Timothy Roemer: “But within NASA there are probably only 100 higher priorities than this sending monkeys into space for the Russians.…”

“But within NASA there are probably only 100 higher priorities than this sending monkeys into space for the Russians. There are only probably one million higher priorities within our own budget with $15 million, and certainly there are three or four higher priorities for joint United States-Russian cooperation from the Nunn-Lugar language to dismantle nuclear weapons, from the research we are doing on Chernobyl, from the different and important things that we do in energy cooperation. I think that this is one of the lowest priorities that we can possibly have in expenditures of taxpayers' money. I would encourage my colleagues to vote to get the monkey off of NASA's back and get the 400-pound gorilla off the taxpayers' backs.”