2007 House Budget Proposal Could End NASA Space Exploration Funded by Public

One of the many issues that have had Congressional conservatives discontented with the White House has been the huge size of the deficit. The House Republican Study Committee, a group of fiscal conservatives, has presented an austere FY 2007 budget as an alternative to the one recently proposed by the White House. It has many good proposals for eliminating or reducing wasteful and extravagant programs. But it also has a proposal that would sound the death knell for publicly funded human space flight in the United States. It would eliminate the space shuttle program after the completion of the International Space Station, just as is now planned by NASA. But it would also completely cancel plans to build the Crewed Exploration Vehicle replacement for the shuttle and any thought of sending American astronauts to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.

Here is the Study Committee’s proposal: “Cancel NASA’s Moon/Mars Exploration Initiative and Retire the Space Shuttle after Completion of the International Space Station. In 2004, the President announced a new initiative to explore the Moon and Mars with the goal of returning humans to the Moon by 2020. NASA currently intends to use the savings from phasing out the space shuttle in 2012 to fund this program. However, the proposed transition will take six more years, costing taxpayers money on administrative and program expenses associated with simultaneously operating both programs. This proposal would cancel the new mission and would retire the space shuttle after completion of the International Space Station.”

The proposal to eliminate the Vision for Space Exploration, just after the Congress endorsed it in the last NASA Authorization Bill, makes no fiscal or political sense. If one wanted to save money in NASA’s human space flight account, it would make more sense to eliminate the space shuttle program immediately. The space shuttle has become a money pit, siphoning off funding from other NASA accounts, such as science and aeronautics. There is a question as to whether the shuttle could ever fly safely again. One can make the case that, with a little outside the box thinking, one could complete the International Space Station using expendable rockets and soon to be commercially available space tugs. The ISS could be resupplied either with Russian vehicles, soon to be commercially available space craft being developed under the Commercial Orbital Transportation Systems (COTS) initiative, and/or the CEV. Retiring the shuttle immediately instead of canceling the Vision for Space Exploration would save more money in the short run. Much of the money could be funneled to other NASA programs, hastening the day that Americans return to the Moon and voyage to Mars. But instead the House Republican Study Committee proposes to reward failure and forego what could be an American led age of exploration, yielding scientific and commercial returns in abundance.

The House Republican Study Committee proposal makes no political sense either. Recent Gallup polls show overwhelming popular support for sending American explorers beyond low Earth orbit, cutting across party and ideological lines. Last year, the Congress appeared to agree by endorsing the Vision for Space Exploration in the NASA Authorization Bill, with the House agreeing to the bill by voice vote. No one in the House Republican Study Committee objected to the voice vote or even argued against the bill as authorizing wasteful spending.

But what Congress gave with one hand, the House Republican Study Committee proposes to take away with another. It is true that there is a difference between authorizing spending and actually appropriating it, but the inconstancy is not something that can be easily overlooked.

An even more fascinating inconsistency lays in the fact that several members of the House Republican Study Committee are also warm supporters of the Vision for Space Exploration. These include Texas Congressmen Ted Poe and John Culberson and California Congressman Dana Rohrabacher. A question could be asked, do these gentlemen actually support the Vision for Space Exploration, or do they now support eliminating it? If the answer is the former, then one wonders what they think of what the House Republican Study Committee is doing in their name. If the latter, then what of their previous support?

If the House Republican Study Committee were to succeed in canceling America’s plans to explore the Moon and Mars, then America will certainly have yielded the high frontier of space to other countries. Officials in China, for instance, have suggested that one of the goals of that country’s space program is the exploration of the Moon and the exploitation of its resources for economic gain. If, at some future date, the next people to explore the Moon are citizens of Communist China, and not Americans, what will future generations say? We lost the future, but at least we saved a little money?