Imagine a tissue-box sized device, with blades a few feet long, whirring to life after charging for a full Sol on Mars. It then flies ahead of a rover to search for hazards and targets of interest. Deeper in the solar system, on Europa, a large spacecraft lands near a fissure and drops small probes into the ocean far below. Beyond the Moon, a telescope with a specially fitted shade images an Earth-like exoplanet for the first time, possibly finding chemical markers of life. Finally, in a few decades, powered by hitherto undreamed-of propulsion, a spacecraft takes off for Alpha Centauri at a significant fraction of the speed of light.

It all sounds like science fiction, but a new budget for NASA proposed by the US House of Representatives includes seed money for all of these initiatives, some of which are receiving funding for the first time. The budget must still be reconciled with that of the Senate, but the House and Senate committees have worked well in the past to finalize NASA’s funding. Most of these concepts should therefore survive.

Ars caught up with the author of this budget Monday evening, John Culberson, a Texas Republican who represents one of the most conservative districts in the conservative state of Texas. He’s a proud member of the Tea Party and would like nothing more than to tear up Obamacare. But Culberson is also a science geek through and through, and while he’d like to cut the federal budget, he’d just as soon plough those savings into NASA to fuel new innovations.

“One of the biggest problems with NASA headquarters has been an absence of long-term goals,” Culberson told Ars. “I’ve done my best with this to give them some short-term and long-term goals based on the scientific decadal study and based on what the public has come to expect from NASA. I want to help NASA inspire the next generation.”

Mars helicopter

NASA plans to launch a Curiosity-sized rover to Mars in 2020 that will have instrumentation to search for signs of past and present life. One of the most interesting scientific payloads that has been proposed for the rover is a small, 1kg helicopter that would have the ability to scout ahead of the rover, as well extend the range of rover’s travels. The small helicopter would fly for two to three minutes a day and then return to the rover where it would spend the day recharging its solar-powered batteries.

But the innovative little flier hasn’t been officially greenlighted for the mission, because NASA doesn’t have the money in its budget. Culberson, who has met with engineers designing the helicopter at NASA’s California-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is a fan of the project. He believes that flying spacecraft will ultimately be essential to exploring both Mars and more distant worlds in the solar system, and he’d like to see NASA begin to demonstrate the technology.

The House budget, accordingly, provides $15 million to keep development of the helicopter on track and ensure its inclusion as a scientific payload on the 2020 mission.

Europa lander

Culberson’s favorite project remains the search for life, and he’s convinced the most likely place to find extant life in the solar system, aside from planet Earth, is in the oceans of Europa. As Ars has reported, his proposed budget includes $260 million for the Jupiter-Europa Orbiter, to launch in 2022, and a lander mission to follow in 2024. A mission to investigate the surface of Europa and probe its interior ocean is among the very highest priorities of the planetary science community.

NASA has balked at the cost of even a single mission to Europa, but Congress has been pushing the space agency to think bigger when it comes to exploring the outer solar system. The latest proposal does just that. It sends an initial mission to make dozens of flybys of Europa to better characterize the icy surface of Jupiter’s Moon and potentially identify fissures to the ocean far below the ice. The second mission, following two years later, would carry a lander to further investigate the ice and possibly drop small probes down some of these fissures.

Culberson said he is meeting with scientists and engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for two days next week to discuss their latest ideas about the lander and possible ways to maximize the scientific payload carried by a dedicated lander mission. “I’m pushing the envelope very aggressively with the lander,” the Congressman said. “I really want to find a way to get through that ice.”

Starshade

Short of sending spacecraft to orbit and study Earth-like worlds around other stars, the best that scientists can do is to try and view exoplanets through telescopes. The problem is that these planets are exceptionally faint compared to their parent stars—a typical exoplanet is about 10 million times fainter than its parent star. As JPL scientist Gary Blackwood once explained, “It’s like trying to see a firefly next to a searchlight in Los Angeles, looking from New York City.”

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft found exoplanets by looking for periodic, slight dimmings as planets passed in front of their parent stars, but the holy grail is to actually image these planets and study their constituent atmospheres to determine whether oxygen, methane, and other chemicals consistent with life might exist there. NASA has some instruments—including the James Webb Space Telescope and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite—coming in the next decade that will begin to scratch around the edges of this problem.

But the best hope for actually seeing planets and studying their atmospheres before 2030 comes, instead, from a telescope designed to study dark matter and the expansion of the universe, the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, or WFIRST. Although it wasn’t optimized to image exoplanets, the visible imaging and spectroscopic capability of WFIRST could also be adapted to studying exoplanets. Engineers have developed a “starshade” technology that could be launched separately and then position itself between the telescope and star system of interest. The starshade then blocks incoming light from the star, isolating the light from the exoplanet.

The House bill provides $10 million in funding for the starshade concept, the largest single infusion of technology funding for the starshade, as well as a needed accelerant for it to have any chance of being ready to rendezvous with WFIRST's prime mission. “This is only technology I’ve seen that doesn’t lose any photons from the exoplanets,” Culberson said. “I want to see it move forward.”

Alpha Centauri

Humans have relied on chemical rocket propulsion for the better part of a century. NASA is now venturing into solar electric propulsion, and there are some intriguing concepts surrounding nuclear thermal propulsion. Yet none of these systems, even at their theoretical limits, will come close to reaching maximum speeds of one-tenth the speed of light.

The House bill directs NASA to consider a variety of sci-fi-like options, including antimatter-catalyzed fusion, the Bussard interstellar ramjet, matter-antimatter annihilation reactions, multiple forms of beamed energy approaches, and immense "sails" that intercept solar photons or the solar wind. “I wanted to put some of these ideas out there and let the engineers and scientists lead us from there,” Culberson said.

The law encourages NASA, within its space technology budget, to study and develop propulsion concepts that could enable an interstellar scientific probe to achieve a cruise velocity of 10 percent the speed of light—or even greater. Within a year of the budget’s passage, it asks the agency to create an interstellar propulsion technology assessment report with a draft “roadmap” for further studying these ideas. The best of these advanced propulsion concepts should then enable the launch of a suitably fast robotic spacecraft to Alpha Centauri by 2069, the 100th anniversary of the Apollo Moon landings.