For NASA, there's no liftoff from politics

— -- Always reaching for the stars, NASA often finds itself mired in earthbound politics.

Born in the Cold War, beset by tragedies and buoyed by triumphs, the $17.7 billion space agency once more faces debate in the post-space shuttle era. Once again, an administration's plans for NASA face congressional criticism, scrutiny from a blue-ribbon panel and demands for more funds that set parts of the agency against one another.

"You cannot have a public space agency without politics playing a role. That's only right when the taxpayers are paying the bills," says planetary scientist Daniel Britt of the University of Central Florida. This month in Washington, Britt and his colleagues visited congressional staffers to voice support for more missions to explore nearby planets, projects cut by NASA. "We tell them that space exploration is an area where the U.S. leads the world, and we'd like to see it stay that way," Britt says.

Such calls are not so unusual. Even as NASA's largest Mars mission, the Curiosity rover, headed for the Red Planet this summer, standard space agency politics took place on Earth. Astronaut Donald Pettit testified to the Senate about International Space Station research, and NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, spoke to a National Research Council panel assessing the "strategic direction" of the space agency.

Some in Congress, such as Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R.-Texas, want more manned missions to the moon. Some, such as Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., want more robot missions to Mars. Then there are those such as Rep. Ron Paul, R.-Texas, who said NASA "is dead, and the corpse must be buried as soon as possible" at a Florida debate.

In his tenure, Bolden has often defended the 2010 Obama administration space policy, which would send astronauts to an asteroid by 2025 and to Mars around the mid-2030s. Big-ticket priorities of the space agency are:

•A large rocket and capsule to get to such places, known as the Space Launch System (SLS) and Multipurpose Crew Vehicle.

•Commercial rocket company missions, such as the May SpaceX "Dragon" trip, to the International Space Station at least through 2020.

•A 2018 launch of the $8.8 billion James Webb Space Telescope, successor to the highly productive Hubble Space Telescope, whose cost overruns along with Curiosity's have drained funding from planetary science missions.

Each one comes with political fighting attached. In June, Bolden and Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., of the House Appropriations committee settled a dispute over NASA using commercial companies, such as SpaceX or Boeing, to send astronauts to the space station. NASA wanted four providers and Wolf wanted one-and-a-half to keep costs down. They settled on two-and-a-half.

Such scraps mix into the yearly haggling over NASA's budget. In February, the administration requested $17.7 billion for NASA in 2013, a $59 million cut from last year. The House has appropriated $17.6 billion while the Senate has slotted $19.4 billion, which sounds like more but includes transfer of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration programs to NASA. The 2013 budget awaits a final vote.

"The glass is either half-full or half-empty at NASA," says space policy expert John Logsdon, author of John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon. The agency won approval to proceed with building the SLS last year but faces doubts in Congress over the lack of a long-term vision. "NASA's budget only supports a program that is fragile and doesn't make long-term sense," Logsdon says. As an example, he points to the SLS, which will launch in 2017 and carry astronauts only in 2021, with a less-defined schedule thereafter.

Squabbling may be just what Congress wants, suggests University of Houston political scientist Alan Steinberg. In a 2011 Space Policy journal study, he noted that although the monetary value of the NASA budget has marched steadily upward since 1973, in reality it has declined as a percentage of the federal budget, from 1.35% to 0.6%. "I think this has allowed congressmen to have it both ways," Steinberg says, as supporters note increased budgets and detractors are pleased that, factoring inflation, the space agency doesn't take a bigger bite out of the federal budget.

The reality is NASA's budget peaked in 1965, in the midst of the moon race. When the moon race was over in 1969, President Richard Nixon decreed NASA would have to fight for its budget with other agencies. "The program has never really adjusted to that change," Logsdon says. "We give NASA a special place in our national life, one that is outsized compared to its actual budget. It is remarkable what they do accomplish with the resources available."