Posted on 08/27/2003 4:09:29 PM PDT by Brett66
Bush in the hot seat over shuttle's future
Lawmakers urge administration to set course
By KAREN MASTERSON
Copyright 2003 Houston Chronicle Washington Bureau
THE INVESTIGATION
WASHINGTON -- President Bush, silent for three years on NASA's future, must quickly define his intentions for the shuttle program if the space agency is to recover from Tuesday's critical review of its safety and management problems, key members of Congress said.
While acknowledging that Congress was in part responsible for NASA's troubles, lawmakers said providing long-term vision and goals for the agency is the administration's responsibility.
"It's doable if the president goes to the American people, just as (John F.) Kennedy and (Lyndon B.) Johnson did in the '60s," said Rep. Joe Barton, R-Ennis, a member of the House committee with jurisdiction over NASA's policies.
Both presidents had convinced Americans that space travel was essential and promised to do what never had been done before: put a man on the moon.
After years of flailing, the administration must decide the agency's course, Barton said. Either stop all manned missions, he said, or double NASA's budget to $30 billion so shuttle missions may be run safely and go beyond the international space station.
In response to a report released Tuesday by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board that was highly critical of NASA, Bush restated his commitment to space travel but offered no specifics.
"The next steps for NASA ... must be determined after a thorough review of the entire report," Bush said in a written statement.
Since taking office in January 2001, Bush has been hugely successful at forcing an agenda that includes improving education, boosting defense spending, removing Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and cutting taxes.
But his commitment to NASA has been tepid. And his chosen head for the agency, administrator Sean O'Keefe, has focused more on fixing the agency's accounting problems than articulating its future. O'Keefe said today that NASA will, without reservation, follow the recommendations of the board, including a major renovation of NASA's culture.
"We get it," O'Keefe said today at a news conference. "We clearly got the point."
He said the report clearly spells out NASA's human failures and how its culture must change to assure safe human spaceflight.
"They've been clear throughout the report, repeatedly, that there must be institutional changes," O'Keefe said. "That is what we are committed to doing. ... We will go forward with great resolve to follow this blueprint and to make this a much stronger organization."
He said NASA reorganization will assure that the safety changes in the space agency culture are permanent.
Many observers say the outcome of the investigation board's work means Bush and O'Keefe now must make tough decisions that they've so far avoided.
"I'm disappointed in the president," said Rep. Nick Lampson, D-Beaumont, whose district includes Johnson Space Center. "I hoped he'd champion a new set of goals. But we seem to have gotten a slowdown in where we are going."
The report blamed the loss of Columbia and its seven astronauts on a management system that failed to heed warnings about damage caused by a chunk of insulating foam during liftoff.
Absent direction from the administration, key lawmakers have come to their own conclusions.
Florida Republican Dave Weldon, whose district includes Kennedy Space Center, said he will ask Bush to increase NASA's budget by 25 percent over the next three years, largely to accelerate production of a new orbital space plane.
Others say the shuttle program should be killed.
"I believe it is likely that we will conclude that a shift in emphasis toward unmanned flight is reasonable for both safety and research value," said Rep. Nick Smith, R-Mich., chairman of the House Science Subcommittee on Research, which competes with the shuttle program for funding authorizations.
Any battle over NASA's funding, without input from the White House, will likely focus less on the merits of sending astronauts into space and more on whether the country can afford to invest in the shuttle program.
Sizable deficits are expected to dog the nation's treasury for at least the next few years, pitting pro-shuttle advocates against a strong tide of red ink.
"The budget deficits were brought on by ourselves," said Houston Democrat Sheila Jackson Lee, who called from Africa to weigh in on the NASA debate. She said conservatives should explain why they support tax cuts for the wealthy and oppose funding increases for NASA, which "benefits the entire world."
Republican leaders, even those who support the shuttle program, were noncommittal Tuesday on the direction of NASA's long-term budget.
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, who has routinely fought for shuttle funding, was guardedly supportive of the program.
"We've got to determine what we need to do and how to do it right," she said. "That probably will require more money, or a need to focus our mission on fewer projects."
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Sugar Land, who also has supported the shuttle program in the past, issued a statement Tuesday that made no commitment to increase the agency's budget.
However, in a second statement addressing new Congressional Budget Office figures estimating a $480 billion deficit for 2004, DeLay was quite definitive about spending priorities.
"Congress must maintain fiscal accountability," the statement read. "The spending guidelines in the budget will get us to balance only if we stick to them."
Thought I should post this, since everyone would want to know what she thinks.
It was the House that wanted to go to the moon, and JFK became the PR man. The House can take the lead again if it wants.
The House sets the goals. The President apparently has no opinion.
Scary, she actually makes sense here--inbetween non sequiturs.
It was thought at the time that a manned presence in space was necessary for military superiority, with the Soviet Union leading the way. As with most government plans, that turned out not to be the case. Even our own military dropped the idea after Challenger. Space tourism has taken the lead as the primary market for manned spaceflight for the foreseeable future.
She's actually just jumping on a bandwagon here. The real problem is to come up with a clearly-articulated justification for manned spaceflight.
The problem at the moment is that the justifications currently available really boil to the following two:
1) It's cool
2) Mankind's destiny is to explore, yada yada yada
The first one is true, but not a particularly good reason to spend billions.
The second is very touchy-feely, but it really doesn't give a justification, it's more of a fond hope that doesn't say what it is about exploring that would justify all that money being spent.
Finally, having once spent years in Houston working (as a contractor) for NASA, I found that the manned space program actually operates on those two principles, and very little else. There's no specific goal -- it's just there to put Shuttles on-orbit.
The problem would be, then, to give NASA another real goal -- something like the moon that can be met (just barely) in a reasonable time-frame, with some sort of actual, concrete results.
Sheila Jackson Lee is not going to be able to provide that sort of justification, and I confess that I'm having trouble doing it as well.
You're right. And Columbia's last mission was to do experiments that should have been done on the ISS. And a reasonable person would question whether those experiments were necessary in any location.
BTW, the space station was originally Reagan's idea, but not its final money sucking, years behind schedule form.
1) increase scientific knowledge; and,
2) show the Islamists that they really ought to give up.
For the first, you need to accept that scientific knowledge is a good thing for our society and continued advancement. For the second, we should all eventually see that the Islamists' approach is a dead-end and cannot compare its productivity to that of space-faring society.
The question in that case is whether manned spaceflight is the best way to advance scientific knowledge. It certainly advances scientific knowledge about manned spaceflight -- but that logic seems to be rather circular: the only reason to gather knowledge about manned spaceflight is so that you can do manned spaceflight better.
The obvious advantages of spaceflight in general are, I think, well-established. But these days, most (all?) of the advances are coming with unmanned vehicles. It's entirely fair to ask if having men on-board is worth the tens of billions of extra dollars required to make that happen.
As for the salamikazes, if they're not impressed by being blown to little bits by modern American weaponry, I doubt manned spaceflight will make any difference to them.
One thing I guess we both left out is national pride. The Chinese and Indians are both trying to do manned stuff to show that they've "made it" as technologically advanced nations. Americans are justifiably proud of being capable of manned space-flight. Maybe that's enough -- but it doesn't seem to be.
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