By Jason Snell for Yahoo

This Week in Space: Exploring Europa, exoplanets, and reasons to be cheerful

While we thrill to the latest accomplishments of NASA’s space missions, someone has to pay for all that hardware, and the people who design and operate it. Which means that those all those accomplishments begin in a much more mundane place: Washington, D.C., where the NASA budget is authorized by Congress.

Surprisingly, if the current budget proposed by Congress is approved, next year’s NASA budget could be a lot bigger next year. The plan would fund the agency at $19.3 billion — more than a $1.3 billion increase.

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