In the event you have not previous read about this, the Senate Commerce Committee will be holding a confirmation hearing Tuesday morning at 10 am to review the nomination of Shana Dale as deputy administrator of NASA. The hearing, in Dirksen 562, will be webcast. I won’t be able to watch the hearing, but this should be a fairly routine event in any case; if you do watch the hearing and hear something interesting, please post a comment.
I talked briefly last night with someone familiar with the progress on the NASA authorization legislation. (As you may recall, the Senate and House have each passed their own authorization bills, HR 3070 and S.1281, in July and September, respectively.) A formal conference to work out the differences between the bills has not started yet, but some initial “pre-conferencing” has begun to take care of some of the minor, easier-to-resolve differences. Look for a final version of the bill in the next few weeks.
Last night the National Air and Space Museum hosted a screening of the upcoming PBS documentary “Race to the Moon” about the Apollo 8 mission. In attendance at the event were the three astronauts from that mission: Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders. During a Q&A session after the screening, someone asked the three astronauts what they felt about the recent addition of SpaceShipOne to the museum and the role of commercial spaceflight. Borman’s response:
Well, I think Spacecraft One [sic] was a nice stunt. You spend twenty-five million dollars to win ten. I’m not taking anything away from it because the people who flew it were very brave and courageous, but I don’t think it leads to much, and I think it’s inappropriately displayed up there next to Lindbergh’s and Yeager’s airplanes.
Borman’s comments were met with a smattering of applause from the audience that filled the museum’s IMAX theater.
Why mention this here? Borman’s comments, and the fact that at least some fraction of the audience agreed with him, suggest that proponents of commercial human spaceflight—especially those who want to sell such services to the government—have not convinced everyone yet of the utility of such efforts.
Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta apparently thinks that President Bush doesn’t get enough credit for promoting commercial spaceflight. Mineta, speaking at the COMSTAC meeting yesterday, said, “I admit that I am a bit surprised about how little is known about how the Bush Administration is enabling commercial space.” As examples, he pointed to the Vision for Space Exploration, the commercial space recommendations contained in the Aldridge Commission report, and the “clear and important role for commercial human spaceflight” in national space policy.
Compare Secretary Mineta’s comments with those made last week by Congressman Bart Gordon, who said that “I don’t think President Bush is a space guy when it comes down to it.” Gordon reached that conclusion, SPACE.com reported, in part because of Bush’s “apparent lack of interest in space issues while he was governor of Texas.” Of course, there aren’t many opportunities for state governors to speak out on space issues…
The House passed by voice vote last night legislation that would amend a provision of the Iran Nonproliferation Act that prevents NASA from purchasing Russian space hardware and services. The Iran Nonproliferation Amendments Act (S.1713), was approved by unanimous consent in the Senate last month. However, the House amended the bill slightly, as the Washington Post explains: the Senate version would prohibit payments starting in 2012, but allow those services and goods to be delivered after that date; the House version would terminate all contracts in 2012, regardless of when the payments were made. The bill also extends the policy to nuclear-related imports to Syria and nuclear exports by both Iran and Syria. The Senate is expected to approve the House version of the bill and send it on to the President, who, the Post reports, “despite some early misgivings, is prepared to sign it.”
At Wednesday’s meeting of the FAA’s Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC), Brant Sponberg of NASA talked about some of the agency’s commercialization efforts, including various Centennial Challenges prize programs. He also offered some details about NASA’s upcoming procurement of commercial ISS transport services, which may be of interest to readers given the rhetoric about the role of commercialization in the Vision for Space Exploration:
Update 10/27 12:30 pm: A few addenda to my previous comments, now that I have my notes from the meeting:
The space subcommittee of the House Science Committee and the subcommittee on government finances of the House Government Reform Committee are joining forces for a joint hearing Thursday morning (10 am, Rayburn 2318) on NASA’s financial management system. The hearing plans to examine how NASA’s new integrated financial management system is performing, and what else the agency is doing to ensure the accuracy of NASA’s financial data, something auditors have raised concerns about in recent years. As the Government Report Committee’s announcement of the hearing noted, “Although NASA management blamed conversion to the new system for its poor audit performance in both FY2003 and FY2004, auditors also found that NASA did not follow proper accounting procedures, did not accurately account for property and equipment, and was unable to effectively reconcile its Treasury account (the equivalent of balancing its checkbook).” Witnesses include several NASA and GAO officials, including NASA CFO Gwendolyn Sykes.
A few policy-related articles of note in this week’s issue of The Space Review:
An article in Sunday’s edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch looks at how some members of Congress from the St. Louis area plan to address potential budget cuts to pay for hurricane relief. One of those quoted in the article is Rep. Jo Ann Emerson (R-MO) talks about changes in the Medicare prescription drug plan, then veers sharply in another direction:
“Consider that everything else is negotiated: wheelchairs, doctors’ fees, everything but drug prices,” she said. “I also hope they eliminate Mars out of the NASA budget.”
One assumes that Rep. Emerson is referring to the Vision for Space Exploration, and not the existing (and relatively small) robotic exploration program. Oddly, speaking earlier in the article about the drug plan, she said, “We could probably find all the savings we need right there.” If so, why eliminate Mars?
Right now it appears that NASA’s supporters will have to fight hard to avoid budget cuts, if not this year then in 2007 and beyond, given the emerging fiscal environment. Now, as Florida Today reports today, NASA actually needs more money than currently planned to carry out everything: on the order of $5 billion through 2010. The problem is that the budget estimates compiled in 2004 assumed the cost of the shuttle program, currently about $4.5 billion a year, would drop roughly in half by the time the shuttle is retired in 2010. Those cost savings have not materialized, hence the need for extra funding. Without that money NASA will be faced with some hard decisions about how many of the 19 shuttle flights currently planned it can afford to carry out. It will also probably trigger renewed debate on whether any more shuttle flights should be flown: an extreme position, to be certain, but not as unlikely an outcome as it once might have been.
Because sometimes the most important orbit is the Beltway…
