Senate VA/HUD Committee Report: Space Station

As reported in FYI #106, the Senate Appropriations Committee on July 14 passed H.R. 4624, the VA/HUD/Independent Agencies appropriations bill for fiscal year 1995. The bill now goes to the Senate floor, although no date has yet been scheduled for floor action.

Accompanying the Committee’s bill is a report (S. Rept. 103-311) giving the committee’s recommendations for funding. This and subsequent FYIs provide selected portions of the report relating to NASA and NSF.

For NASA, the Committee would provide $14,441,487,000 for fiscal year 1995. This is $85,912,000 less than the 1994 level, $200,803,000 above the budget request, and $440,803,000 above the House recommendation.

The report urges NASA to reconvene the Augustine panel to provide “independent expert advice on the future of the aeronautics and space program [which] would enable the Agency to move forward with confidence that its plans have the full support of the national community it was chartered to serve.” It also commends the space agency on its recent redesign of the space station and its new management structure. Quotes from the report dealing with the Human Space Flight program are provide below:

“The Committee recommends an appropriation of $5,573,900,000 for human space flight activities. This amount is $146,000,000 less than the budget request and $19,000,000 below the House allowance.”

“The Committee has included the full amount requested, $1,939,700,000 for the space station in the `Human space flight’ account. The remaining amount, $181,200,000, is included in the `Science, aeronautics, and technology’ account. These two combined appropriations will entail a total space station budget in fiscal year 1995 of $2,111,100,000.... The Committee has included more than $2,100,000,000 for station, despite the severe outlay constraints it faces, because of this project’s preeminent role in U.S. foreign policy, and other benefits in science, technology, and engineering. In addition, the current design is substantially less expensive, according to NASA estimates, than the space station Freedom design which emerged from the 1991-92 redesign. To recommend termination of the project at this point would seriously undermine our diplomatic relationship with the European Community, Japan, Canada, and the Republic of Russia. It would also create a severe, and perhaps permanent, fissure in the U.S. human space flight program.

“The Committee is capping the program’s remaining cost through assembly complete (1995-2002) at $17,400,000,000. The agency should initiate a semiannual project status report [PSR] on the space station, utilizing the baseline estimates for cost and schedule now in place as a result of the 1993 redesign effort. The first such report should be submitted in March 1995.

“Despite its strong support for the station program, the Committee remains seriously concerned about the lack of early available power for scientific users on the redesigned international space station. For this reason, it directs NASA to submit to the Committees on Appropriations by February 15, 1995, a strategy for optimizing early capability on the station for users, particularly those involved in the NASA-NIH protocol and those in the microgravity sciences, with a goal of 7 to 8kw for users during the initial phase of deployment of the U.S. lab.”

The following changes are recommended to the Human Space Flight budget: +$10,000,000 for spacelab activities, -$15,000,000 from the engineering and technical base, -$94,000,000 from space shuttle operations, -$30,000,000 to be derived from launch site equipment upgrades, -$17,000,000 from orbiter improvements to reflect rephasing of the fiber optic cable upgrades for the orbiter payload bay.

See FYI #96 for the House recommendations for NASA.