On the recordFebruary 9, 2010
the President of the United States has come forth with a budget for the future of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. I can tell you that, among the aerospace community, it has not been well received. The perception is that when the President's proposed budget is to cancel the Constellation Program, which was the program from the previous administration that was to take us to the Moon by 2020--a position, by the way, that then-candidate Senator Obama had embraced--it has not been well received because the perception is that it is killing the manned space program for the United States. That perception is not entirely true, but we live in a world here in the government where we have to set policy and flesh out that policy with authorization and then appropriations for that policy. We live in a world where perception often governs instead of the actual substance. It is my hope, as we have a hearing in our Science and Space Subcommittee of the Commerce Committee, which I have the privilege of chairing, that we can start to separate the perception from the substance. What the President has proposed actually has some very good things.…
