In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.
Q: NASA will complete a $350 million structure to test rocket engines at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi early this year. Then, it plans to mothball the 300-foot-high, steel-frame tower for the foreseeable future. 
  
 The reason: Congress ordered the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to finish building the facility even though the agency doesn’t need it. 
  
 The tower was designed to test a GenCorp Inc. (GY) engine for a rocket program canceled in 2010. Its funding survived thanks to Mississippi Republican senators led by Roger Wicker, who crafted a provision requiring the agency to complete the work. 
  
 The test stand is an example of how U.S. lawmakers thwart efforts to cut costs and eliminate government waste, even as they criticize agencies for failing to do so. Attempts to close military bases, mail-processing plants and other NASA facilities also have been fought by congressional members whose districts benefit from the operations. 
  
 “When it comes down to their pork, they’re always going to defend it,” said Rand Simberg, a space policy scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based research group that supports less spending and fewer regulations. “All that matters is maintaining jobs in the right states and districts.” 
  
 Source: NASA via Bloomberg The A-3 tower was designed to test a GenCorp Inc. engine for a rocket program canceled in 2010. Close The A-3 tower was designed to test a GenCorp Inc. engine for a rocket program canceled in 2010. Close Open Source: NASA via Bloomberg The A-3 tower was designed to test a GenCorp Inc. engine for a rocket program canceled in 2010. 
  
 Congress’s interference also makes it harder for agencies to reduce their budgets at a time when they’re absorbing across-the-board reductions under a process known as sequestration. 
  
 ‘Not Sustainable’ 
  
 “Current federal spending trends are not sustainable, and if NASA can make a relatively painless contribution to deficit reduction by shutting down an unwanted program, why not let it happen?” said Pete Sepp, executive vice president of the National Taxpayers Union, an Alexandria, Virginia-based group that supports lower taxes. “It’s not rocket science, at least fiscally.” 
  
 A NASA spokesman, David Weaver, said the agency is “taking steps to manage its infrastructure.” 
  
 “As we prepare for future exploration in a constrained budget environment, the agency is working to ensure we have the right skills, facilities and equipment to execute our missions,” Weaver said in an e-mailed statement. 
  
 The John C. Stennis Space Center, named after a former U.S. senator, is located in Mississippi’s Hancock County, which has an estimated population exceeding 45,000. With more than 5,000 workers, the center is the Gulf Coast locality’s largest employer, according to the Hancock County Port and Harbor Commission. 
  
 Source: NASA via Bloomberg Completing the so-called A-3 tower will cost the agency $57 million, according to the agency’s inspector general. Close Completing the so-called A-3 tower will cost the agency $57 million, according to the... Read More Close Open Source: NASA via Bloomberg Completing the so-called A-3 tower will cost the agency $57 million, according to the agency’s inspector general. 
  
 The county’s unemployment rate in November was 7.4 percent, lower than Mississippi’s 7.6 percent while higher than the nation’s 6.6 percent, according to state and federal data that isn’t seasonally adjusted. 
  
 ‘Investment Magnet’ 
  
 Wicker stands by his support for the test stand. 
  
 “Stennis Space Center is the nation’s premier rocket engine testing facility,” the senator said in an e-mailed statement to Bloomberg News. “It is a magnet for public and private research investment because of infrastructure projects like the A-3 test stand. In 2010, I authored an amendment to require the completion of that particular project, ensuring the Stennis facility is prepared for ever-changing technologies and demands.” 
  
 Completing the so-called A-3 tower will cost $57 million, according to the agency’s inspector general. The agency also plans to maintain it, which will run about $840,000 annually, according to Karen Northon, a NASA spokeswoman. 
  
 The A-3 tower is a relic of President George W. Bush’s Constellation program, designed to send American astronauts back to the moon and beyond after the space shuttle’s retirement in 2011. 
  
 Ares Rockets 
  
 President Barack Obama proposed canceling the Constellation program in 2010 after rising costs and delays, which meant an end to the Ares I and Ares V rockets. The tower was built specifically to test the J-2X engine, simulating how it would work in high altitudes as it powered those rockets. 
  
 The engine was built by Aerojet Rocketdyne, a unit of Rancho Cordova, California-based GenCorp, and is being tested elsewhere at Stennis to power other rockets. 
  
 There are no rockets being developed for NASA that would need their engines tested under the high-altitude conditions for which the A-3 was built. 
  
 It’s conceivable that such a rocket may be built in the future. Companies like Aerojet Rocketdyne and billionaire Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, may need to test engines for yet-to-be-developed rockets that would send astronauts into space, said Chris Quilty, an analyst with Raymond James and Associates in St. Petersburg, Florida. 
  
 “With all the discussion of going to Mars, going to the moon, they are going to need more advanced upper-stage engines,” Quilty said. 
  
 Congressional Protection 
  
 Glenn Mahone, a spokesman for Aerojet Rocketdyne, said that while company officials know the A-3 test stand isn’t “a near-term priority, it likely will be required to support exploration objectives in the future.” 
  
 For now, though, NASA doesn’t need it. 
  
 Obama’s request to kill Constellation was included in a 2010 bill approved by Congress. At the time, NASA already had spent $292 million on the A-3 test stand, and it needed another $57 million to finish the work, according to a February report by the agency’s inspector general, Paul Martin. 
  
 Martin highlighted the A-3 as an example of how efforts to cut costs and get rid of unneeded facilities are blocked by lawmakers. 
  
 “The political context in which NASA operates often impedes its efforts to reduce infrastructure,” he told the House space subcommittee in September. 
  
 Wind Tunnels 
  
 The February audit identified 33 facilities that NASA either wasn’t fully using or had no future need for, including six of 36 wind tunnels, 14 of 35 rocket test stands, and two of three airfields. Those facilities cost more than $43 million to maintain in fiscal 2011, the audit said. 
  
 The A-3 structure is being built by mostly local, closely held businesses. Two of the contractors are in Mississippi: the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians’ IKBI Inc., based in Choctaw, and a Tutor Perini Corp. (TPC) unit in Gulfport. 
  
 Others include Mobile, Alabama-based American Tank & Vessel Inc. and Decatur, Alabama-based M&D Mechanical Contractors Inc. 
  
 The tower is made of millions of pounds of steel -- strong enough to hold liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen tanks weighing as much as 320,000 pounds apiece. The stand also includes chemical steam-generator units that would be used to help simulate the engine’s ability to power a rocket to altitudes up to 100,000 feet. 
  
 ‘Best Tools’ 
  
 Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran, then the ranking Republican on the Appropriations Committee, also pushed NASA to complete the test stand. 
  
 “It is important that a large emphasis be placed on safety and testing, and we cannot launch any type of vehicle until we test it extensively using NASA’s best tools for testing,” Cochran said after a 2011 hearing on the agency’s budget. 
  
 Barney Keller, a spokesman for Club for Growth, a Washington-based group that supports spending cuts and backs a challenger to Cochran in this year’s Republican primary, called the A-3 funding “an excellent example of why so many people are fed up with Washington.” 
  
 To contact the reporter on this story: Jonathan D. Salant in Washington at jsalant@bloomberg.net 
  
 To contact the editor responsible for this story: Stephanie Stoughton at sstoughton@bloomberg.net ||||| Sealing tower’s fate 
  
 In the summer of 2010, Congress saved the tower in Mississippi for good. 
  
 It happened without anybody mentioning the project’s name aloud. 
  
 “This is a big day for America,” said then-Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.), as it was about to happen. Hutchison was speaking in July 2010 at a meeting of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. 
  
 “We’re doing the right thing for America. For our economy. For our creativity,” she said. “For our science. And for our security.” 
  
 Hutchison was announcing a new compromise with the White House, which would finally settle the fight over Constellation. Constellation was dead. Instead, the senators were telling NASA to build something that they had just made up: a “Space Launch System” (jokers at NASA call it the “Senate Launch System”). 
  
 The new plan for NASA was, as usual, long on “how” and short on “why.” 
  
 The senators were clear about what they wanted NASA to do: keep some Constellation-era projects going, with all their salaries and spending, and try to integrate them into a new system. 
  
 But what was the goal of all that? The moon was off the table. Instead, NASA is now focused on a less impressive rock: an asteroid. Sometime in the 2020s, NASA wants to capture one about the size of a house, and then have astronauts zoom up and examine it. This was not a mission chosen to captivate the world’s imagination. It was a mission chosen to use the leftovers that Congress had told NASA to reheat. (Mars still remains a distant goal: At the earliest, NASA might get there in the 2030s.) 
  
 At first, the Senate’s new plan looked bad for the tower in Mississippi. At best, it now would be a project built on spec: erected in the hope that someday NASA might return to the idea of a giant rocket engine that fired in a vacuum. 
  
 But, in the committee room, Hutchison was still talking. 
  
 “I move that the following amendments to the NASA reauthorization bill be adopted,” she was saying. “Wicker Two, as modified. Wicker Three, . . .and Wicker Four,” Hutchison said. 
  
 “All those in favor?” said Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), the committee chairman. 
  
 Everybody said aye. 
  
 “Opposed?” 
  
 Nobody said anything. 
  
 “It does appear to the chair that the ayes have it,” Rockefeller said. 
  
 “Sherlock Holmes, you are,” Hutchison said. 
  
 And that was it. “Wicker Three” was an amendment sponsored by Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.). His amendment said NASA “shall complete construction and activation of the A-3 test stand with a completion goal of September 30, 2013.” 
  
 That language was included in the bill that passed the committee. Then the Senate, then the House. In October 2010, Obama signed it into law. 
  
 “Administrations come and go. I think it makes sense not to leave a partially constructed asset sitting there,” Wicker said this month, in an interview in a hall outside the Senate chamber. “I do believe, a decade from now, we’ll look back and see that it has been used in a very positive way.” He did not name a specific NASA program that he believed would use it. 
  
 In a separate interview this year, Hutchison — who is now retired — had said she couldn’t remember how Wicker managed to get his amendment included in that compromise. 
  
 So how did he do it? 
  
 In the Capitol hall, the senator burst out laughing. 
  
 “Just talented legislating,” he said, and then walked away. |||||
A: 
Four years ago, NASA knew it wouldn't likely use a giant tower originally intended to test rockets—because the testing program was canceled. Yet the agency kept building the A-3 test stand and finally finished the $349 million project in June. And the costs keep coming, with the Mississippi structure expected to require $700,000 each year in maintenance, the Washington Post reports. "You lock the door, so nobody gets in and hurts themselves," says the project's former boss. Now, the tower is a giant ode to an agency that has lost its "sense of purpose," David A. Fahrenthold writes: "There's no 'why'" at NASA these days, says its former No. 2. The test stand, near Gulfport, was once expected to send people back to the moon and to Mars, at a projected cost of $119 million. But costs kept rising, and with plans to get back to the moon looking less achievable, President Obama in 2010 called for an end to the program, dubbed "Constellation," that included the tower. But the Senate, in an effort fueled by Mississippi Republican Roger Wicker, voted to continue funding the construction. "When it comes down to their pork, they’re always going to defend it," a space policy expert told Bloomberg early this year in a piece that dubbed the stand "useless." Even now, to actually use the stand would require a few more years' work, says a NASA official. It's one of seven stands currently "mothballed," with another being renovated nearby. (In other space news, NASA has an "oh my gosh" moment.)