Spurring Private Aerospace Competitiveness and Entrepreneurship Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. BRIDENSTINE. I thank the chairman of the Science Committee for yielding and for his strong leadership on working this bill through regular order so that all of the amendments that we have made, all the Members have had their voices heard in this bill.

Mr. Chairman, I rise to oppose the amendment of the gentlewoman from Maryland.

The language she is proposing to insert into our House bill is authored by Senator Cruz of Texas, and it does have bipartisan support with Senator Nelson of Florida. But there are provisions that we got included because of the open process that we went through that are not included in that bill.

I would like to just run through a few of those that I, myself, got included into this bill, starting with section 110, which was an amendment I offered at markup that will require a GAO report to capture the role of space support vehicles--training vehicles, if you will--in the commercial space industry; regulatory and statutory barriers to the services these vehicles offer and recommendations for updates that will address these barriers. This is critically important in my neck of the woods. In the State of Oklahoma, we have a spaceport at Burns Flat. There are businesses there that are very interested in doing training for commercial crew and commercial spaceflight participants.

This was a provision of the bill that went through an open process. It was an amendment that was accepted in a very bipartisan way. And I am hopeful that when the full bill gets to the floor, it also will be accepted in a bipartisan way.

Additionally, title III of this bill incorporates H.R. 2261, the Commercial Remote Sensing Act, which was also bipartisan legislation that I introduced with my friend from Colorado (Mr. Perlmutter). This title sets metrics to give Congress a full picture of the workload facing the Department of Commerce when licensing remote sensing activities and what issues are preventing them from meeting statutory deadlines.

Title III also recognizes the importance of seeking input from the Advisory Committee for Commercial Remote Sensing, which is largely made up of private sector representatives. This legislation will be crucial as industry expands beyond traditional remote sensing satellites and activities and as Congress looks to update the statutes governing these activities for the first time since the 1990s.

My case for this being bipartisan is that I worked very hard with the other side on the amendments that I ultimately got into this bill. There were some amendments that maybe were not as bipartisan. But I would attest that there is support on the other side of the aisle for a lot of the provisions that we got into this bill.

I look forward to taking a vote on this bill. I oppose the amendment in the nature of a substitute. I encourage all my colleagues to pass the bill that went through regular order in the House of Representatives. I hear a lot of people talking about regular order. This was a very open process. Everybody had their voice heard. I encourage passage of the bill but not passage of the amendment in the nature of a substitute.

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