During an opening address Friday morning at the Return to the Moon 5 conference in Las Vegas, Space Frontier Foundation cofounder Rick Tumlinson mentioned in passing that there may be problems in the Senate for NASA’s Centennial Challenges program:
You realize that Centennial Challenges are basically dead right now. Does anybody realize that? It’s kind of quietly being killed, because some people in the Senate, I think, see it as sort of the camel’s nose leading to the President’s vision.
He didn’t go into greater details about this issue, and I wasn’t able to track him down later Friday to get more specifics. I talked with several people at the conference and they, too, were unfamiliar with any problems facing Centennial Challenges in the Senate. It’s possible he was referring to a decision by House appropriators last month to turn down a NASA request to reprogram $2 million in FY04 funds to kickstart the program this fiscal year.
Update: I did manage to talk with Rick late Saturday and, indeed, he had meant the House decision to turn down the reprogramming request, and not something different in the Senate. Move along, please, nothing to see here…
