The Senate Appropriations Committee voted 28-1 yesterday in favor of spending legislation that would move the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's four satellite programs to NASA.

That could set up a collision course with the panel's counterpart in the House, where the subcommittee that oversees both agencies' purses approved a bill yesterday that would keep NOAA's current management structure intact.

Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), the lawmaker who leads the Senate spending subcommittee for NOAA and NASA, has said the radical move was prompted by her long-standing frustration with cost overruns and launch delays in NOAA's satellite division.

Mikulski railed against what she called NOAA's "fussbudgeting and mis-budgeting" yesterday. That frustration was also evident in the plain-spoken conference report that accompanied this year's Senate CJS spending bill.

"Ballooning acquisition budgets [for satellites] have already begun to jeopardize funding for NOAA's core ocean and weather operations," the report says. "The life cycle cost for NOAA's new polar satellites is nearly $1 billion above last year's revised budget projections, and shows that despite strong warnings from the committee, this program is going in the wrong direction."

The committee reserved special ire for NOAA's management of the Joint Polar Satellite System. The program, the pared-down reboot of an ambitious effort to create joint military-civilian weather and climate orbiters, has had trouble keeping down costs and keeping on schedule. Its estimated lifetime cost grew by $1 billion over the past year, to $12.9 billion.

Gap in weather and climate forecasting

Adding to the pain, NOAA says the first JPSS satellite won't launch until mid-2017, months after its predecessor reaches the end of its projected lifetime. The result, the agency believes, is a near-certain future gap in weather and climate data that could last up to two years.

"In an effort to curb costs and instill confidence in the new $12.9 billion [lifetime cost], NOAA proposed to terminate more sensors from the JPSS program," the conference report says. "The plan for the original national polar satellite program called for two satellites with the option of four more, 13 different types of sensors, and in three orbits. Today, the proposed program is down to two satellites, one orbit, and five different types of sensors, and the costs have increased."

The report continues: "NOAA is running out of sensors and satellites to cut, and at this rate JPSS-1 will launch in 2017 with an empty spacecraft bus. This new cost overrun is unacceptable and shows that JPSS is going the wrong direction."

The Senate bill would give NASA the responsibility of paying for and building JPSS probes and other satellites now funded by NOAA, which uses NASA as its procurement agent.

Programs that would be affected include NOAA's geostationary and polar-orbiting weather satellites, the Deep Space Climate Observatory and the Jason-3 altimetry mission, a joint effort between NOAA and the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites to monitor sea-level rise.

NOAA's budget would drop to $3.4 billion, $1.47 billion below the current level and well below the White House's $5.1 billion request for fiscal 2013.

Funding for the agency's satellite division would be slashed to just $280 million. The money would be used to operate satellites and collect, archive and distribute the data they produce.

House and Senate may not be far apart

NOAA's satellite program received $1.877 billion this year, and the White House has asked Congress to increase its purse to just over $2 billion next year.

The Senate bill would pump NASA's budget to $19.4 billion, an increase of $1.6 billion above the current level that would come entirely from an influx of cash to pay for transferred NOAA satellites.

Meanwhile, the House bill would award NOAA $5 billion.

But the two proposals may not be as far apart as they first appear. Overall funding for programs now managed by NOAA is roughly the same in both the House and the Senate's 2013 spending legislation: $5 billion.

Still, questions remain about what shape NOAA's 2013 budget will ultimately take.

House appropriations panel leaders have not weighed in on the Senate proposal to divide and conquer NOAA's satellites, and Senate aides are still ironing out the details of how such a transfer would work -- such as whether the move would require Congress to approve changes in legislation that delineates NASA's responsibilities.

The Senate conference report directs the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to recommend "the proper breakout of funding between NOAA and NASA" for the president's fiscal 2014 budget request.