With Congress Lacking Vision, NASA Keeps The Faith

With Congress more focused on social programs, tax cuts and votes towards the future, NASA is not dismayed by Washington’s lack of support for the Centennial Challenge.

(Aviation Week) NASA says it will continue to support its Centennial Challenges prize program, despite the fact that Congress may be on the brink of denying funding to the effort for the second year in a row.

Senate appropriators have voted to deny the program’s $10 million fiscal 2007 budget request, although the Senate and House have yet to agree on a final FY ’07 NASA budget (DAILY, Nov. 29).

Centennial Challenges is still planning to offer purses for seven prizes totaling $10.9 million, using funds originally appropriated for FY ’05, according to NASA spokesman Dave Steitz. “We have spread out the money into the ‘out years’ to allow for multiple challenges and purses,” he told The DAILY.

Although this is a classic example as to why the public can not rely upon government initiatives to bring us to the stars, (as politics can be short sighted at times) this move by NASA to continue financial support shows that their is some hope for the space agency.

If NASA began to actually apply more of this “solar backbone” when it comes to politicians and bureaucrats, the US could seriously implement Buzz Aldrin’s road map to Mars within our lifetime.

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