Americans will be getting into space on Russian spacecraft for the next few years.

Amid attempts to cut the budget, Congress halted the space shuttle program in 2011 and has pushed back the date to transition to commercial astronaut transportation to 2017, reports CQ’s Kerry Young.

This relative stinting on commercial spaceflight is happening even with NASA’s budget under the watch of one of its biggest fans, self-described “space Senator” Barbara A. Mikulski of Maryland. Mikulski has been the top Democrat on the Commerce-Justice-Science Appropriations panel since 1989. As Congress moved NASA toward commercial space transport in 2007, she urged her fellow lawmakers to shorten the time the United States would need to “rely on the kindness of allies” to get into space. “Our national security and our national honor depend upon it,” she said.

Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) said the recent display of the Space Shuttle Discovery in Washington, D.C., was “more a funeral procession than a celebration.”

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This year’s version of the budget wars began this morning, when Republican House appropriators announced they’re moving to cut 3 percent from Obama’s request for what’s supposed to be the least politicized and most bipartisan of the dozen annual appropriations packages — for the Energy Department, the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers.

The GOP’s $32.1 billion alternative, which will take its first legislative step tomorrow, would essentially freeze the energy and water budget for the coming year.

The Democrats running the Senate, meanwhile, will give initial approval to two other spending bills this afternoon, both of which — Commerce-Justice-Science and Transportation-HUD — would give the president almost everything he wants.

(The most notable exception is that the president’s cherished high-speed rail initiative will be shortchanged to finance a more robust roster of public works grants to the states.)

And on the same day the space shuttle Discovery buzzed the Capitol, the Washington Monument and the White House — hitching a ride aboard a Boeing 747 for the final flight in its 149-million-mile history before going on display at the Smithsonian — an Appropriations subcommittee will call for an increase in NASA’s budget above the $17.7 billion the president has asked for.

The moves on both sides of the Capitol are as preliminary as it gets, and they offer almost no clues about trends in this year’s budget debate other than this: The House and Senate deliberations are not at all coordinated and are destined to drag on deep into the fall — almost surely well past the start of fiscal 2013 in October, and probably beyond the election and into a lame duck.

That will be almost assured when the House makes a procedural maneuver this afternoon that’s designed to lock down the GOP majority’s commitment to spending $19 billion less than the Senate in its appropriations bills.

When the total pie is above $1 trillion, that 2 percent may not sound like all that big a deal — but, as any couple who disagrees about the finer points of a family budget knows, even that amount of dissonance can yield big discontent if allowed to fester for too long.

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