The online edition of Space News (registration required) reports that four members of the US Senate have requested that written a letter to NASA administrator Mike Griffin asking him not to cut ISS research funding. The letter, by Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), Bill Nelson (D-FL), Richard Shelby (R-AL), and Barbara Mikulski (D-MD)—the chair and ranking members of the Senate Commerce Committee’s space subcommittee and the Senate Appropriations Committee’s commerce, justice, and science subcommittee—are responding to reports from late last month that NASA is considering cutting back or even suspending ISS science programs for a year or more to save money. According to the article, the senators state in the letter that “want to make it clear that any option to further reduce, or curtail altogether, research aboard the ISS would be an unacceptable option and entirely inconsistent with policy guidance enacted by the Congress.” A NASA spokesman said Thursday that they could not comment on the letter, dated Tuesday, because NASA had not officially received it yet. Apparently the mail in downtown Washington is really slow these days…
Part of the proposal smells a lot like another intercenter rivalry issue – JSC trying to get payload operations moved to JSC?
One feature of the proposal was to close the POIC (Marshall payload operations control) and it would undoubtably reopen in a year at JSC. Early Spacelab missions, for instance, were operated (some with Marshall people) from the JSC control building. Some later Spacelab missions were controlled (with JSC people, such as Spacelab Life Sciences 1) from Marshall.
Jan Davis vowed that the POIC would not be moved to JSC while she was around, but she has moved on I believe. But there are plenty of passionate supporters of MSFC still out there.
The whole idea of shutting down science, and laying off numerous people (as proposed), and then going to the expense of recreating the capability in only one year – is hard to understand.