Washington ? Less than 48 hours after the shuttle Columbia disaster, lawmakers on Capitol Hill were mapping out plans for hearings into the accident and the future of the space program.

Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback and Missouri Sen. Kit Bond are among several lawmakers who will shape Congress’ role in ensuring the safety of the shuttle program as well as the future of the nation’s space exploration.

“At least as long as I’ve been here, it’s been about a budgetary fight. It’s not been about a grand vision,” Brownback said. “When we really got going in space, it was about a big picture. It was about keeping up with the Soviets at the time. It was about getting to the moon. I think we’ve lost a lot of that vision.”

Brownback was just leaving his home in Topeka to take his daughter to play basketball when broadcasters interrupted his son’s television cartoons with the news. The shuttle broke apart Feb. 1, minutes before its scheduled landing, killing all seven astronauts aboard.

By late that afternoon, Brownback had started thinking about how he and his colleagues should respond.

By Wednesday, plans were set to have NASA chief Sean O’Keefe testify on Capitol Hill before the Senate Commerce Committee, on which Brownback serves, and a House Science Committee panel on space.

“I don’t think we add to the investigation a whole lot,” Brownback said of himself and his colleagues. “We will receive the report from the internal and external auditors; there’ll be a lot of questions asked.

“It generally ends up being more of a show than you really finding something,” he said.

But the Kansas Republican is hoping there will be a second phase of congressional activity that deals with a new vision for NASA.

“Most of the NASA debates the last few years have been about funding for the space station,” Brownback said. “That’s been our big space debate. That’s one piece of the puzzle. But this would be a good time to look at the big picture.”

Not that he thinks questions about NASA’s budget are irrelevant. On the contrary, Brownback is a newly named member of the Senate Appropriations Committee and said he hopes the panel will look into how Congress has funded NASA’s operations during the past several years.

That is what Bond hopes to do in the coming weeks. As chairman of a subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee that governs NASA’s budget, Bond maintains it is the responsibility of those who fund and oversee the space agency to ensure the safety of the remaining shuttles.

“We need to know how much more we need to do to ensure that every funding decision continues to make the lives of our astronauts the paramount priority at NASA.”

It’s not as simple as giving NASA the dollars it asks for, Bond said, because it may not have been asking for enough.

“My subcommittee has had continuing concerns about whether the budget requests from NASA accurately reflect the full safety needs of the space agency and the shuttle program,” Bond said Tuesday.