Washington

NASA plans to make major new investments in nuclear-powered rockets and spacecraft, its recently appointed head Sean O'Keefe said on 4 February as he unveiled the agency's budget proposal for the fiscal year 2003. But at $15.1 billion, NASA's budget would be virtually unchanged from this year.

O'Keefe added that proposed missions to Jupiter's moon Europa and to Pluto will be scrapped to be replaced with a wider-ranging programme called New Frontiers, modelled after the agency's successful Discovery line of planetary spacecraft.

With a typical mission price tag of about $650 million, New Frontiers will focus on studying the origins of life in the Solar System, as well as other priorities set by a forthcoming review of planetary exploration by the National Academy of Sciences. NASA will solicit mission concepts from laboratories inside and outside the agency this spring, and plans to choose the first winner next year.

The agency is set to make its first significant investments since the 1960s in space nuclear power ($79 million) and nuclear rocket propulsion ($46.5 million) during 2003. It sees these technologies as the best way to cut the time it takes to travel to the outer planets and to increase the working lives of probes and rovers sent to visit planets (see Nature 410, 626; 2001).

These and other technology investments account for much of the 12% increase in NASA's space-science budget, to $3.4 billion. According the White House, the portion of NASA's total budget spent on research and development will grow by 5% to $10 billion.

Funding for the troubled International Space Station drops by 13% to $1.5 billion in the budget proposal. Agency managers have been given two years to solve its fiscal and managerial problems, or resign themselves to having a smaller, less capable station.