'Walking on air' over Hubble

Mission's success expected to ease budget fight for NASA

WASHINGTON -- Emulating the Endeavour astronauts, Rep. Tom DeLay did a "spacewalk" of his own at their success in fitting the Hubble telescope with new eyeglasses.

"I'm walking on air," said DeLay, R-Sugar Land, predicting that the budget fight for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration will be easier because of the flight's success.

House Space Committee Chairman George Brown, D-Calif., agreed. "The restoration of confidence in NASA's ability to plan and manage such tasks will make my job of lobbying for a stable space budget much easier, both for 1994 and for the future," he said in a statement from China, where he was traveling.

Not all were euphoric.

Rep. Pete Geren, D-Fort Worth, who serves on Brown's panel, said he sees the repair effort "as a mixed blessing."

"This particular episode has two sides to it," Geren said. "The reason we are doing it (the repair) is some mistakes were made earlier. This great success is at the same time a reminder of a very expensive glitch."

That makes the Hubble repair mission different from "the other manned space efforts that have been cause for great exultation," Geren said.

Rep. Louis Stokes, D-Ohio, who chairs the House appropriations subcommittee that oversees NASA's money, declined to be quoted on the Hubble repair success and its bearing on the station.

Another member of Congress, asking not to be quoted by name, said a person "could read a lot" into Stokes' refusal to comment on a space success.

But supporters of the space program, including some who had expressed "tough love" recently in urging NASA to spend its money wisely, exulted at the Hubble mission.

Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., who had warned a few days earlier that reaction to a Hubble repair failure could doom the space station, said Wednesday the effort "has been an unqualified success."

Aside from helping bring back space agency pride, the success of the opticians-in-the-sky "will also go a long way to restoring congressional confidence in NASA's ability to carry out its complex duties," Mikulski said.

She chairs the appropriations subcommittee that handles the NASA budget and, while a longtime supporter of the station, had emphasized with increasingly blunt language that NASA had to justify its mission more clearly to avoid slashes in its budget.

"One of the major technical achievements of the Hubble repair mission has been to show that astronauts can actually work in space, which will be a necessity for the space station program," Mikulski said. "The work of the Endeavour astronauts has shown that such effort is not just a scientific possibility -- it is a reality."

"Certainly, short term, it is a major boost for NASA," said Rep. Jim Chapman, D-Sulphur Springs, a member of the House appropriations subcommittee that handles the NASA budget.

"It is clear this was probably the most technically complicated mission they have ever done with the shuttle. So far, it appears it has been executed flawlessly. That will be of immense benefit to NASA in the sense of being able to execute a complicated scientific program," Chapman said.

"If this mission had failed, it could have been the straw that broke the camel's back, in the sense of an agency viewed as unable to accomplish its objectives," Chapman said. Although congressional debates over the space station and the role of the Russians will still be "vigorous," he said, the Hubble mission helps.

Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV, D-W.Va., who chairs the Senate space subcommittee, said he formerly opposed the space station as an expensive project that dramatized the poverty of his state.

But President Clinton and Vice President Gore brought him around, he said, and "I am really enthralled by the Hubble success. I think it makes a lot of difference for the space station. There is an increasing annual ritual to get rid of the station, and I think this will change some of those people."

DeLay, who serves on the House panel that holds NASA's purse strings, said the Hubble repair mission goes a long way to settle the argument over whether it is better to have astronauts or robots in space.

"NASA has proven that what detractors of manned presence in space have been saying is absolutely false," DeLay said. "A robot could not do what they did. It was a spectacular show.

"It also confirmed in the minds of some people that the United States needs to be involved in space to stay on the cutting edge. I am walking on air, because I think it makes our job (in Congress) much easier," DeLay said, anticipating budget fights ahead.

Author-historian Robert Smith of Washington, D.C., said that "the acid test" of the Hubble repair will be "if the capabilities of the telescope are improved. . . . The stakes were high for this mission. Obviously, NASA was in need of a successful mission. If it had not gone well, it would probably have become very difficult for the space station's international project."

Stephen Maran, a senior staff scientist at Goddard Space Flight Center, said the public belief is that one main reason the space program has consistent support is not just the science or "the worlds that we conquer, but the capability it exhibits for world leadership by this nation."

"This mission appears to re-establish NASA's capability to project that kind of leadership," Maran said.

"The final proof is going to be in the pictures, but thus far, I think people are entitled to their cloud nine."