[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 7]
[Senate]
[Pages 9555-9556]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                        AMERICA'S SPACE PROGRAM

  Mr. NELSON. Madam President, I wish to address the issue of America's 
space program.
  Some very disturbing news has come out over the course of the 
Appropriations Committee's deliberations on the House-passed Commerce-
State-Justice appropriations bill, which, it is my understanding, has 
passed the House. It includes the funding for NASA. What is disturbing 
about it is that at a time when we are recognizing that Vladimir Putin 
is increasingly trying to thwart the interests of the United States 
with his aggressiveness and invasion of Ukraine, his threats to the 
Baltic States, his invasion of that part of Ukraine known as Crimea, 
and the various other semi-threats he has made to us, it would 
certainly seem to be in the interests of the United States that where 
we have a joint shared and mutually agreed-to space program which goes 
all the way back to 1975 when in the middle of the Cold War an American 
spacecraft rendezvoused and docked with a Russian spacecraft, Soyuz--
and the Apollo-Soyuz mission made extraordinary political as well as 
scientific history for those two crews, led by Gen. Tom Stafford on the 
American side and General Alexei Leonov on the Soviet side. After they 
docked, those two crews lived together in space for 9 days in the 
middle of the Cold War, 1975. That set us on the course--with the 
Soviet Union still in existence--of starting to cooperate. We actually 
had an American space shuttle rendezvous and dock with the first 
Russian space station, MIR. From there, we went on to build the 
International Space Station with the Russians as well as a dozen other 
nations as our partners. This space station, on orbit 250 to 325 miles 
high, is 120 yards long. In other words, if you sat at the 50-yard line 
in a football stadium, you would look from one goalpost to the other 
goalpost and that is how big this is, the International Space Station. 
There are six human beings up there. There is an international crew. 
There are Russians, there are Americans, and from time to time there 
are Italians, Germans, French, Japanese--a whole host of nations that 
are our partners.
  So it has been that as we built this space station, the Russians 
would launch on their Soyuz spacecraft, to and from the International 
Space Station, supply and human supply, and the Americans, who had the 
capacity of 45,000 pounds on the space shuttle, would take up the 
component parts of the space shuttle and assemble them in orbit. We 
continued that over the better part of a decade and a half, until the 
space station was complete.
  In the interim, we lost 14 souls and 2 space shuttles, the last one 
of which was Columbia in the winter of 2003. The investigation board, 
led by Navy Admiral Gehman, said: As soon as you get the space station 
assembled--it was necessary to fly the space shuttle to take up the 
component parts--you shut it down and you replace the space shuttle 
with a safer rocket.
  I won't take the time right now to explain the engineering and design 
of

[[Page 9556]]

the space shuttle versus the future rocket, but for this discussion, 
suffice it to say that when you put the crew in a capsule at the top of 
the rocket, they have the capability to escape, saving the crew, even 
if there is an explosion of the rocket on the pad because the capsule 
can separate with the escape rockets and land some distance away via 
parachutes.
  By the way, one of those rockets under development right now just had 
its pad-abort test--SpaceX--and it was very successful.
  I am giving all this background to get to what was almost a dagger in 
the heart coming out of the Appropriations Committee in both the House 
and the Senate, and that is, they have funded NASA fairly well given 
the fact that they are trying to cut in order to satisfy this tea 
party-inspired sequester, which is this cut across the board, but in 
doing so, what they have done is cut the development funds for the 
humans riding on American rockets to get to and from our International 
Space Station, the essence of which is that if those funding cuts the 
committee has done are sustained, it will delay us from putting 
Americans on American rockets going to and from the space station 
until, instead of 2017, very likely 2019.
  Ask almost any American whether they want a successful American space 
program, and they will clearly tell you yes, and that means Americans 
on American rockets. We have those rockets. They are sending cargo to 
and from. But we have to go in and do the designs of the redundancies 
and the escape systems on these commercial rockets, the two companies 
of which in competition are Boeing and SpaceX.
  Now let me get back to Vladimir Putin. Do we think it is a matter of 
wise public policy that we would continue our dependence on Vladimir 
Putin on our ability to get to our own International Space Station by 
having to ride and pay what he now charges--$75 million a ride per U.S. 
astronaut? Do we think that is wise public policy given this President 
of the Russian Federation who is so predictable? I don't think so.
  So what the House did--the President's request for this next round of 
competition--and they have come a long way. They are ready to go. I 
just said that one of the competitors, SpaceX, just did a pad-abort 
test by showing that the capsule could separate from the rocket and 
safely land 3,600 feet away in a splashdown with the parachutes.
  It is not wise public policy to cut funding so this development of 
safe human space travel on these commercial rockets of Boeing and 
SpaceX--it is not good public policy, it is not in the interests of 
U.S. public policy that we would stay tied to Vladimir Putin in order 
to get to and from our own space station with astronauts.
  It is just a small amount of money. The President requested for this 
next year of competition $1.24 billion to put in the redundancies and 
the escape systems and have them tested. It is a critical year. It is 
2015. It is the middle of 2015. We are going to start flying U.S. 
astronauts 2 years from now, in 2017. But when you start cutting that 
funding from the President's request to $900 million, as the Senate 
Appropriations Committee just did last week, or to $1 billion, which 
the House has just done in the passage of their appropriations bill--
when you do that, that is going to stretch out the development that it 
is very likely we can't send our own astronauts to our own space 
station on our own rockets. We will have to keep paying Vladimir Putin 
$75 million every time we go to ride on the Soyuz to go to our own 
space station. Now, you figure it out. How many rides is that over an 
additional 2 years? That is probably $300 million right there. That is 
only four rides, assuming he is going to be charging us in 2018 and 
2019 the same price he is charging now. He could jack that up.
  I think it was a sad day in the Senate Appropriations Committee when 
the committee turned down, by a very narrow vote of 14 to 12, Senator 
Mikulski's amendment to restore the cut from $900 million to $1.24 
billion. Sooner or later, that appropriations bill is going to come out 
here. It has a lot of other problems, as every appropriations bill 
does, as the Senate is finding out on this Defense authorization bill 
right now--all the funny money that is baked into it because of this 
so-called sequester. But when it comes out here, I am going to ask the 
Senators: Do you think it is wise policy that we continue our reliance 
on Vladimir Putin?
  As we have been doing the Defense bill, John McCain, our chairman, 
has been on a rampage against giving money to Vladimir Putin by virtue 
of us buying the Russian engine, which is a very good engine and which 
became an engine for American rockets, after the collapse of the Soviet 
Union, as a way of keeping their Russian--formerly Soviet--scientists 
engaged in an aerospace industry so they did not get secreted off to 
become scientists for rogue nations such as North Korea or Iran. But 
Senator McCain has pointed out--rightly this Senator believes--that you 
want to reduce your reliance on those Russian engines called the RD-180 
that are the main engines for the Atlas V, one of the absolute prime 
horses in the stable for our assured access to space. If we are going 
to lessen our dependence on the Russian engine, why wouldn't we lessen 
our dependence on Russian spacecraft being the only means by which we 
would get to orbit to our own International Space Station? The logic is 
too compelling. Yet it is this ideological furor that has lapsed over 
into partisanship that has so gripped these Halls of Congress into 
making irrational decisions.
  We can correct this decision when that appropriations bill comes to 
the floor of the Senate. I hope we will. I hope folks such as Senator 
McCain--one of this country's two heroes who is taking this on in the 
defense committee--are going to help us out here on the floor by taking 
this on in the Appropriations Committee.
  I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the 
order for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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