Repeating what has become a sort of mantra for senior NASA officials, Bolden said the agency "is firmly on a journey to Mars. Make no mistake, this journey will help guide and define our generation."

While eventual Mars flights are not expected until the mid 2030s at the earliest, NASA's long-range focus is the red planet, a goal Bolden promotes at every opportunity.

NASA's human exploration program accounts for nearly half of the agency's 2016 budget request, or $8.51 billion. That total includes $3.106 billion for International Space Station operations, $1.244 billion for commercial crew spacecraft, $2.863 billion for the Orion deep space capsule and the heavy-lift Space Launch System booster and $400 million for research and development.

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What NASA would do with an extra half-billion dollars