 Hey what's up everybody, welcome to tomorrow. Coming up we're going to be talking in-depth about the 2017 Presidential Budget Request for NASA and some more information regarding the second commercial resupply contract. This is your space pod for February 16th, 2016. So the Obama Administration's final budget request came out on February 9th and it asks for about $19 billion for NASA for fiscal year 2017, which is a cut of about $260 million from the 2016 Omnibus Spending Bill for NASA. However, there were sharper cuts to NASA's two main exploration programs. The $19 billion budget, as proposed, would shift some money from NASA's space launch system and Orion programs and funnel that towards the aeronautic and space technology research programs and would also shift some money around within the science programs as well. Under this proposed budget, the space launch system would have $700 million less than the final 2016 budget and the Orion program would have $150 million less than the final 2016 budget. However, this still supports the first launch of the space launch system with an Orion capsule in 2018 for exploration mission 1. And exploration mission 2, they are looking at around 2023, but thanks to work done so far, it still could happen as early as 2021. NASA's science programs would receive about $5.6 billion, which is relatively unchanged from the 2016 budget. However, Earth Sciences would get a boost of about $111 million. However, Planetary Sciences would be cut by almost the same amount, and to make matters worse within that, for the Planetary Science Budget, the Europa mission, which I consider probably the big flagship of for the coming years, is only getting $50 million under this proposal, which is far less than the $175 million it got in the 2016 budget. And the request for Europa and the projections for funding the program through Fiscal Year 2021 would support a launch of the mission in the late 2020s, which is much later than people in the science community and within Congress itself would like. But the request also does not assume a launch on the space launch system, which was mandated by Congress in the 2016 spending bill. And also this doesn't include a lander, which Congress also mandated in the 2016 bill. So something that I like about that, because that is congressionally mandated to have a lander on the Europa mission, hopefully we can kind of further negotiations with the European Space Agency and see if maybe they want to provide the lander, or maybe even tap a private industry for that as well. But in any case, there's going to be a lander on that. It's congressionally mandated. This White House budget proposal also calls for about $217 million for different activities that are related to the asteroid redirect mission. And about 66 million of that is going to be set aside for robotic spacecraft for the asteroid redirect robotic mission. Probably one of the winners of this budget request is for space technology. I mentioned earlier that some money was being funneled into that research. And some of the cool things that are being done under this whole, I guess, program and it's for a whole different variety of different stuff. For example, there's solar, electric propulsion, satellite servicing and all sorts of different stuff that would help enable deep space exploration. So that's good. We need to put more money into research and development. Now, I'm kind of talking pretty optimistically about this budget request, but that's all it is. It's just a budget request. And this is going to get a lot of opposition within Congress. And this is going to need to get passed back and forth between the Senate and the House of Representatives before a final 2017 bill is actually passed. And considering their track record over the past couple of years, we probably won't see that actual budget until the year 2017. They're supposed to have it figured out by like August of the prior year. But whatever. Now, speaking of commercial space transportation, I was able to find some really interesting information regarding the CRS-2 contracts, the commercial resupply services. And within that, I found the request for proposals. Well, I didn't find them. I actually emailed some people at NASA and they were able to provide me links to a lot of the awesome information. Now, this is within the request for proposals. This was actually published before any commercial companies submitted their bid to be selected for the commercial resupply services to contract. And within this, it states what all of the required and optional capabilities are for any company that would be considered for CRS-2. It shows that the required capabilities are pressurized delivery of cargo, pressurized down mass of cargo consisting of either return or disposal capability, or both. The third absolutely required capability does answer a lot of our questions. Anyone who's considered for CRS-2, which has now been won by three companies, has to also have unpressurized up mass and disposal. Now, SpaceX can already do a lot of these things. And I found out in researching for CRS-2 that SpaceX already does load unpressurized trash into the trunk of the Dragon spacecraft. And that burns up on the entry. So they can already fulfill all of these different requirements with their Dragon capsule. For Orbital ATK, however, they need to do some work on their Cygnus vehicle. They can already do pressurized up mass, pressurized disposal, but not necessarily unpressurized delivery of cargo, or unpressurized disposal of cargo. And that's something that I find really interesting, because at least one of the different alternate variants of the Cygnus spacecraft will probably fly. And that's the one that would just essentially have the Cygnus service module with a kind of a rack that's based on the Express Logistics carrier that would have unpressurized cargo within it. And then they can just load unpressurized stuff onto that and dispose of it in kind of the same way that they would load pressurized trash into the pressurized section of a Cygnus vehicle. So I find that really interesting. Now Sierra Nevada, once their vehicle flies, should be able to have all three of those capabilities as well. But they also are going to be able to meet the optional requirement that was published within this request for proposal. And that's the optional capability to have accelerated pressurized return down mass, which consists of the same requirements as pressurized down mass, but it has to be returned to whoever is handling those experiments within 24 hours. And I'm assuming it's experiments that might be anything that might require something like that. So anyway, thank you very much for watching this video. My name is Michael Clark. And please let us know what you think about this whole budget request. Do you think that things are going to be pretty similar to this when the final budget is actually decided in 2017? Or do you think that it's going to be wildly different? Please let us know on any of our social media or in the comment section below. And also subscribe to us here on YouTube if you haven't already. That definitely helps us out. Also, if you're willing and able, please consider donating to our Patreon campaign. This show is entirely crowdfunded and without you guys, none of this would be possible. So thank you, thank you, thank you so much to every single one of you guys who have been donating to this. And I've been having to blast talking about all of this space stuff with all of you guys. And I hope that you're getting just as much out of this as I am. I hope that you're learning new things and connecting new dots and just getting excited for space. That's why we're here is to get you guys excited about space. Oh man. So thank you very much again to everyone who's contributing. And if you guys can help out, that would be just fantastic. There's so many things that we have planned in the future. Again, thank you very much for watching this video. And hopefully you know a little bit more today than you did yesterday, thanks to tomorrow. Keep moving onwards and upwards, everybody. And I will see you in the future.