.Obama’s NASA Blueprint Is Challenged in Congress
WASHINGTON — President Obama may have hoped that a speech a week ago at the Kennedy Space Center would sway skeptics to his proposed space policy, but a Congressional hearing on Thursday gave little signs that the lines of contention have shifted yet.
Opponents like Richard C. Shelby, the Republican senator from Alabama where NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center has been leading the design of the Ares I rocket that the Obama administration would like to cancel, continued to denounce Mr. Obama’s plans. Those plans call for ending NASA’s current Constellation program that was to send astronauts back to the moon and turning to private companies for transportation into orbit.
At a hearing of an appropriations subcommittee, Mr. Shelby said that the proposal would abdicate the United States’ leadership in space.
“Future generations will learn how the Chinese, the Russians, and even the Indians took the reins of space exploration away from the United States,” said Mr. Shelby, the ranking minority member of the commerce, justice and science subcommittee.
Mr. Shelby called the $6 billion that the administration would like to spend to develop commercial rockets to take people to space “a welfare program for the commercial space industry.”
He criticized the space agency for not researching whether a commercial market existed beyond NASA to support the companies.
Maj. Gen. Charles F. Bolden Jr., the NASA administrator, repeated many of the same points he had made to other Congressional committees: that NASA would ensure the safety of any and all rockets that astronauts would ride on and that the current Constellation program was unsustainable.
But in response to a question from Mr. Shelby about the safety of the different rocket options, General Bolden said, “My gut tells me that Ares would be safer than anything else.”
It is unclear whether Congress is leaning to the views of Mr. Shelby or to those of Mr. Obama. Except for Barbara A. Mikulski, the Maryland Democrat who is chairwoman of the subcommittee, all the senators attending the hearing on Thursday represent states with businesses or NASA centers heavily involved in the current Constellation program.
Ms. Mikulski gave little indication of which path she might ultimately choose. “I need to know more,” she said.
She added, “I want to know if this is the program that the Congress and the American people are going to support from one administration to the next. We cannot reinvent NASA every four years.”
In a sign that the Ares I might evade the administration’s ax, Senator Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota and chairman of the Senate budget committee, unveiled a version of the 2011 budget that increased NASA’s 2011 budget to $19.7 billion from $19 billion in the president’s budget request.
The added money would pay for more launchings of prototypes of the Ares I, an idea suggested by Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida. Mr. Conrad cited national security concerns that abandoning the Ares I, which uses a stretched version of the space shuttle’s solid rocket booster, would drive up the cost of solid rocket motors used for ballistic missiles.
“There are classified discussions we can’t go into here with respect to this initiative,” Mr. Conrad said, “but I say to my colleagues, this is absolutely essential, for the national security, that this go forward.”
If that proposal succeeds, then essentially all of the components of Constellation will be resurrected, albeit in less ambitious versions.
In his Florida speech, Mr. Obama announced that the Orion crew capsule, which was to take astronauts to the International Space Station and then the moon, would be continued as a stripped-down lifeboat for the space station. Meanwhile, other members of Congress have introduced bills to extend operations of the space shuttles beyond their planned retirement this year.
NYT
Opponents like Richard C. Shelby, the Republican senator from Alabama where NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center has been leading the design of the Ares I rocket that the Obama administration would like to cancel, continued to denounce Mr. Obama’s plans. Those plans call for ending NASA’s current Constellation program that was to send astronauts back to the moon and turning to private companies for transportation into orbit.
At a hearing of an appropriations subcommittee, Mr. Shelby said that the proposal would abdicate the United States’ leadership in space.
“Future generations will learn how the Chinese, the Russians, and even the Indians took the reins of space exploration away from the United States,” said Mr. Shelby, the ranking minority member of the commerce, justice and science subcommittee.
Mr. Shelby called the $6 billion that the administration would like to spend to develop commercial rockets to take people to space “a welfare program for the commercial space industry.”
He criticized the space agency for not researching whether a commercial market existed beyond NASA to support the companies.
Maj. Gen. Charles F. Bolden Jr., the NASA administrator, repeated many of the same points he had made to other Congressional committees: that NASA would ensure the safety of any and all rockets that astronauts would ride on and that the current Constellation program was unsustainable.
But in response to a question from Mr. Shelby about the safety of the different rocket options, General Bolden said, “My gut tells me that Ares would be safer than anything else.”
It is unclear whether Congress is leaning to the views of Mr. Shelby or to those of Mr. Obama. Except for Barbara A. Mikulski, the Maryland Democrat who is chairwoman of the subcommittee, all the senators attending the hearing on Thursday represent states with businesses or NASA centers heavily involved in the current Constellation program.
Ms. Mikulski gave little indication of which path she might ultimately choose. “I need to know more,” she said.
She added, “I want to know if this is the program that the Congress and the American people are going to support from one administration to the next. We cannot reinvent NASA every four years.”
In a sign that the Ares I might evade the administration’s ax, Senator Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota and chairman of the Senate budget committee, unveiled a version of the 2011 budget that increased NASA’s 2011 budget to $19.7 billion from $19 billion in the president’s budget request.
The added money would pay for more launchings of prototypes of the Ares I, an idea suggested by Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida. Mr. Conrad cited national security concerns that abandoning the Ares I, which uses a stretched version of the space shuttle’s solid rocket booster, would drive up the cost of solid rocket motors used for ballistic missiles.
“There are classified discussions we can’t go into here with respect to this initiative,” Mr. Conrad said, “but I say to my colleagues, this is absolutely essential, for the national security, that this go forward.”
If that proposal succeeds, then essentially all of the components of Constellation will be resurrected, albeit in less ambitious versions.
In his Florida speech, Mr. Obama announced that the Orion crew capsule, which was to take astronauts to the International Space Station and then the moon, would be continued as a stripped-down lifeboat for the space station. Meanwhile, other members of Congress have introduced bills to extend operations of the space shuttles beyond their planned retirement this year.
NYT
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