WASHINGTON — NASA’s proposed, and oft-reviled, Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) may be worth doing if it helps pave the way for an electric-powered interstellar rocket engine, Rep. John Culberson (R-Texas) said.
“[T]he great value” of an Asteroid Redirect Mission is “development of the first interstellar rocket propulsion system that would carry us to Alpha Centauri and beyond,” Culberson said during the closing moments of a March 4 hearing of the House Appropriations commerce, justice, science subcommittee.
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden was the sole witness at the hearing, a routine step in the annual federal budget cycle that gives the lawmakers in charge of writing spending bills their first chance to register an official reaction to the White House’s budget request.
Buried within the Obama administration’s $18.5 billion NASA request for 2016 is $69 million for a solar-electric propulsion system that Culberson, a devoted space buff who has proven as likely to support NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California as Johnson Space Center a short drive from his western Houston congressional district, sees as a crucial technological baby step toward sending humans some four light years from Earth to the solar system’s nearest stellar neighbor.
Source:
http://interstellar-news.blogspot.com/2015/03/us-lawmaker-wants-nasa-working-on.html
