The House Science Committee plans to hold a hearing of the full committee on Wednesday morning to discuss the status of the National Polar-orbiting Operational Earth Satellite System (NPOESS), a weather satellite program that has encountered serious delays and cost overruns. (The link to the media advisory announcing the hearing isn’t working as of this writing.) The hearing, at 10 am in Rayburn 2318, will feature Conrad Lautenbacher, the head of NOAA; Ronald Sega, undersecretary of the Air Force; David Powner of the GAO; and Alexis Livanos, president of Northrop Grumman Space Technology, the prime contractor for NPOESS. Earlier today the Defense Department released details of a “selected acquisition report” on the NPOESS program, reporting that the program’s cost has increased from $6.8 billion to nearly $8.3 billion, “due primarily to technical issues arising during the engineering and manufacturing development portion of the program.” That increase is enough to trigger a Nunn-McCurdy review of the program; while there’s no sign that the program is in jeopardy (it got over $300 million in the FY06 budget), it will likely be restructured in some manner.
I am very interested to hear the outcome of this hearing.
As someone who is a firm believer in the need for Landsat data to continue, I am upset that they merged the Landsat imager onto the NPOESS program to be launched on C-1. I hope that as a result of all of this, that Landsat is divorced from NPOESS and is flown as a seperate mission that maintains the excellent data that we have recieved over the past 30+ years.
I recall reading a couple weeks ago (in Space News?) that there was a move afoot among the various agencies involved with this program to remove the Landsat imager and put it on a dedicated spacecraft, so maybe there’s still hope…
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