WASHINGTON —
A bill mandating that NASA conduct an additional space shuttle flight to
deliver a $1 billion science payload to the International Space Station cleared
the House Science and Technology space and aeronautics subcommittee May 20.
Lawmakers wasted
little time approving the NASA
Authorization Act of 2008 (H.R. 6063) and sending it to the full committee
for consideration. With no amendments offered, Rep. Charlie Melancon (D-La.)
gaveled the markup session to a close less than six minutes after it began.
Melancon
was filling in for Rep. Mark Udall (D-Colo.), the subcommittee's chairman, who
was forced, by airplane trouble, to miss the markup of the legislation he had
introduced five days earlier.
H.R. 6063,
in addition to requiring NASA to fly the Alpha
Magnetic Spectrometer to the space station as originally promised, sets
generous spending levels for the U.S. space agency that congressional
appropriators are free to ignore. The bill authorizes a $19.2 billion budget
for NASA for 2009, or about $1.6 billion more than the White House is
requesting.
The bill
also would authorize appropriators to give NASA an additional $1 billion in
2009 expressly for the purpose of accelerating development of the Orion Crew
Exploration Vehicle and Ares I launcher.
Orion and
Ares currently are on track to enter service in
March 2015, some four-and-a-half years after the space shuttle is due to
conduct its last flight.
The
legislation would permit NASA to remain on course for returning to the Moon
around 2020 but encourages the agency to embrace international collaboration
more fully as it pursues its space exploration goals.
If H.R.
6063 becomes law as is, NASA would be required to name the United States' first
lunar outpost after Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first person to
set foot on the Moon, and to design the outpost to operate for extended periods
without humans present.
On the
science front, the bill would authorize NASA to proceed with development of
Glory, the climate-monitoring satellite that breached Nunn-McCurdy-like cost
controls put in place by the 2005 NASA Authorization Act. The Nunn-McCurdy law
requires the Pentagon to notify Congress and take various corrective actions
when programs experience cost growth that reaches certain thresholds.
NASA also
would be required to produce a plan for ensuring continued collection of the
type of thermal infrared land imagery returned by the Landsat 5 and 7
satellites. The Landsat spacecraft NASA has in development for a 2011 launch
does not include a thermal band. Under the bill, NASA would be required to
present Congress with an option for adding a thermal band to the Landsat Data
Continuity Mission while minimizing the cost and schedule delay associated with
the change.
Rep. Tom
Feeney of Florida, the subcommittee's ranking Republican, attributed the bill's
easy approval by the panel to the bipartisan spirit in which it was drafted. He
praised Richard Oberman, the subcommittee's Democratic staff director, for
engaging Republican staff in the process from the beginning.
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