War & Peace Quote by Barbara Mikulski

A servicing mission to Hubble isn’t just a line item here; it’s a proxy war over what government is for. Barbara Mikulski frames the promise in muscular, almost labor-union terms: “I will fight” in the Senate “this year.” That verb choice matters. Space policy is usually sold as wonder. Mikulski sells it as a budget brawl, an arena where scientific ambition survives only if someone is willing to throw elbows against austerity, shifting priorities, and post-Columbia risk aversion.

The pitch is engineered to bridge constituencies. On one side, the hard-nosed fiscal reality: she’s talking “fund,” “mission,” and a deadline (“by 2008”) that reads like accountability, not stargazing. On the other, she offers an almost mythic payoff: a tenfold leap in “power and efficiency,” culminating in the grandest possible viewer benefit, “look back almost to the beginning of the universe.” That escalation is deliberate; it converts a technical maintenance plan into a civilizational claim about discovery. You’re not paying to fix a telescope, you’re paying to extend human sight.

The subtext is also political geography. Mikulski, long tied to Maryland’s NASA and aerospace ecosystem, is defending not only science but the jobs, contracts, and regional identity braided into it. Wrapped in cosmic language is an argument for American competence: we build exquisite machines, we take care of them, and we don’t let fear or bureaucracy mothball our best instruments. The universe is the headline; governance is the story.