Whatever science and technology experiments the US finally does conduct on the Station, according to current plans, will then be run for only six years before the US abandons the Station completely to whatever Russia, Europe and Japan might want to do with it.

In turn these costs must then be added to President Bush's new post-Shuttle manned program, the Vision for Space Exploration (VSE) -- which will begin with a relatively simple and low-cost manned spacecraft and booster best described as an enlarged Earth-orbiting version of Apollo.

Following on from this the new manned launcher will rapidly evolve into a major new manned lunar program comprising an enlarged 4-man version of the Apollo lunar missions and which is supposed to land the next American team on the Moon by 2020. Moreover, it is supposed to evolve into a full-scale permanently manned base at the lunar South Pole.

Given both the greater difficulty of the task, and the fact that the ISS' estimated total cost has ballooned since 1985 from $9 billion to over $90 billion (including the necessary Shuttle flights) - such a lunar base will almost certainly cost $200 billion or more if it is ever started at all.

The current plan calls for the costs of the VSE to increase rapidly from $3.9 billion in fiscal 2006 to $17 billion in 2020 --requiring a 50% increase in NASA's total current $15 billion budget.

Show Us The Money
Where will the money come from for the ever-growing maws of these two simultaneous manned space programs ?

One possibility would be to enlarge NASA's total budget -- the scenario that is currently being pushed by many space-program advocates, including the Planetary Society.

The other alternative is to bleed much or all of the new funding needed from the rest of NASA's budget -- including its unmanned space science program and its aeronautics research.

A third alternative would be a mix of new funding and reallocation of existing funds.

No matter which funding scenario is adopted, NASA and Congress have been approaching an unavoidably painful decision regarding the future of America's space program, and until Jan. 31 there was no good indicator of which way Congress would jump.

Simply by procrastinating endlessly in making a decision, last year's GOP-controlled Congress made it even harder to tell what would be done. But now, the new Democrat-controlled 110th Congress has given a clear indicator of how it intends to deal with the cost problems of at least one of the two manned programs -- and possibly both of them, if it summons the courage to make an additional decision.

Congress' infamous recent procrastination in trying to deal with the nation's expanding deficit has extended far beyond NASA. In fact, after the Democratic victory in the November elections, the very last act of the GOP Congress was simply to punt on its responsibilities for almost all of the federal budget -- and adjourn without passing any Fiscal Year 2007 budget measures whatsoever for any governmental departments other than Defense and Homeland Security!

The result is that -- to fund all the rest of the federal government's agencies -- the new Democratic Congress has passed a "continuing resolution" that would simply fund all federal government branches at something very close to their total Fiscal Year 2006 levels, and then spend the rest of 2007 debating a detailed FY 2008 budget.

The new Democratic leaders of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees (David Obey of Wisconsin and Robert Byrd of West Virginia) are now in the process of drafting - with little debate - such a continuing resolution. What's interesting about this is that it still allows considerable shuffling of funds around within each major federal agency. And one of those agencies is NASA.

Quoting the Jan. 31 Democratic press release describing the new continuing resolution: "Under the measure filed today, most programs will continue to be funded at the 2006 levels adjusted for increased pay costs. Limited adjustments were made within the confines of the Republican budget resolution to meet critical needs including: meeting new needs in Veterans Healthcare and Defense Health programs; making significant investments in public housing; increasing funding for scientific research; and increasing the Labor, Health and Education bill to keep up with inflation, a promise the Republican leadership had made but never delivered."

The resolution does increase the budgets of some science agencies within the federal government -- including the National Institutes of Health -- and holds the budgets of others steady instead of making the expected cuts in them (including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration).

But what about NASA?

The new Democrat-controlled FY 2007 budget responds to its funding crisis in a way that was generally predicted -- it hacks away wholesale at President Bush new manned space program, including its eventual lunar initiative.

And while this is program is almost entirely the doing of Bush and the Republicans, making it an obvious target for the newly controlling party, a fair number of Democrats from space-industry states did support it, and no one was sure how big the cuts would be.

Now we know.

President Bush had originally asked for $3.978 billion for "Exploration Systems" (the group name for the new program, including both its early Earth-orbiting Crew Exploration Vehicle, the "Ares 1" launch vehicle, and the program's later expansion to the Moon). The 109th Congress never even got so far as to hold the final joint conference at which the differences in the NASA budgets desired by the House and Senate would be resolved -- but the two chambers did pass their separate NASA budgets.

The House removed $160 million from Bush's request, and the Senate only $43 million. But the new 110th Congress' budget removes fully $576 million from Bush's request, trimming it to only $3.402 billion.

It's clear that, for as long as the Democrats remain in control of Congress (let alone the White House) they will continue to shrink Bush's original plans and possibly eliminating the manned lunar program altogether, and limiting the CEV to a low-cost Earth-orbiting version of the Apollo command ship.

What they will do with the current Shuttle/ISS program is less clear -- indeed, this is the burning question for NASA. The reason for this is that the current Democratic Congress is much more shy about cutting the Shuttle/Station program, because a large number of Congressional Democrats under the direction of the Clinton Administration continued to fund that twin program even as its remaining limited capabilities collapsed and its costs continued to skyrocket.

All this continues irrespective of the growing number of Congressmen who are willing to openly say that the Station will be completed as a piece of pure pork - with almost no actual scientific return expected for the $90 billion that will have been poured into it.

The officially sanctioned alibi for this position is that failing to complete the ISS at this point -- when the two orbiting lab modules built by the European Space Agency and Japan are yet to be launched -- would "seriously damage our relations with our international partners", as they have already spent several billion dollars apiece building their respective lab modules.

However, it has been pointed out that simply reimbursing Europe and Japan for their wasted money, and then shutting down Shuttle/Station without attaching any further modules to it, would actually cost the US far less overall.

Moreover, the actual space agencies of Europe and Japan, ESA and JAXA would not be grief-stricken at such an agreement. Even given the far lower costs of their own contributions, those lab modules are also widely regarded by many in their home countries as a pair of white elephants.

And the idea that the current Administration cares what Europe thinks does not match the past six years of highly strained American-European relations. As to Japan, Tokyo foreign ministry officials have said in the past that it is Washington's call on the Space Station, as they are the ones who are paying by far the most significant share.

As such, the real reason why the new Congress will be less likely to apply its ax wholesale to Shuttle/ISS is simply that doing so would embarrass not only a lot of Republicans, but a lot of still-incumbent Democrats.

Funding LEO "Exploration Capabilities"

The 2006 story of funding "Exploration Capabilities" (the Shuttle/ISS program) was already complex. Bush asked for only $6.235 billion for it (almost $700 million less than the previous year), and the House cut another $41 million out of that. But this was all a blind.

NASA had made it clear that the ballooning costs of just returning the Shuttle to flight after the Columbia disaster so that it could finish assembling the Station, and trying to make it as safe as possible (which isn't very safe), would require no less than $2 billion in additional funds over the next two years. The result was one of those fake Kabuki rituals so common in politics.

The Senate Appropriations Committee -- after initially saying that it too would pass a Shuttle/Station budget similar to Bush's -- suddenly allowed influential pro-space Senators Marbara Mikulski (Democrat-Maryland) and Kay Baily Hutchison (Republican-Texas) to attach a massive additional $1.040 billion dollars to NASA's budget as an "emergency funding measure" solely for the Shuttle's Return To Flight program, without cutting any money out of the rest of NASA's budget. (Their plan was to also provide another $1 billion in extra funding to NASA's FY 2008 budget.)

Thus the 2006 Senate's total stated budget for NASA was almost $17.8 billion -- over a billion dollars more than either the White House or the House had favored. How this huge dilemma would have been resolved in the House-Senate conference, God only knows -- which is why the 109th Congress was happy to kick this problem down the road to the new Democratic Congress, along with so many others.

Yesterday's new funding resolution slams the total funding for Shuttle/Station right back down to only $6.140 billion -- slightly less than even Bush's and the House's original figures.

The big question now is whether the Kabuki play will be repeated, with Mikulski and Hutchison again tacking a last-second huge increase onto the Shuttle budget and the Senate hastily passing it. There are fully eight months remaining in which such an amendment (along with any others) could be attached to the Continuing Resolution.

But there are some indications that the new Congress may indeed be willing to take a big bite out of Shuttle/Station as well. Quoting the American Institute of Physics:

"Senators are expected to debate the Iraq war next week, and then turn to the funding resolution [which has already been passed by the full House]. Some senators are already signaling their opposition to the bill, and said that they may try to amend it, which would require that a conference be held between the House and Senate before the legislation could be sent to President Bush. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has said that floor procedures are under consideration, but noted that if the funding bill is not completed by the 15th that the government will close down. One news publication quotes him as saying that he was not going to be 'a Mr. Nice Guy' in getting the legislation passed and sent to President Bush for his signature before this deadline."

In short, if we are going to see such a giant switcheroo in what Congress really intends to do about Shuttle/Station, there is apparently very little time left in which to pull it. And it might be very hard, in that short time, to decide just what money to pull out of NASA's other programs in order to pay for even a smaller increase in Shuttle funding.

Assuming that the Democrats even stick partially to their current position where Shuttle/Station is concerned, the verdict is in: the new Congress takes a much, much dimmer view of America's manned space program in general than any previous Congress in history. And the current continuing resolution -- by cutting $1.6 billion out of last year's total Senate budget for the manned space program -- avoids any massive cuts in NASA's unmanned programs - with only $79 million out of Bush's original $5.330 billion request for space science.

In fact, it actually adds $40 million to the $492 million he had requested for "Cross-Agency Support Programs" (education, business and university partnerships, and attempts to improve management and bookkeeping for NASA's centers). And it adds fully $166 million to NASA's funding for Aeronautics research, completely reversing Bush's attempt last year to cut aeronautics spending down to $724 million - a move that even last year's GOP-Congress was unhappy with and had tried to partially stop).

Even ignoring the burning question of Shuttle Return-To-Flight funding, the devil, of course, is now in the details.

Where space science is concerned, we as yet have no idea where that $79 million (at least) of cuts in space science will come from.

The one thing that seems reasonably certain is that spending on climate-change observation satellites will be sharply increased from what Bush had planned -- especially since the National Academy of Sciences has just issued a report condemning the Bush Administration's recent cuts in funding for such satellites at precisely the moment when it seems sensible for mankind to know with reasonable certainty whether or not serious man-made global warming will actually occur, and how serious it may or may not be.

But it's impossible to know where the cuts will come from in other parts of space science.

One possibility is the Hubble Telescope's planned 2013 successor, the James Webb Space Telescope.

This mostly-infrared instrument was originally sold with the confident statement that it would cost far less than Hubble -- in fact, not much over a billion dollars. But like so many of NASA's initial cost estimates (for both manned and unmanned missions), this was a fairy tale -- the Webb Telescope's current estimated cost is $4.5 billion and still rising.

It is by far NASA's most expensive current unmanned space mission, and it is sucking funds wholesale out of all of NASA's other planned space-astronomy missions -- including both cosmology studies and NASA's planned search for habitable planets orbiting other nearby stars.

From the viewpoint of sheer rationality, another promising target would seem to be the final planned Shuttle mission to repair the Hubble telescope in 2008.

From the very beginning, these repair missions have been pure frauds as supposed "cost-savers". Their total cost, which NASA has feverishly tried to conceal with creative bookkeeping, has been about $2 billion apiece. A completely new replacement Hubble could have been built every time from the original blueprints, and launched on an unmanned booster, for considerably less money -- and probably with new instruments better than those that could ever be installed in orbit on the original Hubble. Even the non-defective backup mirror for the original Hubble is still in storage!

But it is extremely unlikely that this will be done -- once again, simply because it would embarrass far too many still-sitting Congressmen who, innocently or not, went along with NASA's Hubble deception. That final 2008 Shuttle Hubble repair mission -- unnecessary high cost, unnecessary dangers, and all -- will almost certainly fly.

Postscript: Bruce writes... There are some indications today that the "Congressional Kabuki play" that I talked about may indeed come to pass -- Mikulski and Hutchison may indeed get their $1 billion increase for Space Shuttle funding added once again to the "Continuing Resolution" FY 2007 NASA budget, by attaching it to a farm bill this month -- Moreover, today's FY 2008 NASA budget from the White House, is noteworthy for what it DOESN'T change... more to come in the next few days.

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