By Yaël Ossowski | Florida Watchdog
MIAMI — History will be made at 3:47a.m. EST on Thursday in Florida.
The Dragon capsule will fly by the International Space Station at 17,500 mph, the minimum speed required to maintain orbit around the planet.
What makes the event so noteworthy relies less on the flyby and more on the capsule, the first privately launched space vehicle to breach the limits of Earth‘s lower atmosphere.
The project is the brainchild of billionaire PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, who founded Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or Space X, to carry forward the dream of space travel into the 21st century.
The Falcon 9 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral on May 22, en route to carry supplies and cargo to the astronauts on board the International Space Station.
One would think that such an achievement in private space exploration would shrink the role of the federal government, but nothing could be further from the truth.
In fact, in the age of revisiting costly government programs and runaway spending, the National Aeronautics Space Administration, the 58-year-old program, has yet to face the budgetary ax. The FY 2012 appropriation is $17.8 billion.
The FY 2013 Commerce, Justice and Science Appropriations Bill, passed in both congressional chambers and set to be reconciled by September, offers the following figures for NASA funding:
FY 2013 administration request is $17.1 billion,
FY 2013 Senate recommendation is $19.9 billion,
FY 2013 House recommendation is $17.5 billion.
President Barack Obama‘s recommendation, the lowest of the three, would cut NASA spending by 3.8 percent from the previous year, while the U.S. House would reduce it by 1.3 percent.
The U.S. Senate, staffed with space enthusiast and former astronaut Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson, recommends increasing the NASA budget by 9 percent.
Considering NASA’s budget annually in inflation-adjusted dollars, the trend shows that spending had modestly increased since 2007, and large-scale cuts that are scheduled in other agencies and departments are mostly absent from state-subsidized space flight.
It should be noted as well, however, that though Space X has raised nearly $1.2 billion in capital, more than $381 million has come from U.S. taxpayers, according to NASA.gov.
The space future in Florida
The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that 5,400 Florida jobs for NASA have been eliminated in the last two years, an often-mentioned statistic by Nelson.
Pandering to the Space Coast is not new, as witnessed by Newt Gingrich‘s “grandiose” promises about future exploration to voters during the Florida primary as he competed for the GOP presidential nomination.
“By the end of my second term, we will have the first permanent base on the moon and it will be American,” said Gingrich.
Politicians and bureaucrats alike still have high hopes for the NASA programs on Florida’s local economy.
When NASA administrator Charles Bolden testified before the U.S. Senate in March, defending the agency’s multi-billion dollar budget, he found a friend in Nelson.
“With a limited amount of money, we know we’re asking you to do an awful lot,” said Nelson. “You are not only preaching to the choir, you are preaching to the preachers.”
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