A Senate panel unveiled a budget plan Tuesday that would grant NASA more funding than House lawmakers are proposing and also increase oversight of efforts to develop a commercial spaceflight industry.
The Senate Appropriations Committee’s Commerce, Justice, Science subcommittee (SAC-CJS) marked up on Tuesday a multi-agency appropriations bill that would grant NASA $18 billion in fiscal year 2014. That’s $1.4 billion more for the space agency than in a version of the bill the House Appropriations Committee (HAC) will mark up Wednesday, which its CJS subcommittee approved it last Wednesday (Defense Daily, July 10).
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The SAC-CJS said in a summary that its bill–with the $18 billion in NASA funding–aims to inspire “private companies to build new crew transportation and spawning a new satellite servicing industry that can revive, refuel, and rejuvenate defunct communications satellites.” It said it includes $373 million more than the House panel does in the CJS bill “to let humans explore beyond low earth orbit while safely sending our astronauts to the space station on U.S. made vehicles.”
SAC-CJS Ranking Member Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), though, said he added language to the bill “that provides greater accountability and budgetary transparency to the commercial-crew program to ensure that taxpayers are getting the best value for their dollar.”
NASA has contracts with three companies–Boeing [BA], Space X, and Sierra Nevada Corp.–that are working on commercial spacecraft intended to take the place of NASA’s now-retired space shuttle and carry astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) in privately owned vehicles.
Shelby has been skeptical about the commercial-crew initiative, launched under President Barack Obama.
He crafted language–for both the CJS bill and the committee’s report on it–that aims to ensure the commercial-crew effort is “cost beneficial,” an aide said. The ISS is supposed to be decommissioned in 2020, and some people are concerned about investing heavily in a commercial-crew program that would make, at most, six flights to the station.
Shelby told Defense Daily his commercial-crew language is intended “to get the most for the dollar and make sure that people who do work for any government agency (are) accountable.”
“There’s been evidence that some loose standards (are) out there and we’re trying to tighten them up,” he said after the SAC-CJS markup.
The Senate panel proposes slightly decreasing the administration’s request for commercial-crew funding. But it does so only for budgetary reasons and not to punish the effort, the aide said.
The SAC-CJS did not release on Tuesday many details of its bill, which the full Senate Appropriations Committee (SAC) plans to mark up Thursday.
The CJS bill the HAC will take up Wednesday includes a total of $3.6 billion for exploration, with $500 million of that pegged for commercial-crew efforts. The House measure proposes $1.05 billion for the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle and $1.78 billion for the Space Launch System (SLS) heavy-lift rocket, with $1.48 billion of that going to launch-vehicle development and $300 million pegged for exploration ground systems.
In the Senate, it is not clear when the SAC’s CJS bill might reach the floor.
Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), chairwoman of the SAC and its CJS subcommittee, told reporters she hopes to bring two of the 12 appropriations bills that fund the federal government to the Senate floor in July. The CJS bill, in theory, could be one of those two.
It appears unlikely the defense appropriations bill could reach the full Senate before the August recess, though. The SAC has not yet marked up the defense legislation, though Mikulski told reporters she plans for the committee to approve all 12 appropriations bills before the August congressional recess.