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Congress guts commercial crew in favor of the Senate Launch System
The Senate bill has similar changes. It provides commercial crew with $900 million, $344 million less than the request. The funding is also moved from NASA's exploration account to its space operations account, which primarily funds the International Space Station. The report accompanying the bill explained that the move will allow the overall ISS program "to be analyzed and evaluated in its entirety."

"By gutting this program and turning our backs on U.S. industry, NASA will be forced to continue to rely on Russia to get its astronauts to space."
-- NASA Administrator Charles Bolden
Another program cut from the administration's request is space technology, which receives $600 million, a reduction of $125 million. The bill also requires NASA spend $150 million of that on a satellite servicing mission concept called RESTORE-L. Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), ranking member of the full appropriations committee and its CJS subcommittee, has been a strong advocate of that effort, based at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

The bill report explained that funding for RESTORE-L was explicitly included in the bill "so it continues in a timely fashion and to avoid lingering drains on satellite servicing funds that have been diverted to other purposes in earlier years."

Other programs received funding increases. The bill provides $1.9 billion for SLS, an increase of $544 million above the administration's request. It also gives the Orion crew vehicle $1.2 billion, $104 million more than the request. The additional funding for SLS is intended to allow its initial launch "as early as possible in 2018," the report stated.
SLS is known by space scientists as the Senate Launch System and with its capsule Orion has something in almost every congressional district but NO MISSION of import and is too expensive to really be useful.
Posted by: 3dc 2015-06-12
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=420340