In 2008, Senator Mikulski and I included the first ever funding of $17 million for Adam Walsh enforcement in a war supplemental funding bill.

The President's alternative plan will actually cost us more money and delay our ability to get ourselves into space.

the question should be: How can we afford not to fully support them and ensure that they remain indisputable factors in driving our Nation's technical, industrial and scientific excellence?

Ending Constellation will devastate an industrial base critical to our national security.

Despite what I believe is the compelling logic suggesting we reconsider the decision to terminate the space shuttle at the end of the current manifest, the administration has chosen to hide behind the Bush administration mistaken plan.

How can anyone believe it makes sense to follow this plan for purely budgetary reasons--when we have just spent close to a trillion dollars on short-term relief?

The Bush administration failed to request a single dime of funding to reimburse NASA for the cost of re-certifying the shuttle program for its return to flight after Columbia.

I believe that has been reflected in the findings of the 'Gathering Storm' report, prepared several years ago under the leadership of Norm Augustine.

That is why I am so concerned about the Obama administration's response to the Augustine panel report.

If we follow the administration's plan 'we will have lost the many years required to recreate the equivalent of what will be discarded.'

We owe it to the American people. We owe it to the taxpayers. And we owe it to the astronauts to be very clear about what we are going to do and how are we going to do it.