What does the House version of the NASA authorization bill mean for NASA’s Johnson Space Center, the Houston Chronicle asked Rep. Pete Olson (R-TX), the ranking member of the space subcommittee of the House Science and Technology Committee, and whose district includes JSC? “The first message is we love you,” Olson responded. (Hugs, anyone?) “[M]y message to them is that help is on the way. The House and Senate are hard at work to ensure that we have a viable space program.”
Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT) also hailed the proposed legislation as “a strong repudiation of the President’s flawed proposal” for NASA, one he added, that was “stronger even than the good developments we saw last week out of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.” His support is primarily rooted in the bills implicit support for Ares 1 (or, at least, a crewed launcher that would be closely derived from that vehicle). providing demand for solid rocket motors ATK produces in his state. (Incidentally, earlier this week Brett Lambert, director of industrial policy in the Pentagon, said that the US solid rocket motor industry was “over capacity” and needs to be consolidated.)
Advocates of commercial space, though, are hardly loving the bill. While the press release announcing the bill states that the legislation “provides more than $4.9 billion in funding for commercial crew- and commercial cargo-related initiatives”, only $764 million is explicitly designated as such in the bill: $50 million a year for five years for commercial crew development, $100 million a year for five years for a “loan and loan guarantee program” to support the development of such vehicles, and $14 million in FY11 for COTS (about $300 million less than what the administration requested.) The remainder, apparently, is for far less controversial cargo transportation services. “Based on the proposed levels of funding for Russian Soyuz flights versus commercial crew services, it would appear that the House Science Committee has more faith in Russian technology developed in the 1960s than in America’s own aerospace industry,” Brett Alexander, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, tells Space News.
Suborbital research advocates are also unhappy with the bill. While the administration requested $15 million a year for five years for the Commercial Reusable Suborbital Research (CRuSR) program, the House bill authorizes only $1 million a year for FY11 and FY12 (and does not set any explicit funding levels for later years). The bill also puts a number of restrictions on the program, requiring a number of studies and resolution of any liability and indemnification issues. That’s opposed by researchers and suborbital vehicle developers alike, who see it as an unnecessary delay for flying experiments on such vehicles.
Given those provisions in the House bill, it’s not surprising some commercial advocates are rallying around the Senate version, even those it doesn’t give them everything they want. SpaceX issued a press release Tuesday where the company “applauds” the Senate for their bill. “We are pleased that the Senate Commerce Committee has recognized that the best and only near-term option for eliminating America’s reliance on the Russian Soyuz for astronaut transportation is the development and use of commercial systems, such as SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Dragon spacecraft,” SpaceX CEO and CTO Elon Musk said in the statement.
The House Space bill is the best one yet.
In what can only be called a political master stroke, it says “No more” NASA money to the commercial folks. Instead, NASA will help them get loan guarantees. Given that we are after all talking about “commercial” space companies, this seems tough to argue against. Frankly, now that the idea is out, it’s going to be tough to put this Genie back in the bottle. I can’t wait to see how the commercial backers react to the application of market economics to so-called backers of free-market space exploration. And what an easy way to let the commercial guys hang themselves if they don’t perform on their contracts–miss a launch.
And the House Bill says to the Obama Administration that, given the tough budget we are facing, Constellation can be restructured but will not be canceled. So, delay Ares I if you like, but it stays.
So, the Senate and House Authorization Bills are pretty far apart, with the House Bill is the bad cop and the Senate Bill is the good one.
The key will be how the Appropriators react. Of particular importance will be how Shelby, Cochran, and Mikuski react. Shelby and Cochran will love the loan guarantee idea. In fact, I think the GOP will insist on the Loan Guarantee option no matter what.
It is going to be fun to see how this plays out. But the best the New Space folks could have hoped for, that the Senate Bill get “blessed” and quickly passed, is not to be.
In the meantime, backers of commercial crewed space need to start thinking of pithy retorts to counter the desire by the House Science Committee that commercial space funding no longer be a financial burden to NASA but to the commercial crewed launch companies themselves.
From today’s Florida Today at:
http://www.floridatoday.com/article/20100721/NEWS02/7210336/1086/House++Senate+have+different+ideas+for+NASA+s+future
A House committee drafted legislation that would give NASA $19 billion next year, as President Obama has proposed, but with far different spending priorities than the White House and Senate have supported.
There is no additional shuttle flight, funding would be slashed for commercial rockets and NASA would be told to “restructure” the Constellation program that Obama wanted to kill. The bill diverges significantly from a measure approved by a Senate panel last week, which the White House supports …
“If this goes forward, we’re going to remain in . . . purgatory for quite some time,” said Dale Ketcham, director of the University of Central Florida’s Spaceport Research and Technology Institute. “I think the people who will be most happy here are the Russians, because clearly we’ll be relying on them to get to the space station for a long, long time.”
The House bill has jolted private commercial companies into embracing the Senate bill. Welcome aboard:-)
It was obvious last winter that the spending proposals for Commercial were never serious. Congress would as a matter of nature take that commercial money and keep it for job creation back in the district.
The debate in the Congress is now about the POR. How closely will it resemble Ares 1/V or some other design that uses most, if not all, of Ares 1/V hardware.
The argument over turning LEO access over to SpaceX, Orbital and others is over. Again this shouldn’t surprise anyone since in order to get to LEO, all of these companies needed billions from the USG to get there. With no guarantee they would deliver. Congress rightly concluded Ospace, in one sense, was no different than what Nasa has been doing for decades, funding primes for hardware and services.
all of these companies needed billions from the USG to get there. With no guarantee they would deliver.
Constellation needed ten times as many billions from the USG to get there. With no guarantee they would deliver (and good reason to think they wouldn’t).
Congress rightly concluded Ospace, in one sense, was no different than what Nasa has been doing for decades, funding primes for hardware and services.
If Congress concluded that, they were as uninformed as you.
richardb wrote all of these companies needed billions from the USG to get there
This is not true, and you know it. NASA needs an LV to deliver supplies and astronauts to the ISS. We can either pay the Russians, or we can spend a little money to speed up the development already under way (by a US company) in order to stop paying the Russians to boost our supplies to the ISS.
This formula has worked in dozens of other industries and is working for our country’s commercial space companies.
It’s the American Way and I’m proud that companies like SpaceX are growing to meet our governments needs.
Just my opinion…
IF (very big) the House version was to become law, it would not surprise me (read: it would be absolutely hysterical) to see all the commercial companies other than SpaceX and Orbital walk away, leaving NASA more or less screwed.
Pitting Obama-style “commercial crew” against Constellation is a false dichotomy. There are a million different contracting approaches.
Jim, ya know what I really hope? It would be absolutely hilarious if the House got their way and SpaceX had to develop their human launch vehicle on their own dime.. and it would only be SpaceX because Boeing has specifically said they won’t do it on their own dime. Then when the Nelson Rocket fails and NASA *still* has no way to get to orbit they’ll have to come to SpaceX hat-in-hand and beg for seats. When that happens I hope SpaceX charges the same as the Russians, or more if they can get away with it.
You know what has got my goat here. All the negative statements about NASA. How quickly we have forgotten about all the miracles of modern engineering that NASA has demonstrated throughout the years. I truly hope that our government will allow them many more years to put us back on track toward the exploration of deep space. Does anyone know if the decision has been made to allow bigelow to link one of his inflatables up to the ISS? It has been rumored to be in the works. If think you Ares haters, will flip if Ares 1 still gets the go ahead.
Dennis Berube wrote @ July 22nd, 2010 at 2:53 pm
“You know what has got my goat here. All the negative statements about NASA. How quickly we have forgotten about all the miracles of modern engineering that NASA has demonstrated throughout the years.”
My comments to date about NASA have been a reflection of the direction that people like Griffin or Congress have wanted to take NASA, which I believe has been outside of the core NASA mission.
NASA’s core competency is not in designing and running a transportation company, and yet administrators like Griffin and some people in Congress somehow perceive that only NASA can launch a rocket without it blowing up – despite the obvious evidence one way or the other.
I saw the Obama/Bolden budget proposal as a way to get NASA back to it’s roots, which is in my mind:
– Creating technology that commercial companies are not capable of creating, and both passing it along to American companies for their use, and using on NASA programs. NASA is tax supported, and part of it’s job is to pass along their knowledge to commercial companies. They do it already, and they need to focus on it even more.
– Exploration. The bulk of our exploration has been using robotic systems, and this should continue and expand. We now have the ability to go back to the Moon and do some serious robotic exploration to determine what we can eventually do on the Moon with people.
– Teach commercial companies to do the routine tasks NASA has pioneered, and by doing that NASA can save money, and focus their efforts on the cutting-edge tasks that NASA is staffed to tackle.
Instead of Congress designing an HLV that does not have a defined need, they should be focusing on creating the technology and techniques that will lower the costs to access space, and let the market solve the supply & demand questions – that is their core competency, not NASA’s.
> Coastal Ron wrote @ July 22nd, 2010 at 3:40 pm
>
> ==
> NASA’s core competency is not in designing and running a
> transportation company, and yet administrators like Griffin and
> some people in Congress somehow perceive that only NASA can
> launch a rocket without it blowing up –==
No that’s not their attitude. Griffen wanted NASA out of the transportation business (I.E. shuttle concept of NASA as a national transport infrastructure, and fostering space development with safe routine space access) – back to space being rare spectacles that would be more exciting because they were so rare and big.
Congress also wants NASA developing useful tech – but if they can’t get that (or anything else) they figure they absolutely need NASA pouring money in districts to get them votes. Sadly, that (adn national pride) is generally what the public wants from NASA.
> I saw the Obama/Bolden budget proposal as a way to
> get NASA back to it’s roots, which is in my mind:
Yeah I just can’t see how anyone could see Obamaspace that way, or generating below.
> – Creating technology that commercial companies
> are not capable of creating, ==
That would be good – but its very definitely not in the budget – the budgets crafted to LOOK like its doing that, while just throwing out pork.
> – Exploration. The bulk of our exploration has been using
> robotic systems, and this should continue and expand.==
Our robotic explore has gone way down and really its time to do something in space, or shut done the robotic precursors.
> – Teach commercial companies to do the routine tasks
> NASA has pioneered, and by doing that NASA can save money,
> and focus their efforts on the cutting-edge tasks that NASA is staffed to tackle.
NASA doesn’t know anywhere near as much as the companies. They USED to be the innovators, but they can’t keep top people liker that no staff under civil service rules.
>= Instead of Congress designing an HLV that does
> not have a defined need, they should be focusing on c
> reating the technology and techniques that will lower the
> costs to access space, ==
Problem is, its not a technology question. The technology would support cost to orbit down below $100 a pound pretty easily – its the market side that’s lagging.
Would be good if NASA was doing cutting edge tech things again – but I think that era is long passed.
Kelly Starks wrote @ July 23rd, 2010 at 9:06 am
“Problem is, its not a technology question. The technology would support cost to orbit down below $100 a pound pretty easily – its the market side that’s lagging.”
If the mythical $100/lb to LEO actually existed, then there would be a lot of demand – but it doesn’t exist.
If you think it does, please provide details and explain, because no one else has been able to figure it out.
SpaceX, which offers the lowest non-subsidized price to LEO, charges $56M/flight for their Falcon 9, and with a payload to LEO of 23,050, that works out to $2,430/lb. You’re trying to tell everyone that it’s easy to lower that cost by a factor of 24?
Show us.
>> Kelly Starks wrote @ July 23rd, 2010 at 9:06 am
>> “Problem is, its not a technology question. The technology
>> would support cost to orbit down below $100 a pound pretty
>> easily – its the market side that’s lagging.â€
>Coastal Ron wrote @ July 23rd, 2010 at 11:44 am
> If the mythical $100/lb to LEO actually existed, then there would
> be a lot of demand – but it doesn’t exist.
I didn’t say it exists, I said the TECHNOLOGY FOR IT EXISTS. I.E. the reason the costs are not that low or for market reasons, not technology reasons.
Think of it as the same new car that cost $600 in Lease or payment, and $200 a month for insurance. Well if you commute 80 miles a day 1600miles a month, 1800 miles with non-commuting miles.
$800/1800 = $0.44 a mile.
Same car, but you are retired and only drive 10 miles a week. Same car, same tech
$800/40 = $20.0 a mile.
You want $100 a pound, you need to be part of a big market – there are ways for that, but not in effect now.