Scripps Howard News Service February 1, 2003
NASA tried to maintain shuttle schedule on tight budget
By Tara Copp
There were plenty of forewarnings on the stress that insufficient funding was putting on the space shuttle: In Congress, in government agencies auditing NASA and among NASA's own watchdogs.
Last April, concerned members of Congress' NASA funding subcommittee discussed how the space agency had lost 40 percent of its funding in the last 10 years, even though it still had 100 percent mission success in that time.
"The fact is that the administration has got to get its act together in space," said Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., the committee chairman. The cuts in funding, he warned, "can lead to some - I was in the White House when the Challenger blew up, and I never want anything like that to happen again." That July, the Senate reduced NASA's human space flight budget another 10.3 percent.
It's a trap NASA has found itself in for the last decade: Its shuttle upgrade funding keeps getting cut, even though its fleet is aging and needs more maintenance. And demands are high to keep the shuttles on a rapid schedule, to build the international space station.
"NASA's entire budget - the entire budget for its civil space program is smaller than the equipment maintenance budget for the Pentagon," said Loren Thompson, a defense analyst for the Washington think-tank the Lexington Group. "NASA gets about $15 billion a year, the Pentagon gets that kind of money every year just to maintain its equipment."
NASA has been under constant pressure from Congress to provide "low-cost" access to space. In 2000, Congress put a $380 million cost cap on each shuttle launch. In 2001, President Bush nominated Sean O'Keefe to lead the beleaguered agency, and O'Keefe set out a budget that would reduce NASA's shuttle upgrade spending by 43 percent through 2006.
Saturday's crash over Texas "is an unfortunate example of where budgets and human lives come together," said Patrick Garrett, an analyst with Globalsecurity.org, an air and space defense research group in Washington, D.C. "If you don't divert enough resources to an organization you can have a tragedy like this."
In April 2002, NASA's independent auditor Richard Blomberg told the House Science Committee that the budget constraints on the shuttle scared him.
"I have never been as concerned for space shuttle safety as I am right now," Blomberg said.
An August 2001 General Accounting Report found that the actual cost of each shuttle launch ranged from $437 million to $759 million. GAO was critical of the wide range, implying that NASA wasn't being upfront about its real costs. It also noted that NASA planned to launch 30 missions, and not 40 "as originally planned," through 2006.
"Unfortunately it looks like NASA was trying to make the best of a really bad situation," Garrett said. "I am not sure they could have done anything else other than slow down their program to reflect the little money they had. But at that point, they wouldn't have been the United States space program. They'd have been about the size of Japan's."
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, was walking outside her house in Dallas when she heard the fatal sonic boom of Columbia.
Reached by phone by CBS, Hutchison said Saturday's crash shouldn't slow the nation's space mission.
"Absolutely not," Hutchison said. "We cannot walk away from our commitment to space research." However, she added, "We must fully fund our missions. We cannot skimp like we have in the past few years."
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