Campaign '08, Congress, NASA

The power of repetition

An editorial in Florida Today calling for more money for NASA isn’t exactly novel. Fortunately, in another such editorial today the paper realizes it’s treading on familiar ground:

Which brings us to a point we’ve been making repeatedly on this page and need to make again:

If America wants to remain the world’s major spacefaring power, the next president has to recognize the economic, technological and scientific importance of NASA’s lunar program and support it with stable, long-term funding to get it off the ground.

Otherwise, it will stumble in fits and starts, falling further behind schedule while surging space powers such as China move ahead.

So they want the presidential candidates to speak out on this issue:

That’s why John McCain and Barack Obama should make it unmistakably clear during campaign stops in Florida, Texas and other NASA-dependent states that returning to the moon — and later going to Mars — are noble goals that will benefit the country the way project Apollo did a generation ago.

And the mission has their complete backing.

Some might consider such an approach—talking up NASA only in places where there is a significant agency presence—pandering for votes, rather than laying the foundation for a solid, rational space policy. Making such statements in Peoria, Paducah, or Poughkeepsie, on the other hand, is a different story.

The editorial does make one notable error:

For instance, House members last month voted an overwhelming 409-15 to increase the agency’s budget to $20.2 billion for fiscal year 2009 — $2 billion more than President Bush has requested.

The extra money would go for an additional shuttle flight to finish building the International Space Station and development of the Ares 1 rockets and manned Orion spacecraft that will carry astronauts to the moon from Kennedy Space Center.

The money probably won’t survive the Senate and Bush says he’ll veto the funds if they pass, but it’s an important signal to the next White House occupant the space program has broad, bipartisan support.

The $20.2 billion referred to above is an authorization, not an appropriation, and the Senate is likely to approve a similar figure. However, both the House and Senate are considering significantly smaller figures, about $17.8 billion, in their appropriations bills (subject to efforts like the “Mikulski Miracle” to add additional funding). It’s relatively easy to authorize spending large sums of money; actually appropriating the money, on the other hand, is much more difficult.

2 comments to The power of repetition

Leave a Reply

  

  

  

You can use these HTML tags

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>