NASA
Preserving America’s Leadership in Space Exploration
June 03, 2004

Measuring the future value of President George Bush’s vision for exploring outer space is a lot like the question Americans faced 200 years ago in measuring the future value of President Thomas Jefferson’s vision for exploring the Louisiana Territory. The ultimate cost in lives and treasure of exploring outer space is unknown to us today, just as Americans in 1804 could not know the ultimate costs of exploring the west when they launched the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

One thing we can be absolutely certain of is that our descendents in the near and distant future will benefit immensely by our decision to fulfill President Bush’s vision to explore outer space in the same way that generations of Americans have benefited from the fulfillment of President Jefferson’s vision to explore the west.

Miniaturization of computers, pumps, valves and power generators and all of the other technological spin-offs of America’s space program have already produced innumerable benefits. Image processing technology used in Cat Scanners and MRI machines was originally developed to create computer-enhanced images of the Moon for the Apollo program. Pacemakers were first developed using NASA’s miniature electrical systems for satellites. Weather predictions, worldwide communications, hand held cell phones, and high tech and low tech devices from ATMs to Velcro were all originally developed for America’s space program.

In the Texas Medical Center, after Dr. Michael DeBakey performed a successful heart transplant on NASA engineer David Saucier, the two of them teamed up with NASA to combine the space shuttle’s high speed high capacity fuel pump technology with Dr. DeBakey’s miniaturized heart pump technology to produce the MicroMed-DeBakey ventricular assist device. This heart pump is about the size of a penlight battery, yet it has successfully kept critically ill patients alive for up to two years while they wait for a heart transplant. The device works so well that it has even helped weakened and damaged hearts repair themselves and eliminated the need for a transplant.

How do we measure the value of saving or improving human life? How do we measure the value of expanding America’s wealth, prosperity and power? How much of our nation’s unsurpassed wealth and quality of life and growing productivity can be directly tied to the high tech spin-offs and scientific research inspired by space exploration? Remember also that much of America’s unparalleled growth in worker productivity is a direct result of the rapid improvements in high technology and communications.

Scientific and medical research and America’s space program are national insurance policies and essential guarantees for the nation’s future prosperity and freedom. My hero, Thomas Jefferson, liked to point out that “Freedom is always the first born child of science.” It is primarily because of the spreading light of scientific knowledge and the freedom it has spawned that life in the developed world is no longer “nasty, brutish and short,” as Thomas Hobbes so correctly said it had been since the dawn of humanity.

I was in the control room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on January 24 when the second Mars Rover opened its eyes for the first time, and we all had an exhilarating eureka moment as we realized this first photograph showed a layered rock formation that appeared to have been laid down by water. On March 2, JPL and NASA scientists announced that these rocks had indeed been saturated with liquid water, and in the weeks since then, the more closely they look, the longer it appears the water was present, which significantly increases the chance JPL and NASA will find fossils, or perhaps life itself.

How do we even begin to measure the value of the discovery of liquid water on another planet, or the discovery of past or present life on another planet? How could Lewis and Clark measure the value of the new people, animals, plants and minerals they discovered?

Today Houston is leading the nation in developing the science that will come to define the 21st Century: nanotechnology. The just founded Alliance for Nanohealth will bring together all of the institutions of the Texas Medical Center and Rice University and the University of Houston and the Johnson Space Center. The Alliance for Nanohealth is my highest priority on the Appropriations Committee.

I am working to help them create a new scientific institution which will be the best in the world far into the 21st Century. The Alliance will combine all of the human capital and genius and wealth of their immortal member institutions. Houston and our Medical Center offer bionanoresearchers the world’s largest patient population. All things considered, Houston is ideally positioned to dominate the field of nanobiotechnology far into the future. A carbon nanotube is so perfect in every conceivable way that nanotechnology will touch and improve the life of every person living on Earth throughout the remaining ions of human civilization. Of this I am certain.

All of this, and so much more that we cannot yet imagine, lies within our reach to improve and lengthen our lives and the lives of our descendants if Congress will fund regular strong increases in federal spending for scientific and medical research in general, and for space exploration in particular. For President Bush’s space vision to succeed, all that is necessary is for Congress to make a comparatively modest financial commitment today to add one billion dollars per year over the next five years to NASA’s current budget request.

Very few if any Congressmen have a more fiscally conservative record than I do, and I truly enjoy cutting wasteful government spending and shutting down or stopping inefficient and unnecessary government programs. As a first term member of the House Appropriations Committee, I have developed a reputation of saying “no” to almost all of the spending requests that I receive because I will not rest until the federal budget is permanently balanced and the national debt is paid in full.

President Bush is also committed to balancing the federal budget, so he designed his vision for space exploration to fit within a balanced budget. After five years, NASA’s budget will grow only at the rate of inflation. During the Apollo era, NASA represented over 4% of the federal budget. Now it receives one sixth of that, and under the current budget will still remain under a 1% share of the overall budget.

Americans understand better than anyone else in history the value of bold dreams and the benefits of courageous leadership where no human has gone before. Beyond the tangible benefits that will improve our lives and strengthen our nation, we must also fulfill the President’s vision for space exploration because it will strengthen the American spirit.

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