The latest attempt by sympathetic Senate lawmakers to add $1 billion to NASA's budget request to help the agency recover from the lingering financial effects of the Columbia accident and Hurricane Katrina has failed in conference with the House, according to Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), one of the amendment's co-sponsors.

Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) has spearheaded the "NASA Restoration Amendment" two years in a row, along with Hutchison and Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), as a one-time emergency reimbursement to the agency akin to the money it received after the 1986 Challenger accident

Both times the amendment made it into the Senate's version of the Commerce, Justice, Science (CJS) appropriations bill that contains NASA's budget. Last year, the CJS bill was never brought up for a vote in the 109th Congress and NASA was funded for FY '07 under a continuing resolution.

Congressional conferees have nearly finished work on the compromise FY '08 CJS bill, which also includes the budgets for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Commerce Department (of which NOAA is part), the Justice Department, the National Science Foundation and numerous other agencies. However, the Bush administration has threatened to veto the entire CJS appropriation for containing spending above the White House's request (DAILY, Oct. 5).

Hutchison commented on the fate of the NASA amendment during a Nov. 15 hearing of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation subcommittee on space and aeronautics, on which she is ranking member under Chairman Bill Nelson (D-Fla.).

Nelson repeatedly challenged the realism of NASA's plans to complete the International Space Station (ISS) and retire the space shuttle by no later than September 2010, particularly if shuttle Atlantis is retired early in 2008.

Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for space operations, testified that the remaining shuttle manifest contains five months of margin and assumes a flight rate of four missions per year, which is "very achievable." He said, however, that NASA may decide to fly Atlantis for two additional missions.

Hutchison reiterated her concern about the gap between the scheduled shuttle retirement and the operational debut of the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle, which under current budgets won't be until March 2015 at the earliest. "Our goal is to close that gap," she said.

Responding to a question from Hutchison on how far the Orion's debut could be safely advanced given enough funding, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said that September 2013 would be the earliest date, although that would require "substantially more than is being allocated in the budget today."

Richard Gilbrech, NASA's new associate administrator for exploration, said the Constellation program would have to receive an additional billion dollars in FY '09, plus another billion in FY '10 to advance the Orion to September 2013. The technical pacing item, he said, is the development of the J-2X engine that will power the Ares booster's upper stage as well as the Earth Departure Stage.

Hutchison said she would make it a "priority," starting in FY '09, to try to find that additional $2 billion for NASA, although that would likely require offsets within the agency. Nonetheless, "I would like to look at that, because it's a worthy goal," she said.