This conflict will have to be resolved over the next two months through House-Senate negotiations, at the same time that an independent commission issues its recommendations as to how to try to cope with the Station's problems.

The effect the Station cost overruns have had on space science spending is bad enough in itself -- the House is trying to deal with the problem through increasing spending on the Station at the expense of NASA's other science programs, while the Senate is currently threatening to cut off any further increases for Station funding.

The Senate also takes a dim view of NASA's current plan to cancel any thought of a Pluto probe in 2004 or 2006 and to instead spend the money on the Europa Orbiter project (whose own cost is dramatically growing) and on research into ion drive systems for deep-space propulsion that might possibly allow a later Pluto probe to reach the planet before its atmosphere freezes out around 2020.

The Senate has instead ordered all of the $25 million that NASA intended for deep-space propulsion research this year to be provisionally applied instead toward a 2004 or 2006 Pluto mission -- although it admits that by itself this is not remotely adequate to fund such a mission, since the total spending on such research that NASA plans for the next four years is only $100 million, only about one-fifth of that needed for the Pluto probe.

Moreover, the House has ordered that $13 million of the deep-space propulsion only be diverted instead to a propulsion research program at the Marshall Space Flight Center, and may thus resist using any of it for Pluto.

Any hope of getting an early Pluto mission off the ground depends on finding a large additional source of funding for it.

And the Senate has also provided a possible route toward that by ordering cancellation of the $49 million in funding intended this year for development of Europa Orbiter (and for the "X-2000" research program needed to develop miniaturized and radiation-proof electronics for it), with $44 million of it being transferred to a new Outer Planets program whose missions would be selected through competition in the same way as the current Discovery program, with a Europa orbiter not necessarily being the first in the series.

(The remaining $5 million would be used to continue technology development for the Solar Probe, which was intended to be launched around 2010 for an extremely close flyby of the Sun, before NASA also cancelled it for the time being this year despite widespread complaints from scientists.)

But, given both the rapidly vanishing national surplus and the continuing voracious money appetite of the Station, even a delay in Europa Orbiter might not provide enough money for a Pluto mission in Dec. 2004 or January 2006 that could take advantage of a gravity-assist flyby of Jupiter to reach Pluto quickly.

However, the odds are unquestionably a bit better for the 2006 Pluto launch -- which, even though Jupiter is in a less favorable position to give it a gravity-assist boost, might still be able to reach Pluto by 2016 or 2017 even without an ion drive.

And now, at the July 18-20 meeting of NASA's Solar System Exploration Subcommittee, it was revealed that NASA's planetary program has two other very serious problems emerging simultaneously.

The first is its worldwide Deep Space Network of ground stations with big steerable antenna dishes for communications with such probes.

It's been apparent for the past two years that the DSN was being shorted on the funds it needs to deal with the increasing number of such probes -- particularly around the end of 2003 and the first half of 2004, when there will be a veritable "traffic jam" of Solar System probes simultaneously demanding concentrated attention.

This will include:

• two Athena rovers being operated simultaneously on Mars on a full-time basis for three months;
• the MGS and Mars Odyssey orbiters which will still be operating around Mars;
• Europe's Mars Express orbiter and Japan's Nozomi Mars orbiter, which also require frequent coverage by America's DSN;
• the CONTOUR and Stardust probes, which will make comet flybys in November 2003 and January 2004;
• the Deep Impact and MESSENGER comet probes and Mercury probes, which will be launched in January and March 2004 and require concentrated attention for some weeks afterward;
• and just to make it really fun - the Cassini Saturn orbiter which will arrive there in July and will require full-time attention for years thereafter.