In the midst of what is being called the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, NASA was cleared for a slight pay raise. This week, President George Bush approved a spending plan for NASA that speeds up development of its replacement for the space shuttle and authorizes an extra shuttle flight presumably to deliver a $1.6-billion dark energy experiment to the International Space Station.
“I'm grateful to the president for his signature on the NASA Authorization Act of 2008,” NASA administrator Michael Griffin said in a statement. “The major provisions of this authorization bill affirm Congress' support for the broad goals of the president's space exploration policy.”
It may be the “president’s” policy, but it has fallen upon Congress to take the initiative to fund the proposal. The hard part is still ahead. Spending plans passed by Congress boost NASA’s budget to $20.2 billion -- $2.6 billion more than what the president requested -- but the funds haven’t been appropriated yet.
Still, it hasn’t been a bad year for NASA, considering. While Congress met to weigh options for bailing out the nation’s banks and financial firms, the space agency won a critical battle to keep U.S. astronauts aboard the space station.
The agency battled two formidable foes: Inertia and Outrage. Inertia left NASA in the difficult of position of needing an act of Congress exempting it from a trade ban on Russian space services. Not only do Russian ships serve as the station’s lifeboats, they currently are the only vehicles that will be able to transport people to and from the outpost after the shuttles are retired in two years.
Outrage stemmed from two main issues: Simmering regrets that years of short-sighted policy and a leadership vacuum has left the U.S. in what Griffin has called an “unseemly” position of being dependent on Russia to use its own space station; and outright anger that the U.S. was indeed in the unseemly position of condemning Russian aggression into neighboring Georgia and then turning around and paying Russia for rides to space.
Apparently, this is what it takes to run a space agency in the United States these days -- to divorce yourself from the outside world and carry on as if it were the country’s absolutely top priority. I’ll be thinking about that as I sit in Houston on Nov. 3, the day before the presidential election, not watching the Dow or covering the polls. That’s the day NASA plans to brief the media about outfitting the space station for more crew.
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