There's no question that we all should mourn the tragic loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia. However, the next step for Congress should be to reform how financial resources at NASA are spent.

NASA's budget is a classic example of how congressional earmarks take agency resources away from vital programs. In the case of NASA, efforts to make space travel safer for humans have been under funded for years. Part of the reason why that's happened can be blamed on a lack of sound fiscal management at the agency. But, a bigger cause for alarm is the explosive growth in earmarks being added to the NASA budget.

NASA earmarks have grown more than 700% from $74 million for 6 projects in fiscal 1997 to more than $530 million in 2002. The 2003 Senate bill that has yet to be passed includes $3 million for a visitor's center at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, $2 million for Wheeling Jesuit University's National Technology Transfer Center in West Virginia, and $2 million to build a lab at the Gulf of Maine Aquarium. In light of recent events, it wouldn't exactly be surprising to see lawmakers play upon our nation's patriotic generosity to slip even more pet projects into the NASA budget while the final touches are being put on the bill.

Earmarks like these tie the hands of agency heads when it comes time to manage their budget. The modest 2 or 3 percent budget increases that have been given to NASA are actually quite significant for an agency of its size. However, at the same time more than 2 or 3 percent of the overall agency budget is earmarked for pork projects, the reality is that there is no new money for agency priorities.

Over the 30-year course of the shuttle program's development, Congress' has increasingly protected parochial interests against the best interests of taxpayers and even the space program, itself. Originally, the shuttle was expected to be a cheap way to transport people back and forth into space. At just $5 million per launch, it would supposedly open space up to all sorts of possibilities.

However, the space shuttle program has not exactly lived up to our original expectations. To begin with, the cost per launch is actually 100 times higher than originally projected – at $500 million per trip. Based on that fact alone, one might question if we might want to reevaluate the shuttle program. With the events of last week, safety concerns are an even stronger reason to consider the development of another method of transporting humans into space or even to question whether human space travel is necessary. Plus, there has also been plenty of criticism of the anachronistic technology that this thirty-year old program is based on.

But, any attempt to abandon the shuttle in favor of developing a safer, less-costly alternative is guaranteed to be met with fierce opposition — both from the lawmakers in states where the shuttle components are manufactured and from all the other lawmakers who the defense/space industry lobby has cozied up to. In fact, this week the President has expressed openness to reevaluating his budget request and senior appropriators are calling for us to increase our commitment to NASA.

The tragic loss of 7 astronauts' lives is a clarion call for the development of safer human space travel. But it'll be an even bigger tragedy if we continue to hamstring the agency by allowing self-serving politicians to bring home the bacon.