According to a brief article in this week’s print issue of Space News (which you may be able to temporarily read here), Congress has rejected a request by NASA to transfer some FY2004 money to the new Centennial Challenges program. According to the report, NASA had asked permission to transfer $2 million from an unspecified program to fund Centennial Challenges in 2004. However, in a June 17 letter to NASA, Reps. James Walsh (R-NY) and Alan Mollohan (D-WV), the chair and ranking member, respectively, of the House Appropriations Committee subcommittee that oversees NASA, denied that request as well as another request to move $24.2 million from two space science missions. It doesn’t appear that the two Congressmen have anything against the Centennial Challenges program itself; instead, they are concerned NASA is moving too far ahead on the overall exploration program without Congressional approval. The denial of the reprogramming request probably means that NASA won’t be able to announce any prizes until FY2005. The program had hoped to announce an initial set of prizes (valued at no more than $250,000 each, the current limit NASA is authorized to offer) by the end of the current fiscal year.
I really don’t understand the logic. Congress calls for a new vision for NASA, yet when it finally has one, they seem to do whatever they can to slow it up and perhaps even prevent it altogether.
When will congress get its act together and fund the space vision as it is needed.
Welcome to democracy.
First of all, there is no requirement for Congress to _approve_ of whatever the administration wants.
Second, although it is easy to blame Congress for dragging its feet on all this stuff, one might ask why it was submitted in an election year, when these kinds of delays naturally happen. Actually, I think that was simple normal circumstance and could not be avoided. But my point is, American democracy has certain timetables. Everybody knows that things slow down in election years. So this is normal. Frustrating, but normal.
By the way, there seems to be a bigger recent event that seems to have been unnoticed in the blogger community, which is NASA abandoning its contract to give Kistler money for data on its rocket test flights.
I have to agree with Mr. Day, I have actually been impressed by the speed they move. Another thing both Republicans and Democrates are working together. Any vision or policy that congress develops should be dynamic but it needs look down the road at least 30 years.
As I understand that if NASA was made a department, NASA would have more control over allocation of its money. Is this true?
Out of a twenty billion dollars budget, the Chairman wants to hold up two million dollars on something that could have huge leverage on reducing future costs, regardless of the specifics of NASA’s plans. How far ahead is “too far ahead”?
This is idiotic micromanagement.
Also, I should say that the Kistler thing wasn’t unnoticed, at least not by me. I’ve just been too busy to commment. Anyway, when it comes to Kistler, I follow the old motto of “if you don’t have anything good to say…”
Mr. Simberg wrote:
“Anyway, when it comes to Kistler, I follow the old motto of “if you don’t have anything good to say…””
When has this been your policy on anything?
Mr. Malkin wrote:
“I have to agree with Mr. Day,”
Great! Two points for me!
“I have actually been impressed by the speed they move.”
Erp, I never said that they were fast. I just said that they have a rather standard schedule and these things move by that schedule. Making things even worse this year is the fact that the Republicans are having problems getting their entire budget moving.
It helps if you can develop the sense of thinking of time in chunks of calendar. Every political process takes a certain amount of calendar time, and when there is a delay, the entire chunk gets pushed back. It’s not like a single date is being changed, it is that date, plus all the other things that follow. For instance, last week the House Science Committee was supposed to hold a hearing on the Aldridge Commission report. They canceled that at the last minute (I still don’t know why). Once they did so, all the other stuff that is happening in Congress intercedes. For instance, Congress leaves town over the Fourth of July holiday, so when they canceled the hearing, it imposed an inevitable delay of at least a couple of weeks before it could be scheduled again.
I suspect that the hold up in CC funds may have less to do with concern about NASA moving ahead on the Vision and may be more tied up with overall congressional budget politics.
“When has this been your policy on anything?”
Believe me, if it wasn’t my policy on at least some things, I’d have no time to do anything else other than run things down, and I’d die with a huge backlog.
“I suspect that the hold up in CC funds may have less to do with concern about NASA moving ahead on the Vision and may be more tied up with overall congressional budget politics.”
Either way, it sucks. I take it personally, because I was expecting some needed consulting work on it this fall (not CC, but the exploration activities in general).
A Democrat and Republican suffering from HUA. Rand is right… it does suck.
In re the Kistler contact, NASA did everything it could to work with Kistler. Their award of the contract was successfully challenged on the grounds of it not being competitively sourced, and so they were forced to rescind it. Cant say this is such a bad thing. NASA was trying to do what they could to save Kistler, but Im not sure that Kistler was worth saving.
There is a short note on page 4 of the June 28 issue of Space News stating that the Air Force has hired the X-Prize Foundation to explore the possibility of using prizes for Air Force space missions.
thanks for noticing this. i had not seen it, and it really matters to me. i went to the workshop they had a few weeks ago, and everything was ‘great’. they said they had the money….
i am working on the space elevator. there were 4 or 5 technologies that we needed for the SE, that were being considered for competition. i am really hoping they put that money back. and then expand it – a lot.
also, it is interesting (to me) to note that mollohan stopped this…. because he is the guy sponsoring $2.5m to go to his state for SE research.
take care. mjl