An article in this week’s Space News (freely accessible online) provides an update on efforts to win “emergency” funding for NASA to overcome some of fiscal constraints the agency has been experiencing. As previously noted, Sens. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) have advocated an emergency spending measure that would give NASA up to $2 billion extra in 2006, in part to compensate the agency for shuttle return-to-flight costs it absorbed internally. According to the Space News article, the two senators plan to introduce the supplemental funding when the Senate Appropriations Committee takes up NASA’s budget on July 13. The actual amount will be somewhere between $1.5 and $2 billion, with the money to be split roughly evenly between shuttle, station, and exploration on one side, and science, aeronautics, and education on the other, although NASA will have some flexibility on how to spend the extra funds.
While there appears to be enough support for the funding measure to make it out of committee, “what happens next is less certain,” the article notes. Getting it through the Senate is one challenge, and if survives that senators will have to convince their House colleagues to go along with the increase; the House has already passed its FY2007 NASA budget without that supplemental increase. That would explain why many people, like Taylor Dinerman in his The Space Review essay Monday, are skeptical about the odds NASA can get any extra money.
