The Citizen, a newspaper that serves the Houston suburbs around the Johnson Space Center, has an article Wednesday about Richard Morrison, the Democrat running against Rep. Tom DeLay in Texas’s 22nd Congressional District. Morrison, speaking to a gathering of aerospace workers, is critical of the lack of funding for the Vision for Space Exploration the House Appropriations Committee approved in July:
“What are the actions? The actions speak differently,” said Morrison. “Can we trust this man to fund this program? Can we trust this man who says he’s behind the moon and Mars mission?”
The article doesn’t point out that DeLay was one of the strongest critics of the NASA appropriations bill and vowed to increase the FY05 budget, although he was not able to take action on the bill before Congress recessed until after the election. Morrison is also critical of plans to retire the shuttle by 2010, saying that a flight rate of six missions a year is “impossible”. “We must put the scientists and engineers back in control,” he said.
The title of the article refers to a $7 trillion “deficit.” That is not the “deficit.”
Also, to be precise, Morrison is not critical of “plans to retire the shuttle by 2010.” What he is critical of is a high flight rate between now and the retirement date. But it is unclear where he gets a flight rate of six flights per year, unless he is assuming 30 more flights divided by five years.