Nelson Says Augustine Committee Has Overwhelming Power And Influence To Decide Future Of NASA Space Program
The panel that President Obama formed to evaluate NASA space exploration programs has enormous clout, so that its recommendations doubtless will become reality, Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) told the group.
Nelson, chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee science and space subcommittee that oversees NASA, spoke before the Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee examining what hardware NASA should buy for space flights.
The panel is headed by Norm Augustine, former chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin Corp. [LMT]. (Please see full story in this issue.)
Whatever the committee recommends when Augustine issues its report in August, Obama and Congress are likely to ratify it, Nelson said.
He came to the Augustine panel as a supplicant, an unusual position for a man whose tool of the trade is a gavel.
Nickel-dime approaches, where cost savings are paramount, can create huge problems in future, Nelson warned. Noting the government has “a budget that is out of whack,” with trillions of dollars of deficits in coming years, Nelson said that “costs are a major consideration” deciding “a lot of where we’re going with out space program.”
It’s possible, he cautioned, that decisions may be made to do space on the cheap, decisions that will be bitterly regretted 10 or 20 years from now.
Obama has sent Congress a budget that shows NASA with a flat-line allowance of less than $19 billion yearly for the next several years, even as costs of the Constellation Program developing the next-generation U.S. spaceship are expected to rise.
Those budget levels “are entirely deficient for where we’re going to be,” Nelson said, terming the Obama budget levels for the agency “unrealistic” in light of what the agency must do.
“NASA simply can’t do the job” on the Obama budget levels, Nelson announced. He told the Augustine committee that “if you come out with those numbers” in the committee recommendation, “there is no way that NASA can be on the moon by 2020” as planned.
Nelson also warned the committee, as it decides what space hardware NASA should have to get to orbit and then to the moon, that Americans shouldn’t count on Russians to provide transportation.
“Who knows what the geopolitics are going to be,” he said. Russia in the past year, for example, has threatened to launch rockets to demolish the European Missile Defense system, if the United States as planned builds it in the Czech Republic and Poland.
More money is needed, andd there is no escaping that fact, Nelson said.
“NASA was asked to do too much with too little” for many years, the senator continued.
As for the International Space Station, Nelson implored Augustine to recommend continuing its operation beyond a planned shut-down in 2015.
Nelson concluded by telling Augustine that “what you decide … is going to be key.”
But Augustine responded with a noncommittal comment that “you encapsulate challenges facing the space program.”