Now, To Congress

The Augustine committee has now presented its recommendations on the immediate future of NASA's manned spaceflight program to Congress, but its clear some in Congress aren't ready to change course without a fight.

The committee laid out several possible ways forward, with only a small minority of those using the hardware currently being built for the Constellation program. Some in Congress object to wasting all the money already spent on that effort; they argue the current program should be strengthened, not discarded. The Augustine committee counters that approach by arguing Constellation is vastly underfunded, too underfunded to meet its goals. To do so, the committee says, would require $3 billion more dollars per year.

Not so very long ago, that seemed like real money. The fact is, however, that Congress has been dealing in much higher figures than that, basically in lump sums, since the invasion of Iraq. Three billion dollars a year is not a showstopper to Congress. There's also another funding possibility. If a moonbase program is pursued internationally, NASA's new partners in the effort should certainly be ready and able to pick up at least that much of the tab.