What the FY2027 request buys
Verbatim from the R-2A exhibit for project 630321 of PE 1206616SF. This is the budget justification's own description of work that has not happened yet — the one thing no other level of the budget carries.
Complete: - Studies of capsule payload flight environments in the air and space domain, from capsule spacedrop to payload delivery. - Analyses of re-entry communications and plasma black-out. Commence: - Testing to inform a quantitative S&T assessment of a multi-ton prototype capsule reentry aerodynamics, re-entry communications during hypersonic flight, and rapid atmospheric deceleration. - Testing to assess detectability, survivability, and ground operations for tactical payload delivery. - Analyses of capsule compatibility and integration with multiple vendor launch systems and multiple launch sites.
FY 2027 funding decreased compared to FY 2027 by $4.394 million due to completion of high-cost design and development activities, including assessments of capsule spacedrop, reentry aerodynamics and heating, and stability.
FY2026: the year under way
Prior-year accomplishments and current-year plans from the same exhibit. Context for the FY2027 plan, not a series — an activity partitions its project exactly in the request year, but can under-cover it in earlier years.
Complete: - Design and development of a multi-ton prototype capsule for demonstration of spacedrop, re-entry, and cargo deployment concepts for air/land/sea. - Modeling and simulation of the capsule re-entry aerodynamics, stability, heating, and technologies for rapid hypersonic deceleration. Commence: - Studies of capsule payload environments and survivability, from spacedrop to payload delivery. - Analyses of re-entry communications and plasma black-out.
Three years, and no five-year plan
An R-2A activity publishes the prior year, the current year and the budget year. The FYDP outyears exist at project and program-element level and are deliberately absent here rather than inferred. Estimate types are colored and never summed into one figure.
| Fiscal Year | Estimate Type | Amount ($M) |
|---|---|---|
| FY2025 | Actual | 0.0 |
| FY2026 | Enacted | 20.9 |
| FY2027 | Request | 16.5 |
This activity is 81% of project 630321's FY2027 request and 13% of PE 1206616SF's. In the request year the activities under a project sum to it exactly; in the current year they under-cover it in about 9% of cases, so an activity's delta can legitimately exceed its parent's and the two must not be compared row to row.
4 activities in project 630321
Every R-2A line of this project, largest FY2027 request first. Linked where the activity has enough of its own narrative to carry a page; the rest are shown in full on the project page.