House SS&T Hearing on NASA's FY2014 Budget Request

The Space Subcommittee of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee held a hearing on NASA’s FY2014 budget request on April 24, 2013.  NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden was the witness.  SpacePolicyOnline.com published a summary of the hearing on April 24.  Major topics discussed were

• NASA’s new proposal for an asteroid retrieval mission;
• concerns about funding for the Space Launch System versus commercial crew;
• whether NASA will be given sufficient resources to pay for new responsibilities it has been assigned for building climate sensors, for operating a plutonium-238 production facility that for decades has been operated by the Department of Energy, and for initiating a new program to build a follow-on Landsat satellite that the Obama Administration had hoped to assign to the U.S. Geological Survey instead of NASA; and
• the proposed government-wide restructuring of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) programs that will see NASA’s role in these programs sharply diminished.