352 HISTORY OF THE COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 



Pioneer and Mariner spacecraft photographing and obtaining other 

 valuable data from Saturn, Jupiter, Venus, and Mercury. The full 

 committee and the House supported the subcommittee's recommenda- 

 tion to cut the tracking authorization in 1975 by $2.2 million. Unlike 

 earlier protests against reductions in this area, the committee ratified 

 the cuts without a murmur. Wydler successfully put across his amend- 

 ment to insure that NASA would have the option to purchase the 

 expensive new Relay satellite system at the conclusion of the leasing 

 period. Once again in 1976, the Fuqua subcommittee engineered a 

 reduction — this time of $4 million — in the NASA tracking request, 

 and succeeded in having $3 million of that reduction stick by the time 

 the bill emerged from the conference committee. Despite inflation 

 which affected costs at the Madrid tracking station, the committee 

 felt that the $255 million actually authorized would fully support the 

 40 individual programs being tracked. In 1977 and 1978, the authori- 

 zation for the tracking network crept up to exxeed $300 million an- 

 nually, primarily due to inflation. In addition, larger requirements 

 were imposed on the tracking network as interplanetary flights like 

 Voyager proceeded to Jupiter, Saturn, and the sizable moons near 

 those planets. Late in the 1970's, NASA also began building a new 

 ground terminal at White Sands, N. Mex. to supplement the two 

 geosynchronous satellites to be used in the new Tracking and Data 

 Relay Satellite System scheduled for operational use in 1980. 



The committee kept a watchful oversight eye on the rapidly 

 changing nature of the tracking network, with special emphasis on 

 how the new tracking facilities would cope with the specialized 

 demands of the Space Shuttle missions. The Fuqua subcommittee 

 followed very closely the terms of the lease contract with Western 

 Union Space Communications, Inc., a subsidiary of Western Union 

 Telegraph Co., to insure that the public and taxpayer interest was 

 fully protected. From 1977 through 1979, Dan Cassidy of the committee 

 staff completed several detailed reports on program cost, performance, 

 and schedule, which further enabled the committee to ride herd on the 

 extremely complex procedures in the tracking program. 



As the 1970's drew to a close, the Science Committee through the 

 Fuqua subcommittee was buttressed with more than enough spe- 

 cialized data to enable sound decisions to be made on funding, general 

 oversight, and keeping tabs on program developments. The committee 

 had clearly come of age since the days when hundreds of millions of 

 dollars were authorized pretty much "on faith." A mutual respect 

 had developed between the committee and NASA, as the complex 

 tracking operation moved into the transition period toward the in- 

 stallation of a new system of high-speed transmission and fuller cover- 

 age through the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System of the 

 1980's. 



