Texas lawmakers balk at cutting manned spaceflight

Everyone in Washington wants fiscal restraint these days – except when it comes to their priorities. Case in point: NASA.

Texas lawmakers in both parties are girding for battle with the Obama administration over the future of human spaceflight. Many of the same lawmakers routinely accuse the president of sending deficits into the stratosphere.

“It’s a matter of priorities,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas. “We can find that money in other parts of the budget.”

President Barack Obama unveils his annual budget Monday, and reports last week indicated that he wants to abandon the Constellation program that George W. Bush launched in 2004, effectively ending the human spaceflight effort.

He would add about $6 billion over five years to the space agency’s $18.7 billion annual budget – granting an exception to the discretionary spending freeze he promised recently. That’s enough to extend the life of the International Space Station to 2020 and spur private companies to develop craft to ferry astronauts when the space shuttles retire in a few years. But it’s about $55 billion short of what NASA would need to return astronauts to the moon in the next decade.

In the current fiscal climate, with the national debt topping $13 trillion, the White House doesn’t see that as a high enough priority.

Others disagree.

“I do believe that we need to cut spending [but] … we should focus on things that are important and cut in areas that are less so,” said Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, the top Republican on the committee that oversees NASA. She called it “very short-sighted. … We’ve already made such an investment.”

Even her Washington-bashing rival, Gov. Rick Perry, seems to agree. He told Houston station KTRK-TV last week that he “could probably find a lot of earmarks where billions of dollars were spent” on projects that didn’t help the Texas economy nearly as much as NASA.

Rep. Pete Olson, a Sugar Land Republican whose district includes the Johnson Space Center, also wants Obama to reconsider.

The Democrats, he said, “have wasted billions on a stimulus bill that sent funds to his supporters and has failed to create jobs or stimulate our economy.”

“Human spaceflight,” on the other hand, “accounts for thousands of high-paying American jobs,” he said. “President Obama has sadly been focused on the wrong priorities for America.”

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