Dale Bumpers

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. I thank the Chairman. Mr. DURBIN addressed the Chair.

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, this bill includes the Rural Community Advancement Program which provides flexibility to tailor financial assistance to applicant needs. Through this program rural business enterprise grants are made available. As you are very well aware, I have pursued funding for the Arkansas communications project since March 1992. This project will provide a statewide communications and education network that will eventually include all Arkansas publicly funded 2- and 4-year institutions of higher learning, research and extension centers, cooperative extension county offices, many rural hospitals, and State and Federal Government office buildings. The network will include compressed video, TV/video production, and data networking. When completed, the project will serve the large rural population of Arkansas as well as provide linkages and educational support to our more urban areas. This committee first voiced its support for the project in the fiscal year 1993, and the committee has continued to note its support every year since. Unfortunately, the University of Arkansas Divisions of Agriculture, which is sponsoring this project, has endured mixed results in getting the Department of Agriculture to honor the wishes of this committee. Promises were made and broken until the project came to the attention of Under Secretary Thompson and her staff in Rural Development. She and they have offered invaluable assistance, and I am pleased to note that the division received funding for the first phase of the project earlier this year and is actively seeking funding for the second and third phases. I should also note that the division has already committed sizeable non-federal resources to the project while reducing the total cost by nearly one-third. Am I correct in noting that the committee still strongly supports completion of this project? Mr. COCHRAN, The ranking member is correct.

Mr. BUMPERS. And am I correct in noting that the committee will continue to actively monitor the progress of the Department toward fully funding the Arkansas communications project in a timely manner?

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, let me echo the comments of the distinguished Senator from Mississippi, Chairman Cochran. I subscribe to everything he said. I also want to especially thank the distinguished Senator from Kansas for his very, very kind, laudatory comments. Having said that, let me just say I am not going to object to the amendment either. I think, in a way, it is a little bit of a sledgehammer approach. But, by the same token, the Senator is entitled to the report he requested a very long time ago. It is a legitimate request, and the Department should have responded to it much sooner. The Department objects to the amendment, but I am going to, on behalf of this side of the aisle, say I will accept the amendment and I strongly encourage the Department to respond, so, possibly by the time we get to conference, we can deal with this amendment. But let the Department know in advance that unless there is a very firm commitment made, the Senator's request will be honored and the amendment will wind up in the conference committee report. So, I am going to clear this amendment for this side of the aisle.

Mr. BUMPERS. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Yes. With some reluctance, Mr. President, I must object.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. And there would be no way for the Feds to make them enforce it?

Mr. BUMPERS. That includes the present 4-plus million.

Mr. BUMPERS. Now, the administration has asked for an additional $34 million?

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, will the Senator from Iowa yield for a question?

Mr. BUMPERS. I think it might be helpful if we engaged in a few questions and answers to understand precisely what this amendment is. I have not been sure all along I understood it. There is presently a Federal law which prohibits the sale of cigarettes to anybody under 18 years of age, is that correct?

Mr. BUMPERS. And does the Federal Government provide any funds to the States for enforcement of that law at present?

Mr. BUMPERS. The question is, do we provide any money for them at this moment for the enforcement of this law?

Mr. BUMPERS. If we develop a formula along the lines I mentioned a moment ago, where say my State of Arkansas would get 1 percent, what if we were to say to the Federal Government: We don't like the rule and we are not going to enforce it. Keep your $340,000. Would the Federal Government have any recourse against the State of Arkansas?

Mr. BUMPERS. I understand there is $4.9 million available for that purpose, is that correct? Mr. STEVENS addressed the Chair.

Mr. BUMPERS. I thank the Senator. Mr. STEVENS addressed the Chair.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. I am delighted to do that. I am sure we can reach an agreement on a time certain to vote and even a wrap-up time for each side, if that is possible.

Mr. BUMPERS. Let me suggest we agree on this without getting a formal agreement. That we start on this again at 4 o'clock, and I promise, say, 15 minutes would do me to wrap it up, maybe 15 minutes on your side, and we could vote at 4:30.

Mr. BUMPERS. I apologize for going longer than I intended. I was having such a good time. As I told the Senator earlier, I do have a little thing I need to tend to during the noon hour. Let me just suggest I be permitted to leave while people on your side speak on the other side of this issue, and then perhaps we can rejoin the issue around 2:30 after the caucuses. However, I understand there may be something else coming up.

Mr. BUMPERS. I am happy to yield to the Senator.

Mr. BUMPERS. I appreciate the Senator.

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I send an amendment to the desk.

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, this is the sixth year that I have stood at this desk and lamented the fact that we have become inured to projects which have massive cost overruns if it means a few jobs in our State or if it means you can cast a cheap vote and not pay a price for it back home. Now, I have been here for 22\1/2\ years, and I have watched this body time and time again proceed continuously to vote for such things as the space station whereas if it were a secret ballot it would not get 25 votes. The facts and the evidence are absolutely overwhelming against going forward with the space station, and yet because of the issue of jobs back home, it is very seldom that anyone casts a vote against it. Also, there is no political price to pay, even if you do not have jobs back home, hinging on going forward with the space station. There is no political price to be exacted against you for voting for something that people know very little about and have never honed in on. My wife, Betty Bumpers, a woman I admire very much for her courage, started a peace organization in 1981, and I said, ``What you have done is just assured your husband's defeat in the next election.'' She said, ``Yes, and you men are going to get my children killed.'' And so I had to dance around that issue until I ran the next time fully expecting to be confronted by my opponent about my wife's activities in the peace movement. Now, isn't it a strange dichotomy in America, that one has to be defensive about being for all the things that would promote peace. That is how strange this place is at times. Of course, Betty has been active in childhood immunizations all of her life, and all of my political life--she had started a program in 1972 to immunize all the children in my State, which had one of the lowest immunization levels of any State in the country. We immunized 300,000 children one Saturday. She was known then and is still known as the one of the foremost leaders in immunization programs in this country. I remember one day in 1973 some smart reporter said, ``Senator, do you think your wife's activities''--he was referring to peace, of course--``Do you think your wife's activities are going to be a big detriment to you in your campaign?'' I said, ``Well, it will be among all those people who favor war and not immunizing children.'' And I never got asked another question about it. I do not mean to sound arrogant about being willing to stand up occasionally for something I strongly believe in, but occasionally I chastise some of my colleagues who could save the taxpayers billions of dollars and hasten the day we balance the budget, but who refuse to do it because there is no political accounting for voting for the space station, particularly now when the rover is roving around on Mars. As a matter of fact, I know this is pure coincidence, but if you want to go over to the Dirksen Building, it just so happens that, at the same time we are considering the space station and the entire space budget in the Chamber, NASA has a thrilling show in the Dirksen Building for all the Senators to see of the rover roving around on Mars sniffing rocks. Let me say--and I have said this for 6 straight years--I favor the space program. I have never once lamented the fact that we have a shuttle program and that we have the ability to place all kinds of scientific and communications satellites in orbit. And in sending the rover to Mars, NASA is doing exactly what it should do, because that proves another point. We do not need a manned mission to do science on Mars. Mr. President, almost all the scientists in the country, virtually every Nobel physicist, virtually every scientific group in America, opposes the space station. Unfortunately, they don't have enough political clout to fill a thimble. I admire them, I respect them, but the truth of the matter is, they have very little impact on this body or the House of Representatives on what they favor or don't favor. One day on this floor, I said even Carl Sagan was opposed to the space station. Carl Sagan, whom I had known for several years--we weren't close friends, but I had been thrown in contact with him a few times--called to say that I had misstated what he believed. What he said was, ``I believe the space station is a legitimate thing, a highly desirable thing, as a way station to get to Mars. But,'' he said, to follow that up, something that I have always strongly believed, ``it is not--it is not a wise expenditure of money if you are talking about scientific experiments to be conducted on the space station.'' That is one of the reasons the American Physical Society and so many other groups oppose the space station. People around here are sometimes influenced by how somebody feels about it. I will tell you who strongly opposes going forward with the space station: The Concord Coalition, which was headed up by our now deceased, highly respected colleague, Paul Tsongas and by Warren Rudman, also our former colleague from New Hampshire. The Concord Coalition, Citizens Against Government Waste, the Cato Institute, the Progressive Policy Institute, the National Taxpayers' Union, and Citizens for a Sound Economy. Then, in the scientific community, listen to this: the American Physiological Society, the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, the American Society for Investigative Pathology, the American Institute of Nutrition, American Association of Immunologists, American Society of Cell Biology, the Biophysical Society, the American Association of Anatomists. Who comprises the American Physical Society? It is 41,000 physicists. Dr. Robert Park, a professor of physics at the University of Maryland at College Park, has testified time and again here about the folly of justifying the space station by alluding to the kind of scientific experiments they are going to do on it. Mr. President, my amendment says we will terminate the space station at a cost of $600 million and we will save $1.5 billion to put on the deficit. Sometimes my staff presents me with some alternatives. ``Why don't we say we are going to put this $1.5 billion in savings into some other popular program?'' I said, ``I have been there and done that.'' I remember when I first got into trying to torpedo the space station, I would have transferred the money over to Veterans Affairs. That is usually an item that causes Senators to jump under their desks. If you are going to give it to the veterans, most people around here will look very cautiously before they vote no. But I didn't get any more votes than I have been getting since. We have become so inured to cost overruns, we just simply cannot stop a big project once it is started. Only two things that come to mind that we finally did stop. One was the Clinch River breeder reactor, which incidentally was also my amendment. Howard Baker was majority leader. Maybe you think that wasn't an uphill battle. But the American scientific community began to rise up in arms, and the environmentalists threw a fit. So, finally we decided that we did not want to follow the breeder reactor method of generating electricity in this country and we finally killed it after I spent 4 years standing at this desk, talking about the folly of that project. We had already started digging ground down in Clinch River to build it. The other thing we terminated was the super collider. That's another one of my amendments. I guess the reason they happen to come to mind is that I happen to be the architect of killing both of them. The super collider, this massive hole in the ground in Texas, nobody really talked much about the science of the super collider. All they talked about was all the jobs it was going to create in Texas, which indeed it would have. Let me just, while I am on the subject of jobs, point something out. The space station--if you want to make it a jobs program go home and tell the chamber of commerce that it costs $140,000 for every job it creates. Take the same proposition to General Motors or anybody else: You come into our community and we will give you $140,000 for every job you create. They will be standing on line from here to New York to try to take you up on that offer. You think about the fact it costs $10,000 to $12,000 a pound for every pound of material we send to the space station. And now there is an estimate, if you have four astronauts on board, they can only devote 4 hours a day each to research-related activities. So, if you have four American astronauts, that's 16 hours a day that they could put into science. Do you want to know how expensive that is? Well, NASA says it will cost $1,300,000,000 a year to operate the station. So, it will only cost the taxpayers $230,000 for each hour the astronauts put in actually working on scientific experiments on the space station. Do you want to hear one better than that? The space station is to have a 10- year life and it will cost all-told about $100 billion. Figure that one out: $25 million a day is going to be the cost of keeping the space station up there. Do you have any idea, when we sit in the Agriculture Committee talking about research, how we have to grovel and fight and scratch and claw for every dime we get for research? Do you have any idea what $25 million will do? Do you know the National Institutes of Health can only fund one out of every four good scientific projects that are brought to them? And we are talking about honest to God research. Research on cancer, on AIDS, on arthritis--every conceivable kind of disease that afflicts mankind is handled through the National Institutes of Health, to which we give about $13 to $14 billion a year. And they can only fund one out of every four experiments. That is real science. You can book it. Do you know what real medical research could be done if we simply gave them the cost of one space shuttle flight? They could fund one out of every three proposals. Last week I conducted a hearing on immunizations. There is going to be a big to-do over at the White House tomorrow on the remarkable success we have had on immunizations. In a hearing last week it was revealed by some pharmaceutical companies, and the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, that we now face the possibility of eliminating measles worldwide, as we are about to eradicate polio worldwide. We now have new vaccines, even for children's earaches; even for dysentery. Last year we had 50,000 hospitalizations last year of children with dysentery, and 20 children died--but worldwide those figures are nothing. Worldwide, dysentery kills so many children--but not as many as measles. Does that shock you? Measles is still the biggest killer of children in the world; 1 million children a year die of measles. At the hearing they told us about all these new vaccines. For example, for infants--put a little something in each nostril of the nose and they will never get flu. You can also use that in combination with another vaccine which, as I say, will keep them from getting dysentery. I'll tell you what I'll do, I'll stand on my head on the top of this Capitol if you ever get anything even remotely close to those kinds of advances after you spend $100 billion. For 6 years I have listened to Senators come over here, they are my friends and colleagues and I don't denigrate their feelings about it, but when you start asking, ``What are the scientific experiments we are going to conduct?'' ``Well, we don't know. We have to get up there and find out what we are looking for.'' It was Dr. Nicolaas Bloembergen, of Harvard, who made the best statement I ever heard about research on the space station. Incidentally, he is adamantly opposed to it. I'll come back to that. I'm going to take about 20 minutes just reading quotes from the top physicists, medical doctors, you name it, about the space station, before I sit down. Do you know what he said about microgravity research, which is the big thing everybody talks about; that is research you do in weightlessness? He said, ``microgravity is of microimportance.'' That says it all. Why else would we be sending a station up there to do scientific experiments except it is a weightless situation? Another great physicist whom I will quote in a moment said, ``It is the worst place to do microgravity research with men on board or women on board.'' That is because, if you are looking for an experiment that requires weightlessness and you have people tromping around in the station and vibrating it, you lose the benefit. You would expect a 6- year-old to understand that. Mr. President, let me just bring you up to date. In 1996, the General Accounting Office to do a report on the space station. It was not the most devastating report I ever read in my life, and of course I was looking for something that I might hang my hat on that just might jar this place into action. But there were really no bombs in the 1996 GAO report, except they predicted that unless certain things happened certain other very undesirable things were going to happen, namely unless the Russians came through with their part of this project the cost was going to skyrocket. One Senator came to me in 1994 and said: ``Dale, I think this cooperation with Russia is a tremendous idea. We can keep their space scientists busy and they won't be off in Iraq and Iran, building missiles for some of the rogue nations.'' And he said, ``You know, we have to help the Russians all we can. They have big problems.'' I said: ``That's right. But if we are going to send them $200 million for openers, just to say they will be a part of the international space station, I say send it to them in economic aid or food. That is what they need. They do not need to be participating in one of the biggest boondoggles ever conceived. What they need is something to help their people with their infrastructure, build industry, feed their people.'' So what has happened, as predictable as night following day, is Russia has reneged. We gave them close to $200 million for openers to build the first section of the work they were supposed to do. We gave them that money. They were supposed to build the service module. There are nine modules on this space station. They were supposed to build the third one, but a very important one, called the service module, and they have not been able to come up with all the money, nor are they likely to. I will return in a moment to some of the consequences of that. But back to the GAO report. Congressman Dingell and I asked the GAO to update their 1996 report. Here is the update, which we received last night and which anybody else who wants it can get this morning. Here is what the GAO update says. If there is anything people around here detest, it is somebody going around telling them, ``I told you so,'' so I won't say it. Listen to this: The prime contractor's-- That is Boeing's---- cost and schedule performance on the space station, which showed signs of deterioration last year, has continued to decline virtually unabated. Since April 1996, the cost overrun has more than tripled. Let me repeat that: Since April 1996-- A little over a year ago-- the cost overrun has more than tripled and the schedule slippage has increased by almost 50 percent. Does it not take nerve to come in here asking us to go forward with a $100 billion project in the light of that? Financial reserves are dwindling with up to 6 years remaining until on-orbit assembly of the space station is completed. That is what we are looking at now. We still have 6 years to go before we even get that sucker assembled in space: . . . with up to 6 years remaining until on-orbit assembly of the space station is completed. NASA has already identified actual and potential resource demands that exceed the station's remaining financial reserves. As the French say, here comes the piece de resistance: NASA transferred $462 million from its science budget to the space station development budget in fiscal years 1996 through 1998. Why did NASA transfer $462 million from its science account to the manufacturing of the space station? To cover the cost overruns. And the $462 million comes out of the science budget. Either you are going to reduce the scientific experiments on this thing by $462 million, or NASA is going to come back to Congress and say we need $462 million more. Which do you think that is going to be? We all know what it is going to be, and this is just the beginning: It is also planning to transfer another $70 million in fiscal 1999 from the science fund to the station development budget. Mr. President, NASA says that to assemble and build the space station, the cost will be $17.4 billion, and within that are these scientific funds. They are taking money from Peter to pay Paul, but they are taking money out of the account that they say is absolutely essential to justify the space station, namely, the science that we are going to get. You can't have it both ways, or you can, too, in the U.S. Senate. Congress approved the transfer of $200 million this year. We approved a $200 million transfer from the space shuttle. I just told you that they have transferred $462 million from their science account over to the space station account. Now we are giving them authority to transfer money from the shuttle account, the manned space program that most people around here applaud, and are putting it into the space station. Why? To cover the cost overruns on the space station. It is the most traditional, time-honored shell game that any of us know anything about, and that is to cover the cost incurred because the Russians have been so late in coming up with their money. There is another $100 million pending in Congress for the year 1998. That is in the House bill; that is not in the Senate bill. But, in addition to allowing them to take $200 million out of the shuttle fund and put it into the space station, now the House has said, ``We will give you another $100 million to transfer to the space station.'' This is actually outside the $17.4 billion. The $462 million in science funds is inside the $17.4 billion and can only be classified as a whopping cost overrun. This is one of the most interesting things that the GAO report said: When NASA redesigned the space station in 1993. . . . You remember, President Clinton looked at a whole list of them and finally came up with what was finally called International Space Station Alpha: When NASA redesigned the station in 1993, it estimated that Russia, as a partner, would reduce program costs by $1.6 billion because the station's assembly would be completed sooner. It would be finished in June 2002 instead of September 2003, the proposition being that if the Russians came through, we would build it faster and, therefore, save $1.6 billion. Mr. President, those are not my figures, those are NASA's figures, those are NASA's statements. And this is what GAO said about it: NASA has recently acknowledged that completion of the station's assembly would indeed slip to 2003. . . . Fifteen months later than we have been told since time immemorial this thing would be finished. While NASA has not acknowledged the 2003 date, they have yet to tell us what the new milestone will be. And the GAO says: Consequently, most, if not all, of the reduced costs claimed by accelerating the schedule by 15 months would be lost by slipping the schedule by a similar amount. In short, now we are back to the old time schedule, and the $1.6 billion that NASA said they would save by bringing Russia into the program and, therefore, building it 15 months sooner than we would otherwise have built won't be saved. NASA has not told us yet precisely when they expect to have this thing finished, nor precisely what a 15-month slippage at this point is going to cost, though I can tell you, based on the conversations I had with people who know more about this program than anybody else, it is $2 billion. Mr. President, I tried to torpedo the space station since the memory of man runneth not. I have tried in almost more times than there have been design changes, new partners, and new promises by NASA, and until this very moment, NASA is trying to con the Senate by showing this magnificent film about Mars over in the Dirksen Building and still smoothly promising that everything is running on target, on schedule, and the only reason we know that isn't true is because GAO has done two studies that contradict NASA 180 degrees. We don't need a space station. The Mir is the seventh Russian space station. The Mir has been in orbit, how long? Eleven years. The Mir has been up there 11 years, and now it is in big trouble. I am not saying that is predictable. I will say this, and this is not to bash Russia--I believe in doing everything we can to help their economy and keep them viable--but their space program is not as sophisticated as ours. While I understand all the arguments for bringing Russia into this, I am not sure scientifically and from a safety standpoint it is good to do it. But the point I wanted to make is, again, I have stood on this floor for 6 long years and said show me, tell me what are the scientific achievements Russia has achieved in 20 years of having a space station in orbit. And I have been met by a deafening roar of silence. There are none. The only justification for a space station is as a way station to Mars. Mr. President, look at this chart, and I will say that in 1984, Ronald Reagan, I think it was in a State of the Union Address, said we were going to build a space station--that was in 1984; that has now been 13-plus years--we were going to build a space station for $8 billion and deploy it and operate it. That was the initial promise of the President. At that time, here were the justifications. Look at them. It was going to be a staging base, presumably to go to Mars. It was going to be a manufacturing facility. We were going to manufacture a new kind of sophisticated crystal in a microgravity atmosphere. It was going to be a space-based observatory. It was going to be a transportation node. It was going to be a servicing facility, presumably for people on their way to Mars. It was going to be an assembly facility, again, to assemble the parts of a space station to go to Mars. It was going to be a storage facility. And, finally, it was going to be a research laboratory. You can see from my chart how many of those exist today. Seven of them have been torpedoed, and only one remains standing. Go back to the original $8 billion that President Reagan said it was going to cost. Here is an update on that. I tell you, I cannot keep the grin off my face as I go through these things. You just cannot believe it, you cannot believe it, and yet Senators will come in here and vote for this thing. The President said $8 billion. Here is what we spent on the Reagan plan--$11.2 billion. That is gone. What we got out of that is so infinitesimal you might as well have thrown the money off the Washington Monument. It would have helped a few poor people. So when Bill Clinton became President, he said this thing is out of control, we have to have another look at it. So we have a big design--a design-off I guess you would call it. And they look at dozens of plans over at the White House about what kind of a space station it ought to be. Obviously, the first one was much too grandiose, going to be much too costly. So they come up with the International Space Station Alpha. And we are going to participate with Europe and Canada and Japan, and now of course Russia. And here is what the construction cost was going to be between 1994 and 2002--$17.4 billion. I have alluded to that figure several times already. Now, anybody who believes that the construction and development of the international space station is going to be $17.4 billion, you go ahead and vote for it. You have my permission. You certainly will not lose my friendship, if you actually believe that. But if you actually believe that, you haven't got enough you-know-what to be a Member of Congress. But if you believe that, go ahead and vote for it. The GAO had just gotten through issuing a report this morning saying that is nonsense. And here is the operating costs for 10 years, $13 billion. Mr. President, do you know the cost of this program and the cost of all the 83 shuttles it is going to take to get it up there and supply it? The cost is going to be staggering. You know, the cost of gold is $325 an ounce today. That is peanuts compared to what a pound of water will cost to supply these astronauts, just peanuts. It is like 33 times more to send a pound of water. Maybe not that much. I do not want to exaggerate too far. So here is your operating cost, $13 billion. Here are the shuttle flights needed to launch, service and use the station in space--$50.5 billion. Mr. President, let me tell you something about that. At present, that is 83 launches that are going to be necessary to deploy it and supply it for 10 years after it is deployed--$50.5 billion. That is calculated I think on the basis of the space shuttle, the flights running around $475 million each. I can remember when I used to get teary-eyed seeing that shuttle take off when they first developed it. Such a magnificent thing to see. One day somebody told me each launch cost almost $500 million, and my eyes dried up almost immediately. Here are just the related costs of the space station--$1.9 billion on these shuttle flights. Let me tell you, if you believe that 83 shuttles will leave within a 5 to 7 minute launch window without a hitch over the next 15, 16 years, you vote for it, if you believe that every shuttle is going to go up without a hitch, rendezvous with the space station without a hitch, take the needed supplies to the astronauts, all of that, and every launch launched within a 5 to 7 minute timeframe, which is absolutely necessary. And if you do not make it within that 5 to 7 minute envelope, you delay the launch and the costs soar. I have a chart here, Mr. President, about the cost of gold. I guess we can all relate to gold. Here it is. The present cost of the space station is estimated by GAO--incidentally, this is not Dale Bumpers; this is GAO--$94 billion. That is 25 times its weight in gold. And, as I said earlier, that is $25 million per day of operation. It is a jobs program. I said 140,000 jobs. Each job costs $147,000. Three States--California, Texas, and Alabama--they get about 78 percent of all the money. The other 22 to 24 percent goes to virtually every other State. There are only a handful of States that do not have a little piece of the action. NASA is not stupid. They took a leaf out of the Pentagon's book. And they put those contracts into almost every State. I think there is a little $50,000 contract in Arkansas on the space station. That is just not quite enough to influence me. It provides no commercial value. And it costs $12,880 to transport one pound of material to the station. Mr. President, let me now go to what some of the scientists say about this project. Before I do that, here is another little overrun. You cannot compute the cost on this--this is manhours--but I want you to think about this. In 1993, NASA said that the assembling of the space station would require about 311 hours of EVA--extravehicular activity. It is space walking. In 1993, they said it would take 311 hours of space walks to assemble it. Then they decided they miscalculated, and they moved it up to 434 hours. And then they decided they miscalculated it again, and in 1996 they said, ``We miscalculated, and it's going to take 1,104 hours of space walking to assemble the station.'' And now, just very recently, believe it or not, 1 year from the time the first launch is supposed to occur, they say it is going to take 1,519 hours. NASA has only miscalculated by 500 percent the number of hours it will take to assemble the space station. And their calculations on everything else are running pretty close. Mr. President, let me tell you what people who know a lot more about the science than I do are saying. Incidentally, I watched Senator Glenn yesterday. He is not just one of my very dearest friends, he came to the Senate with me in 1975. He is one of the finest men--I think just the finest, most decent man I have ever known. We do not disagree very often, but we disagree strongly on this. We battle back and forth in the cloakroom about it. He has circulated a brochure that ties the space station to research on aging. God knows, I ought to be interested in that. Well, ironically one space shuttle flight to the space station will cost almost as much as the entire $454 million budget of the National Institute on Aging. One space shuttle flight would finance the National Institute on Aging for 1 year. Now, you ask yourself, do you think you are really going to get anything about aging out of the space shuttle? What you are going to get is an expensive $450 million, and you are going to get nothing. If you gave it to the National Institute on Aging, you at least have an outside chance of something happening. Here are the editors of Discovery Magazine from May 1997, 2 months ago. Listen to this: There is no use belaboring the point. Only the naive or the vested still maintain that there is any good pragmatic reason to spend the tens of billions of dollars it will take to complete what started out in the early 1980s as Freedom and now endures as the International Space Station. . . . Is it possible to imagine a technological undertaking so enormous that could garner less respect from the scientific community? That says it all, but I am not going to quit. Here is what Marsha Smith, who was interviewed in Aerospace America in June 1995, said I visited with her in my office yesterday. She is the brightest person in this country on this subject. She does not try to tint it one way or another. She just calls it like it is. She is not unalterably opposed to the space station, for that matter. But I say this simply to demonstrate publicly my intense and high regard for her. I don't know of any breakthroughs that have come out of [Russian] space station programs in terms of new or cheaper- to-produce materials or scientific discoveries . . . . Mostly they have learned how to operate a space station for long periods of time. Now, Mr. President, I again issue the call. What have the Russians got for 20 years of having the space station in orbit that is worthy of the name ``scientific''? Listen to what Tim Beardsley of Scientific American said in June 1996, a little over 1 year ago. The value of biological and health research in orbit has been challenged by Elliott C. Levinthal, a former program director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [that is called DARPA over at the Defense Department] . . . Levinthal, who has been a professor of genetics and mechanical engineering at Stanford University, asserts that no neutral committee handing out funds for basic research in biology would support microgravity studies. And that is all the scientific justification you can find for the space station--microgravity research. Anything else obviously you can do here on Earth. As a matter of fact, you can do this in the shuttle. You can even do it in unmanned flights. James Ferris of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Scientific American: Nothing has come out of microgravity research to convince me that a material can be fabricated in orbit that is going to be better than what you can make on Earth. Why do we want to spend $100 billion to manufacture something we can do just as well on Earth, and for a fraction of the cost? Here is what the German Physical Society said. And incidentally, Germany is involved in paying for some of the costs. Except for investigations carried out on humans themselves, all experiments in this area of research can be carried out unmanned, without loss of precision. This also applies to microgravity. Therefore it is improper [it is improper] to use microgravity as an effective argument in favor of manned spaceflight. That statement was endorsed by the European Physical Society, all the physicists in Europe, the Physical Society of Japan--our physicists' counterpart in Japan--the Canadian Association of Physicists and the American Physical Society. So, Mr. President, there you have it. International space station Freedom, partly being paid for by the Japanese, by the European Space Agency, by Canada--forget Russia for the time being. And how do their physicists feel about it? There is the European Physical Society, the Japanese Physical Society, the Canadian Physical Society and the American Physical Society, and that takes just about every physicist in America, who says this is improbable nonsense. It reminds me of going to a doctor and saying, ``Doctor, I have this hurting in my chest,'' and he x-rays me and says, ``It looks to me like you have cancer.'' And I say, ``Well, it may be, but I will go find a Senator to validate this. I'm not taking your word for it; I want to take the word of the U.S. Senate and see if I have cancer of the lung.'' That is not far off. The scientists all oppose the space station. Yet, as I said in my opening remarks, it is so impossible to convince the Senate. Incidentally, when it comes to the American Physical Society, its spokesman in the past, as I said a moment ago, has been Dr. Park. Dr. Park said, in July 1993: It is the view of the American Physical Society that scientific justification is lacking for a permanently manned space station in Earth orbit. We are concerned that the potential contribution of a manned space station to the physical scientist has been greatly overstated and that many of the scientific objectives currently planned for the space station can be accomplished more effectively and at a much lower cost on Earth. Unmanned robotic platforms or on the shuttle. All he represents is 41,000 physicists in this country. He goes on to say, quoting Professor Nicolaas Bloembergen of Harvard--and I said earlier I thought he was a Nobel laureate, and he is, in physics--Dr. Bloembergen of Harvard, a Nobel laureate and physicist, summed it up bluntly in testimony before a Senate committee 2 years ago: ``Microgravity is of microimportance.'' How is it we know so much more here? After all, we are throwing $2.1 billion of the taxpayers' money at this project every year, and you saw the figures and where we are headed-- $94 billion today, Lord knows how many billions ultimately. I think there is an assumption, says one physicist, that any program that spends $15 billion per year is bound to produce something that society can use, but few of NASA's claims stand up. Indeed, an interim NASA study of technology transfer which became public in January acknowledged that NASA spinoff claims were exaggerated. That is an in- house memo that NASA's claims were exaggerated, including such famous examples as Velcro, Tang, and Teflon. Contrary to popular belief, the study found NASA created none of these. They merely publicized them. Here is what Carl Sagan said: ``A space station is far from an optimum platform for doing science.'' And the Space Sciences Board said it ``sees no scientific need for this space station during the next 20 years,'' and went ahead to say, ``Continued development of Space Station Freedom . . . cannot be supported on scientific grounds.'' Mr. President, I have two or three other scientists I will quote and then I will turn it back to the managers of the bill. Incidentally, I listened yesterday and I listened again today to all these gigantic, frankly, highly specious, spurious claims about how we will find a cure for this and a cure for that. If the doctors in the scientific community say that is hogwash, who are we to question them? Somebody to keep a few jobs in our State. Here is what Dr. Rosenthal said on cancer research: Statements have been made and published to the effect that vital cancer research would be done in space, and that is cited as a reason for supporting space station funding. We cannot find valid scientific justification for these claims and believe it is unrealistic to base a decision on funding the space station on that information . . . Based on the information we have seen thus far, we do not agree that a strong case has been made for choosing to do cancer research in space over critically needed cancer research here on earth. That was David Rosenthal, Harvard Medical School, testifying on behalf of the American Cancer Society. Dr. Shaun Ruddy, on behalf of the Arthritis Foundation: Space station proponents have indicated that the Space Station . . . will provide a ``first class'' laboratory . . . We used to have ``first class'' laboratories in universities and medical schools across the country . . . Reports by the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation have indicated that over 51 percent of the biological laboratory research is deemed inadequate for the conduct of research . . . Furthermore, the National Science Foundation report estimated that the capital construction backlog is approximately $12 billion . . . Should our priorities now be a ``first class'' laboratory in space, or correction of a longstanding deficiency in laboratories throughout this Nation?

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, let me just thank the Senator from Maryland and the Senator from Missouri. Let me add this caveat which might help them sleep better. A veterans' hospital in Little Rock told me they have five doctors they are going to lose. I am really offering this on their behalf. This is sort of a critical situation where these doctors are going to be forced to leave and go home. All this amendment says is that, in the future, the VA--not the doctor--could request a waiver of the visa requirement that they return home for 2 years before they can come back. That seems like a fairly laudable thing when you consider the medical shortages most VA hospitals experience. If you find when you get to the conference committee somebody objects because it may be a turf fight of some kind, I will understand that. I hope that doesn't happen. But I appreciate the accommodation you have given. amendment no. 955 (Purpose: To restore the authority of the Veterans' Administration to request waivers of the home residency requirement for doctors employed at VA hospitals on J-1 visas)