As expected, the House Appropriations Committee subcommittee for VA, HUD, and independent agencies cut NASA’s FY2005 budget request during a markup session Tuesday. Perhaps the only surprise is the depth of the cut: the subcommittee cut the $16.2-billion budget by $1.1 billion, $229 million below the agency’s FY04 budget. The cuts came from “the elimination of funding for new initiatives”, as the committee put it in a press release: $100 million was cut by accelerating the end of the Space Launch Initiative, $438 million was cut by delaying the start of the Crew Exploration Vehicle program, and $230 million was cut from Project Prometheus. The ISS budget was also cut by $100 million, according to the AP. Overall exploration programs got just $372 million of the $910 million requested. The shuttle and Mars exploration programs, though, were fully funded.
Before panicking, remember that this is just the first step of a long, arduous budget process, and a lot can, and usually does, happen. (If you remember back five years ago, House appropriators approved some significant cuts in NASA’s budget that then-administrator Dan Goldin called “devastating”; those funds were restored later in the budgetary process.) House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who previously hinted that the appropriators might cut NASA’s proposed budget, called these cuts “unacceptable” and hinted he might block consideration of the full bill on the House floor unless changes are made. This is just the beginning…
I’m not sure who wrote the headline for space.com but for the AP article they have “Congress Cuts Bush’s NASA Budget Request”. Ummm…
http://www.space.com/news/nasa_budget_040720.html
This is obviously the first chance to tell your House member to support the Vision for Space Exploration. Apollo didn’t happen overnight, and polls show it never was popular nor supported by a plurality of US citizens in its day. This is a chance to demonstrate support for a controversial, minority point of view that somehow succeeds, because its supporters got wise to how to play the political game, and hedged their bets by letting their Congressman know what they wanted, and why.
It also gives us the chance to do the smart thing, and multisourcing access and development of infrastructure, wherever possible. Or get going on finding other funding sources for development, involving the common man and woman in not only the sales of VSE, but long range work on including them too. Or find a way to invest equity in developing small parts of the infrastructure. Or outsourcing the job of lobbying for VSE to a professional firm that can do a better job at arm twisting and sweet talking House members than the space advocacy community can do at present. Or all of the above.
Seems to me now is the time to write a letter to your House member, or consider writing one later in the political process when it might do more good later in the appropriations process for Hud Independent Agencies.
As a Moon-Mars Blitzer I can tell you that several staffers told us personally – – “you guys will probably have to come back” – – they said they support the vision in general but there are higher forces at work with this first budget battle go around.
We were encouraged to come back in February.
If there is a conference committee, maybe we blitz the conference members during that meeting.
One quote from a wire service:
The Appropriations committee is supportive of Bush’s plans (for space) but “does not have sufficient resources” to pay for them, a report with the bill said.
Don’t quit too easily.
This outcome was predictable. Folks believing Bush’s plan is going to go forward successfully are naive. It is too dependent on Congress, who must now waste more of our money on Iraq (spending money on our troops is not wasteful, I mean this in terms of having to fund an operation that should have never taken place).
A vision of economic development using both commercial and public assets is required. On the face of it, it appears a reinterpretation of Bush’s space plan can produce this arrangement, preventing our nation’s space efforts from being held hostage by budget woes. Finding commercial opportunities in Bush’s plan is the next step (one being pursued currently), and these efforts must be robust lest they be easily overwhelmed by bureaucracy.
Many news articles point out that the proposed budget cut comes on the exact day (July 20) of the 35th anniversary of Apollo 11’s landing on the moon.
It would be worthwhile to let your representative know about this.
And also the fact that the majority of Americans approve of the plan in the recent Gallup poll.
What a shame to announce this on the 35 th Lunar landing aniversary. It is only the first of many battles to fund this vision. Will all efforts end up short, so long as we are at war in so many places, or will the collective voices of the moon to mars blitz be heard.
Nasa needs creative think with less levels of burreacratic bull for procurement of any items neccessary to achieve the goal.
If Congressmen from districts other than their own listened to constituents, I would write the Representatives who have been short sighted concerning NASA FY 2005 funding, and let them know where I stood, and what I think they should do about it. Unfortunately, the shortcomings of the US political system, the complications of Arena based decision making, and the lack of pro-space constituents in that part of New York state where the first shots of the war for the new space age were fired from are painfully evident.
I have physical letters that I believe are well written and meaningful ready to go to my House member, and have two more ready for my Senators too.
I wish I had as much confidence in my fellow space advocates ability to write their House members and let them know space is critical to a better future, and for many different reasons. Maybe they have, will, or do. But many space advocates have given up on lobbying the government for a variety of reasons, some valid, some not. Many believe lobbying Congress for space is a waste of time, and given the small numbers of the space community, it might be true.
We need numbers, plain and simple, and the bigger the numbers, the better. We need a vastly expanded space community, especially from the younger generation, who are notorious for not voting, and for their apathy to almost everything except immediate gratification. And we need alternatives to government money, and decision making too. Above all, we need new thinking and creativity in our own ranks, and new ways to bypass conventional lobbying and fund raising.
That is why I am a proponent of the Network Enterprise, and its attendant decentralized power, and of small scale projects that can build real tools and make real progress in all realms of space development in a few months to a few years. I have some ideas for Colorado, and want to try them out in the next few months to years myself. Everyone else is welcome to try their hand where they live too.