The House and Senate versions of the bill are often very different, reflecting the different priorities of the subcommittee members in each chamber. The differences must be smoothed out in a House-Senate conference. Then each chamber must approve the conference report, and the President must sign the final bill.

The VA-HUD bill has only completed the first leg of its trip - it has passed the House. The Senate subcommittee has not even started work on the bill, and President Clinton has already promised to veto it if it contains the current cuts to NASA.

White House Chief of Staff John Podesta said last week that the proposed NASA cut "is clearly unacceptable."

But a veto may be unneeded if Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Maryland) gets her way. Mikulski's state includes NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, severely targeted by the cuts, and she has promised to do "everything in my power" to restore funding.

That's hardly an empty promise, as Mikulski is the top minority member of the VA-HUD Appropriations Subcommittee, which will draft the bill. Rep. Steny

Hoyer (D-Maryland), who spoke out for NASA often during the debate, called her "a key ally. She feels very strongly about this."

The committee includes five Democrats and six Republicans. A spokesman for committee Chairman Kit Bond (R-Missouri) said, "It's too early to speculate, but stay tuned" to see if NASA gets its money back.

A lot depends on how much the Republican party is willing to boost spending. The GOP set aside less money for the VA-HUD bill then it needed in an attempt to both adhere to the 1997 budget caps and make room for a $792 billion tax cut.

Clinton has made it very clear that the tax cut has no chance, but Republican leaders, like Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, have made it equally clear that they still want to keep spending low and stay within the caps.

Appropriators of both parties have called that an impossible task and an unnecessary one in the face of a projected budget surplus. Rep. James Walsh (R-New York), the author of the NASA budget cut in the VA-HUD bill, all but promised NASA supporters on the floor that the money would be restored.

"We have talked with a number of people concerned about the levels of NASA funding," Walsh said. "We know there's not enough money in there for NASA, we're not completed with this process yet."

Walsh repeatedly assured NASA supporters like Rep. David Weldon (R-Florida) and Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) that he would "work with them" on NASA funding as the bill went to conference.

Also slated to sit on the conference committee is Majority Whip Tom Delay (R-Texas) whose district includes the Johnson Space Center. A leader in the party, Delay has also promised NASA funding will be restored.

"As a member of the subcommittee, as the majority whip, and as a member of the conference committee, I can assure you that when the House and Senate come together to negotiate, NASA will be fine," he told a group of constituents in Texas last month.

The conference committee will have only a few members from each chamber, including the top members from each party on the subcommittees. That means Walsh, Bond and Mikulski will be joined by Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-West Virginia), the House VA-HUD subcommittee's ranking minority member. He said Thursday night that he might even support an increase for NASA, not just restoration of funding.

"We have to have 4 billion dollars more in this bill," Mollohan said in an interview on C-SPAN. "NASA needs at least a billion, billion and a half, two billion in order to be whole."

The House vote for the VA-HUD bill was 235 to 187 and largely along party lines, with Republicans for it and Democrats against it. Actually, the fact that 168 Democrats voted against a bill that pays for some of their favorite programs - public housing, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Science Foundation - was a sign of how many agencies were so under-funded that Democrats could not accept it.

Weldon, who was perhaps the most ardent Republican NASA supporter during the floor debate, said after the vote that he will work with the other 17 members of the GOP who opposed the bill to find out why they voted against their party, as he did.

"We'll see if we can form a united front on how we're going to fix this bill," Weldon said. Among those who voted "no" was Science Committee Chairman James

Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin), who has fought for the NASA budget his committee agreed to earlier this year.

There's also a chance the bill will never become law in any form. If the White House and the GOP cannot agree on spending levels in the bill, they will have to go into last-minute negotiations to come up with a catch-all, or omnibus, bill before the end of the session. Although GOP leaders have said they are unwilling to do that, they have not explained how they intend to fund all the spending bills enough to please both their own members and the White House.

"I question whether this bill will ever make it the President individually," Mollohan said. "I expect it will be wrapped in an omnibus package... Hopefully by that time there will be agreement to remove the budget caps."