Hearing Paints Bleak Picture of U.S. Role in Space

Press Release

Testimony today by the head of the U.S. space agency painted a bleak picture of the nation's once-dominant space program as falling behind both Russia and China - and putting U.S. security interests in possible jeopardy.

NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin bluntly told a Senate panel that Americans will be dependent on Russia after 2010 to give our astronauts rides to the $60-billion space station; and, he predicted China will beat the U.S. back to the moon.

That dismal assessment comes as Russia grows increasingly hostile toward the U.S. and on Monday signed a lunar exploration agreement with India. Meantime, China and Japan are locked in a battle to return to the lunar surface as early as mid-2010, while China also has demonstrated its capability to use land-based missiles to obliterate satellites in space.

Griffin called the situation "unseemly in the extreme, and unwise for the U.S. to be dependent on any other nation."

He blamed it on years of neglect of NASA's budget by presidents and Congress.

Neither Sen. Bill Nelson, who chaired Thursday's hearing of the Senate panel that oversees NASA, nor Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, the ranking minority member on the panel, offered much hope. "We're confronting the hard reality that the White House has announced that it would veto" additional funding for NASA, Nelson said.

The lawmaker estimated about $2 billion more is needed over the next two years to close the gap between the end of the shuttle program in 2010 and the launch of its replacement in 2015.

Griffin testified that between 2010 and 2012 the only way to put a U.S. crew in orbit "will be to buy seats from Russia. That is, at this point, our only option," he said, adding that "after January 2012 we no longer have the legal option to buy seats from Russia."

He told lawmakers that neither Europe nor Japan will be ready to launch crews in the years immediately after 2010. But NASA could be ready to launch the shuttle's replacement earlier, by September 2013, at a cost of about $1 billion more a year in NASA's 2009 and 2010 budgets.

"I would like to look at that, because it's a worthy goal," said Hutchison, a Republican from Texas. "I would think this would be a priority the president and the American people would think would be a worthy goal."

Nelson noted that given the attitude of the current administration "the five-year gap could turn into six years, and that could turn into seven years."

"What do I do besides pray?" Nelson asked.

"I don't have a better plan," Griffin said. "I'm sorry."

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