[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 5]
[Senate]
[Page 7066]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              NASA FUNDING

  Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, the National Aeronautics and 
Space Administration is an incredible little Federal agency that has 
pulled off extraordinary feats and continues to do so--defying the laws 
of gravity, utilizing the principles of physics to do wondrous things--
as we begin to continue our exploration of the heavens. But NASA is 
going through a very difficult time. First, NASA has been starved of 
funds. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, in its human 
space program, has not been allocated enough money by this 
administration and a series of Congresses over the last several years 
in order to do everything they want to do. This was particularly acute 
earlier in this decade when we lost the second space shuttle, the 
Shuttle Columbia, in its breakup in the atmosphere upon reentry over 
Texas.
  NASA spent $2.8 billion just in the recovery of that disaster and in 
the recovery of flight. Unlike the loss 20 years earlier of Challenger 
and the cost of recovery from Challenger, which was provided outside of 
the NASA budget, this time NASA had to eat the cost of recovery out of 
its operational budget, therefore leaving almost $3 billion less for 
NASA to operate on to do all it wants to do.
  What are the things it wants to do? What do we want it to do? To 
fulfill the vision as enunciated several years ago by the President, 
that we would build a new vehicle after the space shuttle, the capsule 
called the Orion, the rocket called Aries, a program called 
Constellation that would have a new vehicle, like a capsule, like the 
old Apollo capsule that only carried three astronauts, that would carry 
six. It would be a new human vehicle to get to and from the space 
station, much safer than the space shuttle, more economical, but then 
that the program would then expand on for us to go back to the Moon by 
2020 and establish a habitation on the Moon to learn from dealing in 
that environment, as ultimately humankind is going to go to Mars. That 
is the program called Constellation.
  But NASA was never provided with enough money. Over the past couple 
of years, this Congress, this Senate has tried to provide NASA with the 
money. Indeed, last year we were successful in the NASA appropriations 
bill in getting an additional billion dollars just to partially pay 
back NASA for the money it had eaten out of its operating budget on the 
cost of recovery of the space shuttle disaster, the Space Shuttle 
Columbia. But when we got to the House, in the negotiations, the White 
House--specifically the White House budget director--would not support 
the additional billion dollars. The chairman of the House 
Appropriations Committee then insisted that it be taken out of the 
budget.
  NASA is right back in the place where it found itself, with not 
enough money to do everything it is trying to do. It is like saying you 
want to take 10 pounds of potatoes and stuff them into a 5-pound potato 
sack. It doesn't fit.
  Hopefully, the new President will understand this. Does America want 
a successful space program and does America want a successful human 
space program complementary to those robotic spacecraft that do so many 
successful things? I think the answer is clearly yes. We have always 
had the high ground. This country's technological achievements have 
always kept us at the cutting edge as the leader in the world.
  Remember when the Soviets surprised us by putting up the first 
satellite sputnik, and we were scrambling to catch up. Remember when 
they surprised us and put the first human, Yuri Gagarin, into orbit and 
that surprised us. And we hadn't even gotten Alan Shepard up in 
suborbit, and it was 10 months later before we could get the first 
American in orbit, former Senator John Glenn, one of the great heroes 
of this country.
  After that, then our resolve, the Nation's focus, a Presidential 
declaration by a young President who said: We are going to the Moon and 
return. With all of that combined, along with a space race with the 
Soviet Union, we clearly became the leader. The spinoffs from that 
program into everyday life, the technological achievements--Velcro, 
microminiaturization, new products, a lot of the modern miracles of 
medicine--are direct spinoffs from the research and development of the 
space program. When going to the Moon, we had to have highly reliable 
systems that were small in volume and light in weight. That led to a 
microminiaturization revolution of which we are all beneficiaries 
today.
  The question is, Are we going to retain that leadership in space? Yet 
if we keep bleeding NASA of resources, we are not going to be able to. 
We are already facing a situation where we will not have human access 
to space for 5 or 6 years, when the space shuttle is shut down in 2010, 
and the Administrator of NASA tells us that we are not going to be able 
to fly the new vehicle Orion with humans until the year 2015, if that. 
What does that mean to us? It means we have a $100 billion investment 
in orbit right now called the International Space Station that is 
supposed to be used for scientific research, and we are not even going 
to have an American vehicle to get there for 5 or 6 years. That is 
unacceptable.
  How are we going to get there? We are going to pay the Russians to 
get a ride for our American astronauts on their Soyuz vehicle which had 
a problem last week on reentry with a too steep reentry, a ballistic 
reentry, 8 Gs experienced by the cosmonaut and astronaut on board. So 
we are going to have to negotiate with Vladimir Putin during this 5-
year period, which we are going to have to buy. We are going to be 
laying off American space workers at the Kennedy Space Center, and we 
are going to be funding jobs in Moscow at who knows what price Vladimir 
Putin will charge us because he knows it is the only way we have to get 
to the International Space Station. And, by the way, if that is not 
enough to cause heartburn, we can't pay Russia for space flights, of 
which we have to go about and contract right now if they are going to 
build a spacecraft for 2011, when we would need it. We can't pay them 
for it because we are prohibited by a law that says, since they are 
helping Iran, a nation that we are concerned about proliferating 
nuclear weapons, we have to get a waiver of that law.
  All of this is to say that we have a mess. If this Nation wants to be 
a leader in space, which I believe every American believes we should, 
we have to start helping NASA. We have to get the next President 
attuned to this issue.
  I yield the floor.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Alaska.

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