Congress

Authorization update

Missed in all the attention given last week to the impending, only to be scrubbed, launch of the shuttle Discovery was progress on the House version of a NASA authorization bill. In late June the space subcommittee of the House Science Committee approved a proposed bill, HR 3070, but all but one of the Democrats on the committee opposed the bill on a variety of grounds.

Last week, Democrats introduced their own version, HR 3250, designed to rectify the flaws they perceived in the original bill. Those changes, according to a Democratic caucus press release, included authorizing additional funding for several programs, including the James Webb Space Telescope, as well as reversing a planned decline in aeronautics finding. The bill also contained a provision that would require any future cuts to be made proportionally to all parts of the NASA budget, rather than singling out a single of limited group of programs (like aeronautics or science.) The bill would also recommend that NASA put the CEV into operation by 2010 but require that NASA not require the entire shuttle fleet until the CEV is ready (hence avoiding any gap in US manned spaceflight.)

Almost as soon as the Democratic version of the bill was introduced, a compromise was reached. The full Science Committee approved an amended version of HR 3070 during a hearing last Thursday morning (called on fairly short notice) that incorporated some, but not all, the changes proposed in HR 3250. A committee press release lists the various changes. For example, the compromise version drops a provision in the original bill that mandates shuttle retirement in 2010, but also excludes language from HR 3250 that would prevent shuttle retirement until the CEV is ready—in other words, making effectively no major recommendation on the issue. The compromise version also includes funding authorization for FY 2007 (the original covered only 2006, while HR 3250 went through 2008). The compromise also endorses a shuttle servicing mission to Hubble.

The big question, though, is whether it will be possible to reconcile the House bill with the Senate one (S. 1281), which contains a number of significant differences, particularly on shuttle/CEV issues. A complicating matter is that the Senate still has a lot of appropriations bills to deal with, and much of September is going to be lost to a Supreme Court confirmation battle.

I will be out in Las Vegas for the rest of the week for the Return to the Moon conference, by the way, so updates will be infrequent through the weekend—unless, of course, there are major policy-related developments at the conference.

1 comment to Authorization update

  • Jim Muncy

    Actually, last Thursday’s events were scheduled long in advance, but it was a full Science committee “markup”, not a hearing. That said, the compromise was indeed reached very late in the game, namely the day before.

    Sometimes they make the sausage really quick. It doesn’t make it any easier to watch, tho. ;-)