There’s an article in the Houston Chronicle about the cuts to NASA’s 2005 budget request. The Majority Leader does seem to be on the warpath about it:

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, the Sugar Land Republican whose district includes NASA’s Johnson Space Center, called the cuts “unacceptable,” then warned: “It would be very hard to get this bill to the floor if it’s unacceptable to me.”

DeLay, the second-highest-ranking House Republican, schedules measures for floor consideration and wields considerable power over spending bills.

So, why?

I haven’t looked at the cuts in detail, but they seems mainly to affect the president’s new vision. One of the biggest cuts is in the Prometheus Program (largely Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter at this point), most of which would go to California (JPL and whatever contractor is selected) and DOE labs for the reactor work. No money for JSC there. The general exploration activities, including CEV, are nominally funded out of Houston, but it’s managed at HQ and will go to contractors all over the place. Shuttle is fully funded, as is ISS. This action doesn’t seem to be bad for JSC at all, all things considered, from a pork perspective.

So why is DeLay up in arms about it? He is supposedly, after all, one of those Republicans who are supposed to be concerned about federal spending.

Theory 1: He’s greedy, and assumes that any budget cuts will affect JSC to some degree, however minor (probably a valid assumption).

Theory 2: He wants to support the president in his budget request, out of loyalty to the White House.

Theory 3: He actually believes in the vision, and wants it to be funded this coming year.

Theory 1 doesn’t seem worth holding up an appropriations bill over. I’ve got to surmise that it’s theories 2 and 3 in some proportion. Can it be that the Hammer has become a space nut?

The show we broadcast last night, in which we read our ceremony on the air, is now up on the web site. There is also a link to my solo appearance on Sunday night. They’ll both be on line for a week or so.

Via Space Today, there is a press conference next Tuesday to make some announcements regarding X Prize developments. More than likely this will be Rutan’s official announcement. Brian Feeney of the Da Vinci Project will also be there. Let’s hope he also announces a prize shot. Nothing like a little competition to rev up the ratings.

Jeff Foust rounds up more stories on the House cuts to the NASA budget request. A quote from Congressman Weldon:

This bill takes care of most of our needs at Kennedy Space Center, so I’m hard pressed not to support my chairman when he’s taking care of Florida.

Yup.

I’ve got mine. What did posterity ever do for me?

I also always wonder if they understand the impact of “delaying” a program for a year. A contractor has a team put together, and they can’t just put them in cold storage until Congress decides to finally fund the program. They get reassigned to other projects, and it’s hard to reassemble them later, resulting in putting together a new team, with associated learning curve. This is one of the reasons that government space programs are so inefficient and costly.

Over at RLV News Clark Lindsey takes an uncharacteristicaly blunt swing at a particularly stupid article on SpaceDaily. I can’t say it any better than Clark, so go on over there and read his take.

There’s also a good item on the state of sounding rocket research (dismal). I’m a fan of sounding rockets since they offer a low cost means of doing simple space research. In science it’s often the simple experiments that have the most dramatic impact (in part because it’s harder to quibble about simple results, but that’s another post entirely). Unfortunately simple isn’t sexy, and sexy is what NASA is most interested in. Another point about sounding rockets that’s not generally well understood is that there’s a region of the atmosphere between about 50 km and 100 km which is too high for balloon research but to low for satellite research. There’s some important processes that take place in this region, and sounding rockets are really the only way to study them directly.

We’ll be reading the ceremony live, starting in less than an hour, at 7 PM PDT. You can listen here. There will be opportunities to submit questions via email and chat.

John Gizzi reminds us that the administration supports the Law of the Sea Treaty, which Reagan tried to bury twenty years ago, and even Clinton didn’t support.

I wonder if anyone in the administration understands that the principle behind this treaty is the same one behind the 1979 Moon Treaty, which would have effectively outlawed private property in space, and the implications for the new space policy? I, too, like Gizzi and Doug Bandow, would like to know what the rationale is for this policy.

As Duncan Young points out in comments, the House Appropriation Committee has chosen today to announce that it’s not funding the new Vision for Space Exploration next year. Casualties: the new exploration architecture studies and CEV, and the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter. Zero funding. Meanwhile, the Shuttle program, which is facing overruns on its return to flight activities, gets over four billion dollars, though it’s not flying.

Perhaps we’ll now see how important the new policy is to the administration.

[Update at 5:45 PM PDT]

Jeff Foust has further thoughts.

I’ll be on the radio tonight, discussing the anniversary and the ceremony we came up with to celebrate it.

[Update a little after noon]

I should add that it’s another anniversary (several, actually–the Hitler assassination attempt was sixty years ago today, and Vince Foster’s body was discovered in Fort Marcy Park eleven years ago, though how it got there still remains unclear). It has been twenty-eight years since the first Viking landed on Mars.

Thirty-five years ago, the first men from planet earth walked on the moon.

I was fourteen years old, watching it on a black and white television (though it would have made no difference if we’d had color–the images were black and white themselves). I saw Neil Armstrong step down from the ladder onto the surface, and heard him say “…one giant leap for mankind.”

I wasn’t thinking about the future as I watched, but as a naive teenager, I assumed that this was just the first of many such flights, that were the precursors for bases on the moon, and then flights to Mars and other places. I didn’t know that Lyndon Johnson had made the decision to end the Apollo program two years earlier.

I grew up with the space program–one of my earliest recollections was sitting in my pajamas in front of the teevee, watching John Glenn become the first American in orbit. I couldn’t imagine then that the last manned flight to the moon would occur in less than four years, and that it would be at least four decades, and probably more, after that before humans would return.

But later, as Apollo wound down, and Vice President Spiro Agnew’s proposals for continuing manned space exploration were ridiculed, it became clear that we weren’t going to see the future in space that I’d been promised by grade-school teachers and science fiction, and my interest waned through high school, to the point that I got perfunctory grades, and made no plans to attend college.

I didn’t know that in that same year that the first men trod the lunar regolith, a physics professor at Princeton was doing class projects to determine the feasibility of building huge colonies in space, and moving polluting industries off the planet. And later, thirty years ago this coming September, as I spent my first year after high school working as an auto mechanic, I didn’t read the issue of Physics Today in which his first seminal paper on this topic appeared.

But, laid off from the VW dealership in the wake of the 1974 recession, as Michigan unemployment hit levels not seen since the Depression, and disillusioned at the thought of spending the rest of my life unable to ever really get my fingernails clean, I decided to go to community college. I took math and science classes, and a couple years later transferred to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. There I met people who were aware of Professor O’Neill’s work, and introduced me to it. My interest in space was rekindled, and it led to the career that’s made me the wasted wreck of a man you see today.

Thirty-five years after Neil and Buzz walked on the moon, we have neither the NASA Mars base, or the huge spinning space colonies. But we’re finally seeing new progress on a front in between those two visions. Forty years after the end of the X-15 program, we’re recapitulating some of the early NASA program privately, and diversely, with the efforts of Burt Rutan and the other X-Prize contestants and suborbital ventures. They won’t be diverted down a costly dead-end path of giant throwaway rockets. Instead they’ll slowly and methodically evolve capabilities and markets, creating the infrastructure for low-cost access to space. Once we can afford to get, in Heinlein’s immortal words, “halfway to anywhere,” we’ll finally be able to return to the moon, to complete the job begun by those first voyagers, and this time we’ll be able to stay.