Mr. Rohrabacher’s Additional Views on the Science Space & Technology FY 2014 Budget
ADDITIONAL VIEWS OF HON. DANA ROHRABACHER COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE AND TECHNOLOGY FISCAL YEAR 2014 BUDGET
Although I strongly agree with much of the Committee’s Views and Estimates, there is one specific area on which I wish to state a different view, as I have done for the past few years.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
We have not yet received a budget request from the President for Fiscal Year 2014, and the previous request did not contain any real budget planning for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
Commercial Crew remains our most critical near-term civil space goal. We currently rely on the Russians, who have been good partners, but the Soyuz provides the tremendous risk of a single point of failure. We must create redundancy and enable NASA to certify multiple, independent, sustainable systems that can bring people safely to orbit and return them to Earth. In addition, the price the Russians are charging us continues to rise.
Calls to maintain the Commercial Crew funding at previous year’s levels fail to take into account the planned funding profile for this program. Every year that we underfund this program we make it more difficult and more costly for NASA to certify the safety of these systems for America’s astronauts. I know that some of my colleagues are skeptical of the ability of these commercial crew companies to meet the requirements of this program, but NASA’s technical experts are not.
Our Exploration program continues to be problematic, in that the funding is inadequate to the mission. The plan didn’t fit under the funding level anticipated by the NASA Authorization Act of 2010 (P.L. 111-267), and now that we have considerably less to work with we refuse to acknowledge reality. The single most important message of the Augustine Commission was that you cannot succeed when your mission does not match your funding.
We continue to hear that the SLS/MPCV system will serve as a back-up for Earth-to-orbit transportation in the unlikely event that none of the other systems in development are successful. Last year’s request for this “back-up system” was more than 300% of the appropriated level of the primary system. By acting on this type of faulty logic, we have created a national debt as large as our GDP and still our nation refuses to take its foot off the deficit spending accelerator. SLS is unaffordable, and with relatively modest expenditures on specific technology development, we do not need a heavy lift vehicle of that class to explore the Moon, Mars, or near-Earth asteroids.
NASA’s Space Technology development is a critical area to current and future missions. New technologies are what drives new jobs and creates new industries. Technology should be funded at a level sufficient to accomplish our top development priorities sooner rather than later.
For FY 2013, NASA requested nearly $1.8 billion for their Earth Science programs. These programs should not be located at NASA, whose core and unique mission is exploring space.
