Science, State, Justice, Commerce, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act of 2007
SCIENCE, STATE, JUSTICE, COMMERCE, AND RELATED AGENCIES APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2007 -- (House of Representatives - June 28, 2006)
BREAK IN THE TRANSCRIPT
Mr. FEENEY. Mr. Chairman, I thank the chairman for yielding me time; and I especially thank him for his strong support for America's space program. The Weiner amendment would take $477 million from NASA's space exploration budget, essentially would cripple the CEV-CLV program.
Ladies and gentlemen, just so you know what that means, we are scheduled to fly our last shuttle mission in the year 2010. We have a bird on the pad. We hope we get it up July 1 or sometime soon. But we will be down for sure by 2010. We will have no manned space flight program after that unless we continue with the CEV development. This amendment basically wipes out that development in this budget cycle.
I will tell you we need a next generation of vehicles or we will not be in the human space flight business. The Weiner amendment raids the account that is necessary to keep the workforce in place.
If you allow the workforce to disappear from 2010 to, say, 2015 or 2020, you can never replace these people. The expertise that you lose cannot be put back together again. Once Humpty Dumpty and the skilled workforce is dead and depleted, you can never put it back together.
But I am not here just to talk about America's space program. I want to tell my colleagues about a firsthand experience I had. If you are not concerned about space, you ought to be.
I was the first American, along with our colleagues Rick Larsen and Mark Kirk, invited to see the Chinese human space flight program. They got started in 1995. They are 35 years behind us in time, but they are remarkable in how fast they have caught up in their human space flight program.
The Shenzhou vehicle has flown five times now, twice with Taikonauts that have come back successfully, and they have had extraordinary success. While our workforce is basically keeping healthy a 40-year-old, 30-year-old technology, the young Chinese engineers have put together a remarkable new technology that will be very, very powerful in the future.
Mr. Chairman, I want to read the Chinese announcement of their own human space flight program. They say, by 2007, there will be a series of unmanned satellites from the year 2007 through 2015. Starting in 2017, they expect to have unmanned missions to the Moon to bring back lunar samples. By the year 2024, they say they will have landed men and women on the Moon.
Folks, I think their real schedule is much more ambitious than that. If and when we get back to the Moon under the Weiner amendment, we will be looking at Chinese flags and maybe Chinese bases when we get there.
And if that does not stimulate your competitive interests, I am telling you that they are producing 5 to 600,000 engineers a year, by a factor of 8 or 10 what America is able to produce. Nothing stimulates our math and science brains in middle and high schools more than space exploration. The Weiner amendment would put an end to that.
Finally, I will tell you if you are not worried about human space, China is developing the Long March 5 vehicle. It will be able to take 25 tons into orbit. It is not just their human space capabilities that they are working on. They are trying to get space predominance so that they can potentially incapacitate all of our communications satellite and all of the satellites that America depends on for our force multipliers that allow our military to be the most capable in the world.
Ladies and gentlemen, please do not gut the human space component of America's exploration; and, if you do, be prepared for what happens when the Chinese beat us to outer space.
BREAK IN THE TRANSCRIPT
http://thomas.loc.gov/