Mr. SCHIFF. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me the time, and I want to join the chairman and my colleague and friend, the gentleman from California (Mr. Dreier) from the San Gabriel Valley in strong opposition to the Markey amendment.
I appreciate the colleague's interest in increasing funding for the Superfund program, and I share that desire, but this is most emphatically not the way. To divert $115 million in funds away from a critical NASA project, Prometheus, is not the way.
Project Prometheus and the exploration of the icy moons of Jupiter has been rated as top priority by the National Academy of Sciences. JPL has recently launched two Mars Rovers, aptly named Spirit and Opportunity, to land on the red planet and determine whether there was or has been water on that planet and help science unlock the geologic mysteries of our solar system.
This work in Project Prometheus is a bold, new venture and will revolutionize solar system exploration using nuclear power and propulsion. Project Prometheus will enable more robust and ambitious scientific missions by supporting more complex scientific instruments, enabling significantly larger and faster data communication networks and allowing a single spacecraft to visit multiple targets per mission.
Using nuclear power and propulsion systems will exponentially increase the amount of power available to spacecraft instruments and enable vastly greater amounts of scientific data to be returned to home, 120 CDs worth of data compared to one or two floppy disks of information today. It will allow much more time for scientific observation of the moons, 180 days, opposed to only 1 to 5 hours using conventional technology.
This project's spearheading the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter mission will be the first application of these new technologies for a flight mission. It will search for evidence of global, subsurface oceans on Jupiter's icy moons.
This is a top priority, and I urge rejection of this effort to rob Peter to pay Paul.