Congress Grills Lautenbacher, Sega on NPOESS Cost Growth

摘要

Members of Congress implored two Bush ad-ministration officials during a Nov. 16 hearing to request additional money now to get a troubled weather satellite program back on track and avoid a possible gap in critical coverage of severe weather conditions like the hurricanes that recently devastated portions of the U.S. coastline. But Conrad Lautenbacher, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and Ron Sega, undersecretary of the U.S. Air Force, both said that more money in 2006 and 2007 would not help them mitigate the schedule delays on the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellites (NPOESS). The NPOESS satellites, which are being jointly funded by the Air Force and NOAA as the replacement for the two separate fleets of U.S. civil and military polar-orbiting weather satellites, are now expected to begin launching in 2012, two years later than last scheduled, Lautenbacher and Sega told the House Science Committee. From their opening statements through the end of the long session, members of the committee made no attempt to hide their extreme displeasure with the government's execution of the program.