Congress, NASA, White House

“A fairly lonely crusade”

The Orlando Sentinel provided an update earlier this week on efforts to extend the shuttle program beyond its currently remaining five flights. As you might expect, there wasn’t much to update: there’s been little recent progress, and even advocates like Congressman Bill Posey (R-FL), who has introduced legislation to extend (HR 1962) to authorize funding for continued shuttle operations, admit there’s not much interest among his colleagues or from the White House. “It’s been a fairly lonely crusade; I have to admit that,” Posey told the Sentinel.

That doesn’t mean he hasn’t stopped trying. On Thursday he announced he wrote President Obama, asking him to keep flying the shuttle to avoid a gap in US government human spaceflight access. “For an amount equal to less than 1% of last year’s stimulus bill, we could fly the Shuttle for an additional five years, close the space gap, and keep America first in space,” Posey said. That amount comes from his estimate that a shuttle extension would cost only $1.5 billion a year, or $7.5 billion over five years, compared to the $787-billion price of last year’s stimulus bill. However, a United Space Alliance official put the cost of flying five more missions—the number that could be added using existing spare parts—through 2012 at $1.8-2.4 billion a year, according to the Sentinel. Compare those figures to the $3.16 billion included in the final FY2010 appropriations bill for shuttle operations.

Posey, in his letter to the president, urged the president to extend the shuttle, and even invited him to next month’s STS-130 launch. “Your leadership is direly needed today to ensure that your stated objectives for our nation and our space program are realized,” Posey wrote.

1 comment to “A fairly lonely crusade”

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>