An appropriations subcommittee of the US House of Representatives added more than $400 million dollars to NASA's proposed budget Tuesday, including restoring funds for a crew return vehicle for the space station.

The VA-HUD subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee added $415 million to the fiscal year (FY) 2002 budget sent to Congress by President George W. Bush earlier this year during a hearing Tuesday as part of an overall spending bill for the Departments of Veterans Affairs and Housing and Urban Development as well as independent agencies such as NASA.

The largest part of the increase -- $275 million -- will be used to restore funding for a crew return vehicle (CRV) for the International Space Station. Funding for the CRV was removed from the President's original proposal to cover an overrun in the station's budget that now exceeds $4 billion.

The decision earlier this year to eliminate the CRV, as well as an American-built habitation module, was sharply criticized by many both on and off Capitol Hill because it effectively reduced the capacity of the station to three people. Those three-person crews, critics argued, would be unable to perform much of the research planned for the orbiting facility.

"This bill provides sufficient resources to continue developing the seven-person crew return vehicle," said Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX), one of the leading members of the House. "Without a seven-person crew return vehicle, space research simply cannot be done adequately. That crew return vehicle is vital and this bill restores it."

Of the two programs, the subcommittee elected to restore funding only for the CRV. Committee members noted that NASA is making progress in negotiations with the Italian Space Agency on an agreement whereby Italy would build a habitation module for the station in exchange for additional station resources and possibly the American launch of Italian satellites. By contrast, NASA has run into problems trying to convince European and Japanese station partners to develop a CRV.

In addition to adding funding for the CRV, the subcommittee added $35 million to ISS research programs. It also moved over $280 million in research funding out of a space station account and into separate accounts to prevent NASA from using those funds to cover the space station cost overruns.

Funds for space shuttle upgrades were reduced to account for projects that have been canceled, although the budget for space shuttle operations was fully funded. The subcommittee also added $35 million to begin urgently-needed repairs to the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center, where shuttles are mated to their external tanks and solid rocket boosters before being rolled out to the launch pad.

Combined, the increases approved Tuesday raise NASA's budget for FY 2002, which begins October 1 of this year, to $14.9 billion. This is an increase of $415 million above President Bush's original request and $641 million over the current FY 2001 budget.

"The proposed budget attempted to reduce costs but the price to our progress in space would have been far too steep," said DeLay. "This bill increases funding for critical priorities and also preserves programs that are vital to the future of NASA."

Tuesday's subcommittee action was just an early step in the overall budget approval process. The budget must be approved by the full House Appropriations Committee before being sent to the full House of Representatives for a vote. The full committee is expected to approve the budget later this month but the full House may not act on the funding bill until after its traditional August recess. In addition, the Senate has yet to take up work on its version of a NASA spending bill.

While the process is just beginning, the subcommittee's decision to boost NASA's budget is seen as a positive sign for the agency. Just two years ago the same subcommittee voted to gut NASA's budget, slashing more than $1 billion in a move that would have canceled several spacecraft missions and possibly forced NASA to close one or more of its field centers. The cuts were rescinded later in the budget process as Congress eased spending caps that forced the cuts.