And the major disagreements seem to revolve around two possible additions to the budget: an emergency Crew Rescue Vehicle for the International Space Station, and an unmanned probe to fly by Pluto.

First, on July 17, the GOP-controlled House Appropriations Committee voted to increase NASA's total funding by fully $415 million over the Bush request.

Fully $310 million of that increase would go to the Space Station -- with $275 million of it to restore development of a 6-person emergency Crew Rescue Vehicle for the Station, a lifting body vehicle which would allow the entire crew to evacuate the Station in the event of emergency and return immediately to Earth.

This vehicle -- along with a Habitation Module and a Propulsion Module to allow periodic reboosts of the Station as its orbit slowly decays -- was cancelled in the Bush budget as a result of NASA's sudden revelation this year of massive Station cost overruns.

Without these components, the Station is limited to a crew of only three people at a time during those long periods when a Shuttle is not docked to it, since there is not adequate room for the originally planned 6-person crew to sleep, and a Russian Soyuz craft (which can hold only three people) must be docked to it as its emergency evacuation craft.

And since just running the Station takes full-time work by two crewmen and about half the workday of the third, there is almost no time left to conduct the actual experiments which are supposedly the reason for the Station's very expensive existence.

Italy has expressed some interest in providing a Habitation Module itself -- and if a full-scale crew rescue vehicle can be restored to the program, the Station will once again be able to support most of its planned schedule of experiments - although a large centrifuge necessary for many of its biological experiments has also been cancelled for the time being.

The Propulsion Module is less urgent, since boosts by unmanned Russian Progress craft periodically docked to the Station can reboost it for a long time until the money for its own reboost module does become available.

The House Committee, however, provided relatively little in other new funds for NASA. $35 million more would be spent on research equipment for the Station, and $34 million would be added to NASA's academic programs, which are widely regarded as underfunded.

Another $35 million would be transferred from the Shuttle program as a result of NASA's recent cancellations of some Shuttle missions over the next few years, and used instead to start repairs on the giant Vehicle Assembly Building -- which is reportedly so dilapidated at this point that nets are used to catch chunks of concrete that might fall from its ceiling and damage the Shuttles within.

But NASA's Earth Sciences program funding would be reduced by $31 million, and funding for its Space Sciences programs would be cut by $27 million.

The Next Generation Space Telescope -- Hubble's successor, which was scheduled to be launched in 2009 to use a 6 or 7-meter wide cryogenically cooled mirror to make infrared observations of the extremely distant Universe to examine the early era after the Big Bang -- would have this year's funds cut by $20 million .

NGST is supposed to be far more capable than Hubble while at the same time costing only about one-third as much and weighing only about one-quarter as much, so that it can be launched on an unmanned booster to the "L2 Point" 1.5 million km from Earth's nightside to maximize its sensitivity.

This means that it requires the development of major new technological advances, including a huge multi-panel unfolding mirror which must be precisely unfolded to the right focus, and an efficient cooling system capable of chilling that mirror to only minus 223 deg C.

The House Science Subcommittee also cut $10 million out of the New Millennium program for space test flights of new experimental technologies, and another $10 million out of the STEREO mission that was scheduled to put two identical solar astronomy spacecraft into orbit around the Sun in 2004.

It did raise other Space Sciences spending by a total of $13 million -- but it provided no additional funding for one project that planetary scientists consider urgent: a Pluto flyby probe which would have to be launched in December 2004 (or, much less preferably, January 2006) to make a gravity-assist flyby of Jupiter and thus reach Pluto by about 2015 at the latest, before its thin atmosphere freezes out for nearly 200 years as it moves slowly away from the Sun.

But the Committee's counterpart -- the Senate Appropriations Committee, which is now controlled by the Democrats -- had different ideas.

Two days later, on July 19, it voted to increase total NASA funding by only $50 million over Bush's request -- and, in the process, it lambasted the Space Station wholesale. In fact, it voted to reduce total spending on the Station by $100 million.