WASHINGTON - It is too soon to tell what impact the loss of the shuttle Columbia will have on NASA's budget, space agency officials said Sunday.
Despite the Columbia tragedy, NASA's budget request for the next fiscal year will be sent to Congress Monday as planned along with the spending priorities for all other federal agencies.
However, the loss of Columbia will almost certainly require the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to refine its spending plans in consultation with Congress.
But agency officials aren't ready yet to discuss the fallout.
``I'm not going to speculate,'' said Robert Mirelson, a spokesman at NASA headquarters. ``The budget is X amount of dollars. How that money is readjusted is something for down the road that will be addressed by the Office of Management and Budget and the administration.''
NASA officials gave reporters a preview of the budget Friday with the understanding that details would be withheld until the official release on Monday afternoon.
Mirelson said it would not be appropriate to disclose the agency's spending blueprint, even for space shuttle safety upgrades, in light of the loss of Columbia.
Administrator Sean O'Keefe and NASA comptroller Steve Isakowitz were to brief reporters at headquarters Monday but that meeting was cancelled to give agency managers time to focus on more immediate concerns, Mirelson said.
Sarah Keegan, a NASA spokeswoman who specializes in the agency's budget, said she had no information about whether agency officials had begun to rework the budget numbers.
The budget request is to be the first that has been fully shaped by O'Keefe, a management expert appointed by President Bush to straighten out the civilian space agency's culture of cost overruns and schedule delays.
When O'Keefe took the helm, slightly more than a year ago, the agency was reeling from a budget that had been cut approximately 40 percent during the 1990s.
Personnel cuts downsized the agency from 25,000 civil servants in 1993 to just under 18,800 in 2002, a 30 percent decrease. The agency was left with a troubling skills gap. Scientists and engineers age 60 or older now outnumber their under-30 colleagues by three to one.
Although Congress has not yet finalized the spending levels for the current fiscal year, NASA was expected to get $15 billion, a slight increase from last year.
NASA's budget request for the next fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1, was expected to be no more than $15.6 billion, which would represent the maximum four percent increase President Bush said he would allow for domestic discretionary programs.
Spending on the space shuttle program has hovered around $3 billion per year and was not expected to change much through 2007.
With Columbia gone, there are a number of obvious spending
decisions confronting NASA.
The agency must decide whether to build a shuttle replacement, accelerate safety upgrades to the remaining three orbiters, or perhaps pour money into the orbital space plane project that O'Keefe and the Bush administration unveiled last November as the likely successor to the shuttle era.
The absence of Columbia will relieve NASA of having to spend money for its maintenance, preparation and launch, but there is now the additional cost of recovering the spacecraft debris from Texas and Louisiana and the ensuing investigation into the catastrophic loss.
Columbia's fatal descent throws another curve into NASA's
spending plans regarding the International Space Station.
With the remaining three shuttles grounded for the foreseeable future, costs associated with those flights appear as if they will be deferred. However, O'Keefe's goal of completing U.S. construction on the orbiting research laboratory by 2004 now seems in jeopardy. The budget ramifications of that aren't clear.
As the shuttle fleet sits idle, there is also the possibility Russia could be called on to make additional trips to the space station with their Soyuz and Progress ships. If so, the United States would likely be asked to pay Russia for the launch services and the vehicles, an expense not currently in the budget.
There is also the possibility that the Columbia tragedy could break down the walls between the shuttle program and the Defense Department that went up after the 1986 Challenger explosion.
O'Keefe and the Bush administration had already shown a willingness to move toward more joint work between NASA and the military services.
Lawmakers are now sounding a similar refrain.
``You can take some of the funding of the developing of new technologies (and) shift it to an agency that's flush with cash,'' Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Florida, said on Fox News Sunday.
Nelson, who once flew on a shuttle mission when he was a congressman representing Florida's Space Coast, said with the Defense Department researching a next-generation reusable space vehicle, NASA could then devote more spending to immediate safety upgrades on the shuttle fleet.
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Texas Republican who represents Johnson Space Center in Houston, said she believes NASA should be getting more money, if only for national security reasons.
``We've got to be the major country in the world that can use the satellite communications,'' she said on Fox News Sunday. ``Look at what we were doing in Afghanistan. We had Predators (drone aircraft) shooting missiles that were guided through satellite communications to targets within 50 feet. It is phenomenal what we have been able to do, and there is more, and we need to be the first ones to get it."