27-) HISTORY OF TUT COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 



Mr. Hammill. A little more, 54 percent, I think. 



Mr Mosher. We could en all sorts of things worth doing if we wanted to add 

 some money. Every direction I look I see crucial needs 



Mr Symington It is sort ol Parkinson's law of budgeting. 



For New York Congressman Ed Koch, the budgetary problem was 

 even more serious than trying to decide on whether to support the 

 Space Shuttle. Koch zeroed in against the Viking-Mars project in the 

 Karth subcommittee, where he told his colleagues: 



I |usr for the life of me can't see voting for monies to find out whether or not 

 there is some microbe on Mars, when in fact 1 know there are rats in the Harlem 



apartments 



KARTH BLASTS SHUTTLE 



Even before the final committee markup of the NASA author- 

 ization bill in 1970, Karth went publicly on record with a scathing 

 attack on the Space Shuttle. In an address on March 3, 1970 at a 

 meeting of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 

 Annapolis, Md., Karth labelled the President's Space Task Group 

 Report and the NASA program which was based on the Report as 

 "totally unrealistic." He exploded: 



Based upon my experience with Ranger, Centaur, Surveyor, Mariner, Viking 

 and even Explorer, NASA's projected cost estimates are asinine. * * * NASA must 

 consider the Members of the Congress a bunch of stupid idiots. Worse yet, they may 

 believe their own estimates and then we really are in bad shape- 

 Chairman Miller and Teague bristled at Karth 's opposition. Miller 

 did not want to add fuel to the flames by denouncing Karth publicly, 

 but Teague was not at all bashful about expressing himself. In his 

 long and successful service as Chairman of the Veterans' Affairs Com- 

 mittee, Teague looked on it as an unprecedented breach of Congres- 

 sional courtesy and practice for the chairman of another subcommittee, 

 who had not attended the hearings and held investigations, to take a 

 strongly critical position against the findings and recommendations 

 of a subcommittee of which he was not a member. Teague labelled 

 Karth's public attack on the Shuttle as "just plain stupid," adding: 



Karth could have had much more influence had he worked within the committee, 



but instead he went out and made a bunch of speeches and got nowhere. 



Teague was so angry at Karth's public opposition to the findings 

 of the Manned Space Flight Subcommittee, that he swore that as long 

 as he lived Karth would not become chairman of the full committee. 



FULL COMMITTEE AND NASA AUTHORIZATION IN 1970 



By the time the subcommittee reports reached the full committee, 

 the battle lines were tiehtly drawn. 



