Congress, NASA

Senate doesn’t follow House lead on exploration cuts

The Commerce, Justice, and Science subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee marked up their FY2010 appropriations bill yesterday and appear to have more closely followed the White House’s request than the House did earlier this month. According to the summary, the bill provides $18.68 billion for NASA overall, equal to the administration’s topline request. The summary doesn’t give the full breakout of funds by account so it’s hard to tell how closely this matches the president’s request (especially if they created a “Construction and environmental compliance” account like the House did.)

Also unclear is the fate of some smaller programs, like Centennial Challenges and related innovation efforts that are feared to be on the chopping block despite their small ($20 million) price tag. However, we do know thanks to the Orlando Sentinel that the bill includes three earmarks for Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) totaling $1.6 million, primarily for facilities at the Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

The full Senate Appropriations Committee is scheduled to take up the bill at 3 pm this afternoon.

7 comments to Senate doesn’t follow House lead on exploration cuts

  • Major Tom

    Given that the Air Force currently won’t approve the Ares I-X test flight due to range concerns about thrust oscillation knocking out the vehicle’s flight termination and thrust vector control systems, restoring the House cut to Constellation may not have been the right move. See:

    http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/orl-nasa-rocket-troubles-062809,0,4229034.story

    Additional cuts were arguably more in order. Do the senators from Florida really want to continue throwing taxpayer dollars at a program that’s threatening to land a multi-story rocket in a populated area of the Space Coast? Or a program that likely faces a choice between launching someplace other than Florida or cancellation?

    FWIW…

  • Actually, Major Tom… I’m trying to figure out why Sen. Nelson wants to send more money to Alabama for failed rocket R&D instead of using existing (or near-term) rockets to launch astros from Florida sooner.

    Rocket safety is not a question of Senatorial priviledge. Fighting for jobs is.

  • sc220

    Nelson’s support for Ares is truly baffling. Does he work for Floridians or Richard Shelby? Going with an EELV-based launch infrastructure would reduce the Gap and keep the flight rate at the Cape high.

  • Going with an EELV-based launch infrastructure would reduce the Gap and keep the flight rate at the Cape high.

    It would also provide a lot of employment in Decatur, Alabama. It is bizarre.

  • Martijn Meijering

    If both Nelson and Shelby are in a position to block progress, then they need to form a united front because otherwise they both lose. That would explain Nelson supporting what Shelby wants.

  • richardb

    Major Tom, you overstate the case from the Orlando Sentinel. So far the Air Force hasn’t shut the door, in their words “We … need a flight-safety system that we know with a 99.9 percent confidence level will function,” said Lt. Col. Loretta Kelemen, head of the 45th Space Wing Range Safety Office at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. “If they do not meet our requirements, then they do not launch here.” Nasa quite naturally thinks their system is good enough and will attempt to prove it to the AF. As I read it, the Air Force is warning Nasa they aren’t satisfied but they haven’t said “No” yet.

    Nelson is fighting for Ares because it keeps a bigger workforce in Florida than an EELV would in Alabama. He might also be a bit worried that if Nasa gets a big shiner over a canceled Ares, Congress might lose confidence in other Nasa programs and see a spiral of budget cuts.

    All of the above doesn’t earn credit to Nelson or Nasa, but does anyone seriously think that US Senators have the public interest at heart? Study the corruption scandals blowing thru Washington to disabuse you of that noble thought. Senators for the most part are quite venal and worry about re-election and pork (ie legal influence peddling), in that order.

  • Major Tom

    “Major Tom, you overstate the case from the Orlando Sentinel.”

    No, I did not overstate the case. In the first post, I wrote that “the Air Force CURRENTLY [emphasis added] won’t approve the Ares I-X test flight”. That’s a true statement and consistent with the Orlando Sentinel article. The USAF may approve the Ares I-X launch in the future, but they currently will not due to range concerns about thrust oscillation knocking out the vehicle’s flight termination and thrust vector control systems.

    “Nasa quite naturally thinks their system is good enough and will attempt to prove it to the AF.”

    I think Hanley or Cook has stated that they’re resorting to computer simulations in an attempt to prove that the Ares I-X flight termination system won’t fail under the stress of the thrust oscillations. Personally, I think they’ll have a very hard time doing so. Ares I-X employs the same flight termination system as the Shuttle SRBs but in a very different acoustic environment. As the SRM propellant burns, the SRM naturally vibrates up through a frequency that the flight termination systems on the Shuttle SRBs are not designed to withstand. Getting a computer model to demonstrate that these acoustics won’t occur or that the acoustics won’t be strong enough to disable some part of the flight termination system (which runs along the entire length of the SRBs) will be very difficult without a lot of questionable assumptions built into the computer model. And getting the Air Force range safety officers and their engineering support teams to buy into those assumptions will be even more difficult.

    I’d bet at the end of the day that the Air Force range officers will require changes to the flight termination system used on the Shuttle SRBs to qualify it for the acoustic environment on the Ares I-X flight (or the addition of a highly reliable thrust oscillation mitigation system to Ares I-X). And the schedule and cost hits involved in those changes will probably bring the already limited relevance and programmatic viability of the Ares I-X flight into question.

    Just my 2 cent crystal ball… we’ll see what happens.

    “Nelson is fighting for Ares because it keeps a bigger workforce in Florida than an EELV would in Alabama.”

    I doubt Sen. Nelson cares much about Alabama voters.

    As for Florida voters, were debris to rain over a suburban or urban area of south Florida, it would easily trump KSC jobs as the hot-button space issue in the next congressional election.

    And as for KSC jobs, given that Ares I/Orion is already looking at 2015 with zero confidence and 2017 with only 65% confidence, those jobs are arguably better served by getting a different launch system fielded sooner, even if that system doesn’t requires fewer workers than Ares I/Orion. It’s a question of whether some jobs are preserved with a more quickly fielded system, versus having to lay off most of the workforce due to a 5-7+ year gap.

    [As a side note, I personally think that the gap argument is rather overblown, but if we’re a congressman making that argument on behalf of the workforce/voters, we should at least think through which options are most likely to inflict the least amount of pain on that workforce.]

    “Senators for the most part are quite venal and worry about re-election and pork (ie legal influence peddling), in that order.”

    All too true in most cases, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t voice our concerns and be critical of the system or elected representatives individually.

    FWIW…

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