Nick Lampson: “I wanted to come here this evening and talk to my colleagues for a few minutes about the VA-HUD bill that is going to…”

“I wanted to come here this evening and talk to my colleagues for a few minutes about the VA-HUD bill that is going to come up tomorrow and talk specifically about potential amendments that are going to be made. It is important for us to lend our support to the overall NASA budget and, specifically, manned space exploration and those items that center around the International Space Station. There has been an awful lot of talk in the last several weeks about potential cuts in the International Space Station because of the overruns that had been talked about for a long period of time. We are looking at building a facility that has never been built before and doing things that are absolutely new technology. The guesses in the expenditures of what it was going to take to create this facility have not always been right; and, unfortunately, we are facing more costs than what we originally anticipated. Something has to be done about that. We hope we will find a way in our committees to ask the tough questions of the contractors and of NASA to make sure that we get a better handle on what is going to be spent in the future with regard to any space activity, whether it is manned or robotic. But, right now, we are making some real serious decisions and potentially bad decisions with regard to the International Space Station.”