National Security Satellite Launches

Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, yesterday the senior Senator from Arizona took to the floor to criticize the work of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. I am honored to be on that subcommittee as the vice chairman and to work with Senator Cochran, the Republican from Mississippi.

The senior Senator from Arizona argued that the support for Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump is somehow connected to the work of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. I have heard some pretty outlandish claims by Mr. Trump on the campaign trail, but the fact that he would capture the hearts and minds of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee with his rhetoric is beyond me.

Senator Cochran has been a Member of the Senate for many years. He is respected and has worked his way up to be chairman of the full committee. I have worked with him and found him to be an excellent partner. He is bipartisan and tries to make sure that we protect our Nation's national defense. I have never found him to be in the thrall of Donald Trump, but that suggestion was made yesterday by the senior Senator from Arizona. I will leave it to the American people to judge the wisdom or absurdity of that allegation.

I would like to take a moment to correct the record on a few of the things that the senior Senator from Arizona said. The issues involved are pretty complex, but the crux of it comes down to this: The senior Senator from Arizona is proposing to waste $1.5 billion--and perhaps as much as $5 billion--on a controversial proposal on how the Department of Defense and intelligence agencies should launch national security satellites. In addition to costing billions of dollars--that is billions, not millions--the senior Senator from Arizona's proposal is opposed by the Secretary of Defense, Ash Carter; the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper; the Under Secretary of Defense, Frank Kendall; and the Secretary of the Air Force, Deborah James. One would think that the senior Senator from Arizona, who chairs the Defense Authorization Committee, would note that it is unified opposition from the Department of Defense to his ideas. Each of these individuals has expressed strong concern about the ideas of the senior Senator from Arizona. They have stated as clearly as they can and as often as they can that what he has in mind will harm our national security. They have even stated it in the senior Senator's committee hearings. He is either not listening, paying attention, or refusing to agree. Nevertheless, all that I did, all that the Senate has done last year with Senator Cochran on a bipartisan basis, was to listen to our senior national security leaders while protecting taxpayers from wasting billions of dollars.

The matter generating all of this discussion is about competition for launching defense satellites into space. Let me tell you at the outset that before I came to the subcommittee, we made a terrible decision. About 10 years ago, the two leading competitors for launching satellites into space were two private companies, Boeing Aircraft and Lockheed. They came to the government with a suggestion, and they said: We've got a great idea. Instead of competing against one another to launch satellites--listen to this--we will merge our companies together, and we will save the government lots of money. I don't know why, but the Department of Defense and the committees on Capitol Hill bought it, and they created the United Launch Alliance, or ULA. It became a monopoly. These two merged corporations became a monopoly in launching satellites. You know what happens when you have monopoly status? The costs go up dramatically, and that is exactly what happened.

In the last 10 years, United Launch Alliance has been a reliable partner with the Department of Defense, and they have launched satellites and other things into space which have been critical for national security. But because they are a monopoly with no competition, they became very expensive.

There are new entries in the market that are promising in terms of launching satellites, and one of them is SpaceX. SpaceX has matured into a company that can play an important role in the future of satellite launches. I noted this fact, and as chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, I did something that is unusual by Capitol Hill standards. In January of 2014, I held a hearing. At the same table I invited the CEO of United Launch Alliance and the CEO of SpaceX to sit next to one another and testify. They answered questions about their capabilities and about the history of space launch in the future. The committee members asked them how they could save money, and each of them responded. At the end of the hearing, I suggested to each of the CEOs that they propound up to 10 questions to the other CEO that they didn't think were covered in our hearing. I tried to make this as open as possible and to invite a new competitive spirit when it came to these space launches. I think it was constructive.

It is also clear that there is another element in this issue that brought the senior Senator from Arizona to the floor. The United Launch Alliance has several engines that can take a satellite into space. The most economical one, the RD-180, is not built in America. It is built in Russia. Now, that has become a major problem. Put Vladimir Putin and his adventurism to the side here. I have even joined with the senior Senator from Arizona, condemning what Putin has done in countries such as Georgia and Ukraine and his threats to the Baltics and Poland. Put that over to the side for a moment. It is best for us to make our own engines when it comes to the launching of satellites for America's national defense and intelligence. We put millions of dollars in the appropriations bill to incentivize the building of a new engine so we can finally break away from our dependence on this Russian RD-180 engine. For 2 years we have been putting that money in the bill.

I am not opposed to competition. I favor competition. I favor an American-made engine. That is not the issue. Here is the problem: You can't just waive a wand or pass an appropriation and recreate a new rocket engine. It can take up to 5 years. What will happen in that 5- year period of time while we in America are developing at least one new American-made reliable rocket engine? We will have to be dependent either on that Russian engine in transition or run the risk that we are not going to have any engines available when we desperately need them for satellite launches. That is exactly what the Secretary of Defense has told the senior Senator from Arizona, and he just will not buy it. He has said: We have to cut the cord and walk away from the Russian engines.

Here is something he can't answer: NASA also uses engines to launch satellites and people into space. Why would we launch people into space? For the space station. How do we get those folks up to the space station and bring them home? On Russian rocket engines.

If the senior Senator from Arizona says that's it, cold turkey, no more Russian engines, what in the world is he going to do about NASA's needs for this engine in supplying the space station and making sure that the folks in orbit can safely come home? He can't answer that question because the answer truly tells him the problem he is creating here.

What we are trying to do is this: Transition to American-made engines. I am for that. Create competition for space launches in the future. I am for that. And make sure we do it in a thoughtful, sensible way and not at the expense of America's national defense, our national intelligence, or the future of our space program. We can work with the Senator from Arizona. I would like to do that, but when he comes to the floor and suggests that all of us who oppose him are somehow cronies of Vladimir Putin or marching to the orders of Donald Trump, it doesn't create a very productive environment for conversation.

Let's do the right thing. Let's work together on an appropriations authorization. Let's put the Russian engines behind us in an orderly way, let's create the American engine, and let's push for competition. That is where I got started on this, and that is where I am today.

We need to listen to the experts--the experts at the Pentagon--who have told us repeatedly that to do this cold turkey and to cut off the Russian engines is, frankly, to jeopardize our national defense, security, intelligence gathering, and even our space program. That is something I hope the senior Senator from Arizona can agree is an outcome which we should avoid.

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