The proposed NASA budget for the 2017 fiscal year, $19 billion, has evoked mixed reactions from government officials and space organizations.

White House officials unveiled the Obama administration's 2017 budget proposal today (Feb. 9), and NASA's share came in $300 million lower than the agency's final budget for 2016. The proposed NASA budget would decrease funding of space exploration but add some to aeronautics and space technology and redistribute the science budget. A breakdown of the budget request is available here, and there is also a full summary available.

The budget request is considered by the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, which ultimately must pass a bill specifying how to allocate the money. [Photos: NASA's Space Launch System for Deep Space Flights]

Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, expressed disappointment in the proposal's allotment to different projects.

"This administration cannot continue to tout plans to send astronauts to Mars while strangling the programs that will take us there," he said in a statement. "And the administration once more proposes cuts of more than $100 million to the planetary-science accounts, which have previously funded missions like this past year's Pluto flyby.

"At the same time, this proposal shrinks space exploration priorities within NASA's budget; it disproportionately increases earth-science accounts to more than $2 billion — a 70 percent increase since 2007," Smith continued. "This imbalanced proposal continues to tie our astronauts' feet to the ground and makes a Mars mission all but impossible. This is not the proposal of an administration that is serious about maintaining America's leadership in space."

However, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Texas, who also serves on the House Science Committee, praised the program overall.

"As in past years, the president's budget will help ensure that the U.S. can compete in a 21st century global economy and solidify America's place as a scientific and technological leader," Johnson said in a statement. "The investments in the full range R&D and STEM — including advanced manufacturing research, prioritizing basic research, investing in clean transportation and civil space activities, and education programs like Computer Science for All — are truly investments to help us meet our greatest challenges not only for the year ahead, but for decades to come."

Mary Lynne Ditmar, director of the Coalition for Deep Space Exploration, a space advocacy organization, expressed concern.

"While we appreciate the funding proposed for the International Space Station and its transportation systems, space science programs — including the James Webb Space Telescope, and proposed deep-space habitat — we are deeply concerned about the administration's proposed cut to NASA's human exploration development programs," she said in a statement.

"This proposed budget falls well short of the investment needed to support NASA's exploration missions, and would have detrimental impacts on cornerstone, game-changing programs such as the superheavy lift rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS) and the Orion spacecraft — the first spacecraft designed to reach multiple destinations in the human exploration of deep space," she added.

"The greatest challenge to these programs is not technical, but budget stability — plain and simple," Ditmar continued. "At this critical stage, it is important to ensure that the significant progress already made on the development of the SLS and Orion spacecraft continues, so as to meet important milestones, including the first integrated launch in 2018 and crewed missions beginning in 2021. Fully developing these systems will enable the United States to realize its aspirations for human exploration, planetary missions, international collaboration and scientific discovery."

Eric Stallmer, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, praised the budget proposal. "I commend the Administration for crafting a budget that provides robust funding for NASA and FAA AST," he said, referring to the Federal Aviation Administration's Office of Commercial Space Transportation. "We applaud the proposals that would enable and utilize private space capabilities to help build a sustainable American expansion into the solar system from the edge of space through low-Earth orbit to the moon and beyond. It builds on the strong foundation established by the FY16 Omnibus and Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act. We look forward to working with the Congress to fully fund a number of the proposals in this request, while also championing efforts to shore up areas that need additional input and support."

Casey Dreier, The Planetary Society's director of space policy, broke down the proposed budget overall on the society's blog. On planetary science in particular, he said: "Well, we're five for five. This is the fifth year in a row that the White House has proposed cutting NASA's Planetary Science Division. While every other science division at NASA would receive a funding boost in this budget, Planetary Science, the year after flying by Pluto and confirming flowing water on Mars, earns a $110 million cut.

"Now, credit where credit is due," he continued. "The request is for $1.52 billion, which, compared to previous requests, is a marked improvement and very much a step in the right direction. We've been advocating for at least $1.5 billion for this program for years now, and it is satisfying to see this number reflected back in the president's budget.

"But the fact of the matter is that this program has been underfunded for years and needs to rebuild," Dreier continued. "Congress stepped up and provided $1.631 billion last year, and that number needs to continue to improve in order to position NASA for a spectacular decade of planetary exploration in the 2020s. As expected, most of the cut appears to impact the Europa mission (which would get about $50 million in 2017, down from $175 million in 2016). The administration is sticking with its intent to launch in the late 2020s. The request tones down some of the optimistic planning for the Europa flyby mission set forth in last year's budget. NASA runs the numbers to assume an Atlas V launch, not SLS, though SLS is very much under consideration.

"In more positive news, all existing missions are funded through 2017," Dreier said. "That means [the Mars rover] Opportunity can keep on roving, and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter can keep collecting data through the year. No arbitrary zeroing out of mission budgets here."

Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her @SarahExplains. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

Paul Sutter is a visiting scholar at The Ohio State University’s Center for Cosmology and AstroParticle Physics (CCAPP). Sutter is also host of the podcasts Ask a Spaceman and RealSpace, and the YouTube series Space In Your Face. Sutter contributed this article toSpace.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Have you ever wanted to reach out from far away and just … slap someone? Usually, it’s pretty difficult, but if you’re both standing in some water, it’s not so hard. You slap the water, the water makes a wave, the wave travels to your adversary and it does the slapping for you.

It doesn't have to be water, either. You can do it in air too, although it’s not very effective. [The Hunt for Gravitational Waves: Complete Coverage]

And you can do it in a perfect vacuum.

The key here is the nature of space-time. I’ve discussed before the importance of space-time — how space and time are unified in a single fabric that stretches across eternity in four dimensions. That was the magic that enabled Albert Einstein to develop his theory of special relativity. But to make special relativity more general, Einstein had to make another leap: Space-time isn’t just a stage, fixed and unmoving, a background for all particles and forces to play around on.

In general relativity, space-time is dynamic. The stage is an actor, too! It can warp and twist, and bend and flex. It can wave. It responds to the presence of matter and energy, and can influence the behavior of that same matter and energy, exactly as you can. Space-time is a thing.

Space-time isn’t a wooden floor; it’s a trampoline. It bends and curves underneath you, and that bending affects the motion of stuff around you. Go ahead: Stand in the center of a trampoline, and have a few friends roll some balls around. Look at how their paths curve. Congrats — you’re a living, breathing general-relativity demo.

Just like any other dynamic stuff, like water or air, space-time allows waves to travel through it. But waves of what?

Well, water waves are waves made of water. Air waves are made of air. Space-time waves are made of … you guessed it: space-time!

I feel the need to note that this is a huge prediction of general relativity, and would never come about in pure Newtonian gravity. In fact, I’m pretty sure Isaac Newton would have you imprisoned for even mentioning it.

You can think of a wave as a disturbance in both time and space. Float in one spot in the ocean, and you will bob up and down with each passing crest. Take a picture of the ocean from your penthouse balcony, a moment frozen in time, and you can see the wave pattern stretch to the horizon.

But if you’re doing your buoy impersonation (“David Buoy?”) in the middle of the water, you’ll notice that unless there’s a current dragging you around, you’ll actually stay more or less in one spot. Bobbing up and down, yes, but always returning to where you started. Waves don’t transfer stuff; they transfer energy.

That’s what enables the slapping. The waves breaking on a shoreline are the result of distant ferocious storms beating against the water or faraway winds brushing across the surface. You can’t see the storm, but it still gets to transfer some of its energy to you.

And gravitational waves (note here, they are not "gravity waves"; that name was taken before general relativity got going) are similar. They make you bob up and down. Well, almost. It’s more like in and out. Or stretchy-squeezy, like space-time is playing with putty. As a gravitational wave passes through you, you literally get stretched out and squashed, over and over again.

But how could a simple ripple in space-time affect you like that? What force is it using? It’s using gravity, because that’s what gravity is: the bending and warping of space-time. And if space-time is wiggling, you get to jiggling.

It’s pretty easy to make a gravitational wave. Just move around. See? I said it was easy! But to make one even barely substantial, it helps to be heavy. Like black-hole heavy. [The Search for Gravitational Waves (Gallery)]

Brian Greene Explains That Whole General Relativity Thing

https://youtu.be/0jjFjC30-4A

How a black hole would destroy the Earth

https://youtu.be/i0Q3yk7KzYA

A black hole just sitting there, minding its own business, isn’t going to make waves, just as you standing in the center of a pool won’t. But if that black hole starts moving — say, by spiraling in on a collision course with a relative — it’s going to ring space-time like a bell.

Those waves travel throughout space-time at the speed of light, eventually washing over the Earth. But even big waves from the most momentous events in the universe are exceedingly tough to find. I mean, it’s not like you or I feel continuously taller and shorter minute by minute. You might feel them, if they were strong enough — or if you were unlucky enough to get close to the merger event — but even the heavies in our universe make only the barest of space-time breezes.

It’s not like we haven’t seen evidence for gravitational waves already. The 1993 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded for the indirect detection of these waves: a pulsar orbiting a neutron star, steadily losing energy by waving the space-time underneath them, causing them to slowly fall together.

What we’re hoping for with experiments like the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is to directly observe gravitational waves as they slosh onto the Earth. Imagine all the fantastic events happening in the cosmos: black holes colliding, massive stars blowing up, even the faintest whispers from the universe’s earliest moments. But shrouded behind dense layers of impenetrable gas or buried deep in cosmic time, they remain unreachable, inaccessible to traditional astronomy. But the waves persist.

The ability to directly see gravitational waves would take the blinders off one of the last great windows into the universe, allowing us to study the fundamentals of gravity in some of the most extreme corners of the cosmos. What wonders will be revealed to us? What new mysteries will confront and confound us?

The sky above us is ringing from the cacophony of countless bells, each one given a unique signature from the event that created it. Those waves wash over us and through us, subtly and gently flexing the space-time under our feet and in our bodies.

Somewhere out in deep space, a black hole is trying to slap you. Gently, caressingly, but slap you nonetheless. Can you feel it?

Editor's Note: The LIGO team is holding a news conference Thursday (Feb. 11) at 10:30 a.m. EST (1530 GMT) to provide a "status report" on the search for gravitational waves. You can watch this news conference, which is widely expected to announce history's first direct detection of these space-time ripples, live here at Space.com.

Learn more by listening to the Ask A Spaceman podcast, available on iTunes and on the Web at http://www.askaspaceman.com. Ask your own question on Twitter using #AskASpaceman or by following Paul @PaulMattSutter and facebook.com/PaulMattSutter.

Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Space.com.