NASA’s FY2010 budget proposal will be reviewed this week by two Congressional committees. This afternoon the House Science and Technology Committee will hold a hearing on the budget proposal, with acting administrator Chris Scolese as the sole witness. On Thursday afternoon the Science and Space subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee will have its own hearing on the budget proposal, although no witnesses are listed for the hearing.
The hearings come, of course, just as NASA appears to be getting a new administrator, and also as the Augustine panel prepares to begin its review of NASA’s human spaceflight programs. All this raises questions about just how much emphasis to put on the budget, especially for the exploration and space operations portions of it. “We now have a budget that doesn’t really tell us much for certain about what we plan to do,” noted Jeff Bingham, on the staff of the Senate Commerce Committee, during an event Friday afternoon at CSIS’s Washington offices.
Update 12:45 pm: I left out one other budget-related hearing: the Commerce, Justice, and Science subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee will have a hearing Thursday at 11 am, with Scolese as the sole in-person witness. There’s one minor twist to this hearing: the STS-125 crew is scheduled to “testify” at 12:30 pm while wrapping up their work in orbit.
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