By Emelie Rutherford
A key Senate budget-writing panel endorsed a NASA budget July 22 that largely heeds a new compromise between lawmakers and the White House to build a heavy-lift rocket by 2016 and salvage some aspects of the ill-fated Constellation space-flight program.
The Senate Appropriations Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies subcommittee (SAC-CJS), though, added more funds than NASA authorizers did for the accelerated plan to build the heavy-lift rocket sooner than President Barack Obama previously proposed.
The subcommittee marked up its $19 billion version of the space agency’s fiscal year 2011 budget, sending it to the full Senate Appropriations Committee (SAC) for consideration.
The appropriations legislation has many similarities to the policy-setting NASA authorization bill the Senate Commerce Committee approved July 15. Members of that commerce panel hailed its bill as a compromise between the White House’s attempt to cancel Constellation–a space-shuttle-replacement effort intended to carry astronauts to the moon and beyond–and lawmakers’ opposition to a NASA reorientation to rely more on a burgeoning commercial space transportation industry to for trips to the International Space Station.
“In the area of human spaceflight…we worked with our authorizers in restructuring it,” SAC-CJS Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) said at the bill-writing session.
One difference between that authorization bill unveiled last week and the appropriations legislation approved yesterday is the amount of money for a new heavy-lift rocket. The SAC-CJS bill includes $1.9 billion for the rocket, up from the authorizers’ $1.6 billion, and specifies Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama as the lead location for the rocket. SAC-CJS Ranking Member Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), a harsh critic of the administration’s plans to cancel Constellation, pushed for these provisions.
The appropriations bill also includes $3 billion to develop the next-generation “Crew Launch Vehicle” and “Crew Exploration Vehicle,” building on work done for the Constellation program’s thwarted Ares I rocket and Orion crew capsule.
Obama’s $19 billion FY ’11 NASA budget proposal, unveiled in February, called for ending the under-funded Constellation program–which has included the developmental Ares I launch vehicle and Orion crew capsule and future Ares V heavy-lift rocket–and invest in private space companies.
Obama modified those plans in April, pledging to build a heavy-lift rocket by 2015 and salvaging some work done on Orion, and then again this month, in signaling support for the compromise bill unveiled last week by NASA authorizers. Lawmakers want to re-start manned space flights in 2016, instead of the White House’s previously proposed date of 2025, and begin work on a heavy-lift rocket now instead of in 2015.
The SAC-CJS’s appropriations bill, like the Senate authorization measure, would extend U.S. support of the International Space Station through 2020, five years later than the administration previously eyed, and potentially allowing one additional space shuttle flight before it is retired.
The appropriations measure also would reduce the administration’s proposed funding for bolstering a fledgling private-sector space industry.
The full SAC set to mark up the NASA budget bill July 23. The House Science and Technology Committee also approved its version of the space agency’s authorization bill, and made deep cuts to the administration’s proposed funding for such commercial companies.
For Constellation, ATK [ATK] has been the prime contractor for the Ares I first stage, Boeing [BA] has developed the Ares I upper stage, and Lockheed Martin [LMT] has been making Orion.