By Eric Berger Dec. 19, 2013 Updated: Dec. 19, 2013 8:04 p.m.
Johnson Space Center's political fortunes are on the rise.
This week, U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf, a Republican from Virginia, announced he would not run for re-election in 2014, and Houston Republican John Culberson is the odds-on favorite to replace him as chairman of an appropriations subcommittee that oversees NASA.
Culberson says he's devoted to the space agency.
"NASA is going to be at the top of my list," Culberson said. "I am going to ensure that NASA gets the money they need to remain the global leader in space."
From its peak during the space shuttle era, Johnson Space Center has shed more than 4,000 jobs from a workforce of about 17,500 civil servants and contractors.
In addition to the space shuttle program's end, President Barack Obama in 2010 canceled the Houston-based Constellation Program, which was to build the rockets, spacecraft and equipment needed to return astronauts to the moon.
Politically, Obama has had little reason to favor the Texas-based space center, said Mark Jones, a political scientist at Rice University. And Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison's retirement, in 2012, also reduced the center's influence in Congress.
If Culberson ascends to the chairmanship of the House Appropriations subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies, Jones said, it will give Johnson Space Center a powerful advocate in one of the key places NASA policy is made in Washington.
"NASA almost certainly will be more responsive to the needs of Houston and Johnson Space Center than it was under the chairmanship of Frank Wolf," Jones said. "He will have considerable leverage in how NASA allocates its budget."
All bills that fund NASA operations flow through this committee, where they are worked on, before moving to the House appropriations subcommittee.
Back in 1958, it was from a similar post in a House appropriations subcommittee, which oversaw NASA's budget, that Houston Congressman Albert Thomas landed Johnson Space Center for Houston in the first place.
Another step that should help politically is the recent decision of U.S. Rep. Steve Stockman, the Republican representative for the district that includes Johnson Space Center, to run for the U.S. Senate, not re-election.
"He was someone who really had no interest in trying to protect the Johnson Space Center," Jones said. "That simply is not a legislative priority of Steve Stockman, and you're not going to get anyone who could be worse for Johnson Space Center."
But Culberson's likely rise to the subcommittee chairmanship in about a year is more significant.
Although it bodes well for Houston, Culberson stressed he is not interested in promoting the parochial interests of a single space center. NASA should be doing what scientists think is most important when it comes to exploring space.
"There's so much more to NASA than just jobs and politics," he said. "We should be doing what the scientists think is important rather than what is good for a particular congressman's district."
To that end, Culberson said he favors reshaping NASA to give the agency more independence and more stability.
"First and foremost, NASA needs to be depoliticized and given stability to allow them to focus on what they do best," he said. "They need the ability to build rockets and spacecraft the way the Navy builds submarines, with multiyear procurement, with contracts extending for a long enough period of time so that the engineers and scientists working on them can do so with confidence that the rug will not be jerked out from underneath them, as has happened on so many occasions."
Like many in Congress, he is not a fan of the president's current plan for human spaceflight, the robotic capture of a small asteroid and moving it to a location near the moon, where astronauts could visit it aboard a spacecraft NASA is building.
"It grieves me to see the NASA that I grew up with in Houston - from the time I was a little kid in West University with my telescope and listening to and watching the Apollo missions, and landing on the moon and these incredible feats of adventure - reduced to pushing a rock around in space," Culberson, 57, said. "It's embarrassing."
Culberson has also, on many occasions, expressed a passion for planetary science.
In particular, he said, NASA should follow the request of leading scientists and develop a mission to explore Europa, an ice-encrusted moon of Jupiter.
Europa is believed to have large oceans - containing more water than those on Earth - beneath its ice.
"It needs to be a flagship mission, the biggest and best we've ever flown," Culberson said. "I hope to be a key part in discovering life on another world for the first time.
"We're only going to have one chance at this in our lifetimes. We've got one shot. I want to make sure you and I are here to see those first tube worms and lobsters on Europa."