WASHINGTON - Congress is preparing to take a close look at NASA's budget and its future after the Columbia disaster, and Maryland Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, one of Capitol Hill's most enthusiastic champions of the nation's space programs, has an influential seat at the table.
After a decade of work on space issues, Mikulski will play a key role in the coming weeks in defining Congress' response to the Columbia accident and determining how the nation should explore space in its wake.
As the senior Democrat on the Senate committee that funds the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Mikulski is in a prime spot to help shape the agency's budget - and with it, the direction of the shuttle program and the entire national space agenda.
Mikulski will not be a part of the congressional investigation into the shuttle loss, set to begin next week. That review will be led by the House Science Committee, with a separate series of hearings to be held by the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. The investigation is to begin Wednesday morning, when the two panels are scheduled to hold a joint hearing with NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe.
Some members of Congress are raising questions about NASA's investigation, concerned that the external board conducting it - to be led by Harold W. Gehman Jr., a retired Navy admiral - will not be sufficiently independent. They are calling for an outside investigation, perhaps modeled after that of the commission then-President Ronald Reagan established in 1986 after the space shuttle Challenger exploded.
Mikulski said such a board may ultimately be necessary to help determine the future of U.S. space exploration, but for now, she wants to hear from NASA.
"My goal is the immediate one - to solve the Columbia problem. ... I'm concerned about what went wrong," Mikulski said in an interview yesterday. "What I want from NASA is a rigorous, thorough investigation with absolute candor - no holds barred on what happened."
Beyond that, Mikulski said, she and her panel will be assessing "the overall safety, reliability, viability, durability, capability" of the shuttle and considering alternatives for space transportation if the program proves beyond repair.
Mikulski and Sen. Christopher S. Bond, the Missouri Republican who is chairman of the subcommittee, say they want to hold a hearing on shuttle safety as soon as NASA is prepared to present them with information about the Columbia mission.
"If there's some clear, crying need that [NASA] can identify" for shuttle safety, Bond said, he will work to insert money into the first funding measure he can find, whether it's the still-unfinished 2003 budget, a midyear supplemental spending package or next year's budget.
Unlike some of her colleagues, Mikulski said she is not ready to blame the Columbia accident on insufficient funding for the shuttle program in general and safety in particular.
"We have consistently made shuttle safety and astronaut safety our No. 1 priority," she said. But Congress needs to do more than just fund the shuttle, she said, if it wants to advance space exploration; it must establish an entirely new space transportation system.
"We have aging technology, we have an aging work force," Mikulski said of the shuttle program. After they figure out what went wrong with Columbia, she said, Congress and NASA must decide how to run a "balanced 21st-century space program."
Mikulski has long fought to increase funding for NASA even as she has challenged the agency to control its costs and make new strides in space science and exploration.
"Senator Mikulski is and has been one of the foremost champions of NASA and its mission," Bond said. Mikulski sat at the helm of the panel for five years early in her Senate career, and then again from June 2001 until late last year. She "has been steadfast on space shuttle safety. She has made that the No. 1 concern," Bond added.
Her longstanding fascination with science has prompted Mikulski, a third-term senator, to develop an expertise in space programs, colleagues and scientists say, making her a crucial "go-to" player on the issue in Congress at a critical time.
Mikulski, who is better known for fiery speeches on social issues such as labor protections and education, can talk at length about NASA's highly technical programs and missions, sprinkling her discussion with words such as "dazzling" that betray a childlike enchantment with the subject.
"She has a deep, personal, abiding concern and love for the people who take the risks to be astronauts," Bond said.
Mikulski is one of several "space senators" in Congress, so called because their states are home to the major space centers. They sit on the powerful appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA and steers millions of dollars to their states in the process. In her 14 years on the panel, Mikulski has been a stalwart defender of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, fending off proposed budget cuts throughout the 1990s and once helping save it from being shut down.
Mikulski said her interest in space and science dates back decades to when, at age 9, she became fascinated with Marie Curie - a fellow Pole who was a scientist and the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. Mikulski set her sights on being a doctor but realized during her freshman year in college that she had no knack for science.
"After one semester, I found out that I was better being interested in science than I was in doing science - I was really klutzy," Mikulski said. Still, she added, "I have always kept an interest in scientific discovery."
Space scientists praise her dedication to their endeavors.
"Over the years, she became what I would say is the most eloquent spokesperson for space science in the entire Congress - House and Senate," said Stamatios Mike Krimigis, director of the space department at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. "She has been a hero to the science community."
Mikulski's devotion to space science has been a relief to researchers such as Krimigis, who remember all too well instances in NASA's history in which science was starved while human space exploration received the lion's share of federal money. Mikulski has worked hard to maintain a strict separation between the two pursuits - never robbing one to pay for the other, supporters say.
"She has insured over the last few years that there be basically a firewall in the budget between the human part of the budget and the science part of the budget," Krimigis said. "She has been the sentry of the firewall - she really has made sure that science was not raided."
That could become more difficult with the added attention the Columbia disaster has attracted to the shuttle program.
"For me, I was always for a balanced program," said Mikulski. "Space is not risk free - we need to understand that - and if they're willing to put their lives on the line, we need to" provide the necessary funding.