Mr. SCHIFF. Madam Speaker, last week was one of extraordinary triumph for the Nation's space program. On Thursday, NASA announced that the Cassini spacecraft may have found evidence of liquid water reservoirs that erupt in Yellowstone-like geysers on Saturn's moon Enceladus. This stunning announcement was followed the next day by the successful orbital insertion of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter around the Red Planet.
I stand before the House today to celebrate these incredible technological achievements and wondrous scientific discoveries, but most of all, to honor those who made it possible, the men and women of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
JPL, which is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology, has designed, built and controlled many of America's most successful unmanned space craft. JPL has pioneered our exploration of space from Explorer 1, America's first satellite, to the Ranger and Surveyor craft that paved the way for Apollo to the Voyager spacecraft that explored the outer planets and are still continuing to send back data even as they leave our solar system.
JPL missions have increased our comprehension beyond anything even contemplated half a century ago. Every American space probe that has visited another body our solar system was managed by JPL. Through the wonders of technology, we have circled Jupiter with Galileo, sampled a comet with Stardust and rolled across the surface of Mars with Spirit and Opportunity. Cassini, which has been orbiting Saturn for just over 18 months, has transmitted stunning photographs and invaluable data on Saturn and its moons, while the Mar's Reconnaissance Orbiter, which will begin its science mission later this year, is expected to transmit more information about Mars than all of our previous Mars missions combined.
JPL's spectacular missions have not only brought us incalculable scientific data; they have also sustained American's interest in space flight, especially the Mars missions.
Now, as NASA prepares to accelerate the development of the Crew Exploration Vehicle and moves forward with plans to return humans to the Moon, the space agency and Congress must take care to continue to provide adequate resources to support the robotic exploration of space that is JPL's specialty.
Over the past months, NASA has worked to put into place a comprehensive program aimed at realizing the President's goal of landing an American on Mars. This is an ambitious and worthy goal, but the technological and physiological challenges, not to mention the cost, mean that it may be decades before an American walks on the Martian surface.
In the interim, we can continue to explore the Red Planet and our neighbors with relatively inexpensive probes that are better equipped than humans to survive the extreme hardship of long-duration space travel.
Madam Speaker, as we consider the future of our space program, I urge NASA and my colleagues not to deprive JPL, one of the crown jewels of American science and technology, of adequate resources. The Mars program is one of the centerpieces of JPL's focus and the lab has several exciting missions planned for the next couple decades.
But even as JPL unlocks the secrets of our planetary neighbors, it is poised to begin an ambitious search for habitable worlds around the stars, a search that will help to answer one of humankind's oldest questions: Are we alone in the universe?
SIM PlanetQuest scheduled for launch in the middle of the next decade will precisely determine the distances to stars throughout our galaxy and will probe nearby stars for Earth-sized planets. SIM will open a window to a new world of discoveries.
The Mars program and SIM PlanetQuest are ambitious and resource-intensive missions with long lead times. JPL has also been a leading NASA center for the Explorer that in the past has offered opportunities to carry out small and medium-sized missions that can be developed and launched in a short timeframe.
The Explorer program engages academia, industry, NASA centers and government labs in strong partnerships that provide young engineers, scientists, and managers the opportunity to develop and gain valuable experience on missions from inception to launch.
Unfortunately, as a result of budget cuts over the last few years, this important program is quietly being phased out. But I believe that we must consider the significant and damaging effect this will have on NASA's scientific and technological program.
I am especially concerned about the recent decision to terminate the NuSTAR mission before its interim confirmation review. This action will have permanent damaging consequences as it is causing the scientific community as well as industry to question the reliability of NASA as a partner and the wisdom of investing internal resources in the proposal development process.
The termination calls NASA's commitment to the peer review selection process into serious question and illustrates, in my view, a lack of appreciation of the serious investment made by the team at NASA to date.
While I understand that NASA is facing difficult budgetary decisions, the priorities must be set, it would be a severe blow to NASA science to allow such a low-cost, productive, and unique program like Explorers to be so severely cut. In particular the unprecedented action taken with NuSTAR will have lasting consequences for all future competed missions.
Madam Speaker, the decisions we make this year will have profound implications for the future of America's space program. Even as we celebrate JPL's most recent successes, I urge NASA and my colleagues to work to ensure JPL's leadership in exploring our solar system and the Universe beyond.