Congress, NASA

Wait till next year

Yesterday the House and Senate, as expected, approved another continuing resolution (CR), this one funding the federal government through March 4 at FY2010 levels. The passage means that it will be up to the new Congress—one with a new Republican majority in the House and a narrower Democratic majority in the Senate—to deal with FY2011 spending. As previously noted, the CR doesn’t contain any new anomalies or other provisions related to NASA, which means that, among other items, the prohibition in the FY10 appropriations bill that prevents NASA from terminating any Constellation programs remains in effect, despite the human spaceflight plan enacted in the NASA authorization act signed into law in October.

The extended CR has raised questions about NASA’s ability to carry out various initiatives, including an additional shuttle mission authorized in the new act. However, Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) told Florida Today this week that the new CR should not imperil that mission or other NASA priorities. That, though, may be based on the assumption that NASA would get in 2011 no less than the FY10 topline of a little over $18.7 billion versus the authorized (and requested) level of $19 billion. In a hearing at the beginning of December Nelson said he expected NASA to carry out the provisions of the authorization act if funded at the 2010 level, and, in particular, got a commitment that NASA could carry out the additional shuttle mission if funded at that level. However, there remains the possibility that a new, more fiscally conservative Congress might seek to cut funding below the 2010 levels, either overall or for specific programs, when it convenes in January.

34 comments to Wait till next year

  • IMHO I don’t think the GOPer Congress will cut NASA’s budget below the FY2010 level, it will keep that level going with continuing CRs, complete with restrictions so that certain CxP components will continue on to finish.

    Also look to the STS zombie to go on into 2012, maybe 2013, especially if cracks keep showing up in vital areas in the aging craft.

    Despite the fact the STS will go away eventually, it just goes away that much more slowly and painfully, preserving some jobs (votes) in Red State NASA districts.

    The good news? SpaceX and eventually Orbital take more cargo to the ISS, broadcasting events on YouTube to younger generations showing how future space transportation is done economically.

  • Aremis Asling

    I find it interesting that Nelson is so dead-set on NASA following the authorization act, but at least as far as I can see, they are strictly prohibited from adjusting funds in such a way as to make that possible. I think NASA could easily at least move forward for the first few months on the new plan, but with the old budget, so long as they are able to shift some money around. But that doesn’t appear to be possible given the ‘no new projects’ and ‘no sundowning’ restrictions. Someone please clarify how these two interests aren’t mutually exclusive.

  • John Malkin

    Being a Cubs fan, I’m use to waiting until next year. However my expectations that next year will be better is low. Since the GOP couldn’t or wouldn’t negotiate this year. I’m sure next year that GOP will hack away at Democratic priorities while Democrats will hack away at GOP priorities without regards to the priorities of the public. Either way when all the mayhem clears the Republic will be the losers. I’m hoping since both sides support NASA for various reasons that it will be spared the axe and a hope for a better future will emerge. It’s going to be an ugly year in politics but interesting.

    I think if the Tea Party movement was serious about changing politics in Washington, 2011 would be a good year to try to pass a Balance Budget amendment which requires Congress to actually pass a budget before the end of the fiscal year but that’s my dream.

  • CharlesHouston

    This is a clear abdication by the Congress of their responsibility to operate the Government. Their responsibility is to pass a budget before the last one expires! This means October.

    Sen Nelson’s statement shows how out of touch with reality he is – appropriated funds are legally obligated to specific programs and STS-135 is not one of them. NASA people that spend money on STS-135 must very carefully skate around the law, and this means delay. This almost certainly delays STS-135 into the fall – possibly into the next fiscal year! This means that we have to maintain the standing army for longer.

    Now NASA is forced to spend money on Ares since the contracts are in place and there is clear legal direction to fund them. That money is purely wasted.

    We will continue to watch as the experienced workforce drifts away – likely the NASA budget will still be flat or will go up, but we will drift along with much of the workforce laid off and not productive.

    Hopefully the Tea Party folks will quickly lose their initial zeal, or we could see more months of drift in many parts of the Government.

    It is not too much of a stretch to see this as a potential loss of much of our national ability in space – commercial operators see chaos and cannot plan. The government drifts along in confusion.

    The Administration is to blame – they tried to change direction too fast. They do not know how to operate a large program and are learning slowly.

  • Aremis Asling

    “The Administration is to blame – they tried to change direction too fast. They do not know how to operate a large program and are learning slowly.”

    I agreed with you right up until this point. Everything you say suggests that the changes being proposed are all necessary and that expenditures on the old path are a waste. And in this last paragraph you suggest that Obama is moving too quickly. It appears as though you are arguing for mutually exclusive goals, a more efficient direction as soon as possible to cut costs and a slow transition to that new direction. You can’t have both.

    My project manager put it rather well when I started my current position. She showed a graph, relatively level on one side, chaotic in the middle and level, but higher on the other. The point she made was that any change, for better or worse, will almost by necessity require some chaos at initial implementation. To the extent that I’ve seen it, this is the case in almost every large undertaking. To wit, NASA will never undergo a smooth, problem-less transition. As far as I’m concerned, do your due dilligence, sure, but when the rubber meets the road, we need to just rip the band-aid off, make the changes, and move forward.

  • Vladislaw

    John Malkin wrote:

    “I’m sure next year that GOP will hack away at Democratic priorities”

    The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnel has already said what the number one priority of the Republicans is for the next two years and it has nothing to do with NASA, jobs, the deficit or other National priorities, it’s to see that President Obama is only a one term President.

    “I think if the Tea Party movement was serious about changing politics in Washington, 2011 would be a good year to try to pass a Balance Budget amendment”

    Yes I am sure the tea party is all about changing politics, like the lady from South Dakota voting for 6 billion in ethanol subsidies so her state’s corn producers make out like rats.

  • This almost certainly delays STS-135 into the fall – possibly into the next fiscal year! This means that we have to maintain the standing army for longer.

    I think that is the desire, intentional or not. With taxpayer monies tossed down the crapper for good measure.

    The Administration is to blame – they tried to change direction too fast. They do not know how to operate a large program and are learning slowly.

    Although the Administration shares blame with the Congress, IMHO their sin is one of neglect, not creative destruction.

  • The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnel has already said what the number one priority of the Republicans is for the next two years and it has nothing to do with NASA, jobs, the deficit or other National priorities, it’s to see that President Obama is only a one term President.

    I’m pretty sure that he believes that seeing to the latter will help a lot with the former.

    Yes I am sure the tea party is all about changing politics, like the lady from South Dakota voting for 6 billion in ethanol subsidies so her state’s corn producers make out like rats.

    Is there any evidence that Kristi Noem was ever a Tea Partier? If not, then this sentence is senseless.

  • Jeff Foust

    Please stay on topic, gentlemen. Thank you for your cooperation.

  • Larry

    I don’t see that extra shuttle mission happening! NASA stopped Lockheed Martin from rewoking ET-94 at MAF back in September and with only 25 hourly floor people out there after Septembers layoff that tank which is needed to be able to do STS-135 has been sitting in the VAB UNTOUCHED!It will take at least 9 to 10 months to get it readey to ship to the cape.

  • Vladislaw

    My apologies Jeff, I was just trying to point out that many here feel that the tea party is either going to cut NASA to the bone or rescue NASA from President Obama, The only point I was trying to make is, when it comes to NASA funding it will far more likely to be business as usual.

    Kristi Noem, congressional hopeful and Tea Party favorite from South Dakota raises $1.1M

    “Move over Christine O’Donnell.

    The new Tea Party star — and fund raising machine — is Kristi Noem, a rancher, mother of three and GOP candidate for congress from South Dakota”

    http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2010/10/13/2010-10-13_the_new_sarah_palin_or_christine_odonnell_south_dakota_tea_party_darling_kristi_.html

    The tea party candidates will be fund raising for reelection and will be under the same pressure from lobbiest and special interests groups in their districts/states. I have not seen anything from a tea party candidate, that is not from a space state, mentioning anything related to space, either NASA centric or commercial centric.

  • Mark R. Whittington

    It is interesting that the appropriators have ordered NASA to stick with the old program even though the new one has already been authorized. One wonders if something might not be up.

  • amightywind

    Aremis Asling wrote @ December 22nd, 2010 at 11:18 am

    But that doesn’t appear to be possible given the ‘no new projects’ and ‘no sundowning’ restrictions. Someone please clarify how these two interests aren’t mutually exclusive.

    It is quite simple. Obama and the 111th congress have done enough damage. The GOP does not trust the NASA leadership not to sabotage the Constellation project before they can reorganize it in 2011 or not to cram down new projects that cannot be sustained. So they must be explicit.

  • DCSCA

    “The extended CR has raised questions about NASA’s ability to carry out various initiatives, including an additional shuttle mission authorized in the new act. However, Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) told Florida Today this week that the new CR should not imperil that mission or other NASA priorities.”

    Nelson’s whistling past the graveyard. Florida’s only hope of siphoning off more space dollars is in an election cycle. He trotted out the ‘old hands’ too late, and they’re carrying less and less weight these days. The Obama administration has already telegraphed a position for 2011 indicating plans to start budget negotiations with a ‘freeze’ on discretionary spending. So NASA best start planning with ‘minimum mission’ thinking as their budget is in play and an easy discard from the administration’s hand. The government borrows 41 cents of every dollar it spends and the civilian space agency is a ‘luxury’ not a ‘necessity’ in the Age of Austerity.

  • DCSCA

    Rand Simberg wrote @ December 22nd, 2010 at 1:24 pm
    The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnel has already said what the number one priority of the Republicans is for the next two years and it has nothing to do with NASA, jobs, the deficit or other National priorities, it’s to see that President Obama is only a one term President.

    I’m pretty sure that he believes that seeing to the latter will help a lot with the former.

    Hmmmm. We’re certain sure Kentucky’s involvement with NASA, aside from birthing country/western music for shuttle crew wake-up calls, are minimal at best.

  • silence dogood

    Santa’s Message: Human Spaceflight Elves–spend your Christmas money while you still have it (if you can really commit/obligate that quickly during the holidays!).

  • Robert G. Oler

    CharlesHouston wrote @ December 22nd, 2010 at 11:41 am

    “It is not too much of a stretch to see this as a potential loss of much of our national ability in space – commercial operators see chaos and cannot plan. The government drifts along in confusion.

    The Administration is to blame – they tried to change direction too fast. They do not know how to operate a large program and are learning slowly.”

    not so much.

    There was no way to “change direction” slowly. The notion of changing direction means deleting people from the government technowelfare programs and that was never going to go down well…and as long as all the people stay employed the programs are over budget and getting worse.

    STS 135 is never going to happen. The joy for me is that the CR’s just keep eating up money and there isnt the money to keep all the folks employed…

    and it will get worse.

    Who is to blame for the budget mess is mostly Obama’s fault but in the end the GOP has almost been non patriotic in how they have dealt with this.

    Robert G. Oler

  • E.P. Grondine

    “The Administration is to blame – they tried to change direction too fast. They do not know how to operate a large program and are learning slowly.”

    There is little doubt that Obama had little idea how vicious ATK would be in defending Ares 1.

    As it sits, work continues on ATK’s 5 seg, and that’s all that matters to ATK. If there is a reason for the 5 seg, I don’t know it. That is to say, perhaps a reason may exist, but I’ve never heard anyone, and I mean anyone, speak of it. Does anyone here know of one?

  • NASA Fan

    Once again, dysfunction inherent in our system of government is resulting in loss of resources and inhibiting any forward movement on a new future for NASA. Like I’ve said many times: Look to the past for NASA;s future performance, notwithstanding whatever the content of their portfolio.

  • It is interesting that the appropriators have ordered NASA to stick with the old program even though the new one has already been authorized. One wonders if something might not be up.

    This is a continuing resolution, and has nothing to do with the desire of the appropriators. Their desire was expressed in the failed omnibus.

  • CharlesHouston

    The replies of several people here indicate that they do not know how Federal contracts and the budgeting process works. A representative example was:

    (my comment first) “The Administration is to blame – they tried to change direction too fast. They do not know how to operate a large program and are learning slowly.”

    There is little doubt that Obama had little idea how vicious ATK would be in defending Ares 1.

    What the Administration did not know, and is very slowly coming to grips with, is that the appropriations bill drives a series of contracts to implement it. When our amateur President gets up in February and declares that we should stop Ares and stop Orion – those contracts are already in place and have funding codes and deliverables. It is illegal to just stop doing them. So, the crafty amateur might come up with the idea of interpreting a contract clause to force the companies to retain money for contract cancellation – this would cause them to lay off people and prevent them from making contract deliverables. This does not cancel the contract or remove the legal requirement to make deliverables.

    So – ATK might have viciously defended the SRB use in future years but it had no immediate need to defend the funding for the next year. By the time contract negotiations had finished on the cancellation – the year would be over. Sure work proceeds, even with few people, since there are contract deliverables that must be made.

    The Administration did not realize the the Federal budget is a huge ship with a tiny rudder. To make a major change in a program – you allow the year to progress and work on the appropriations for next year. With a new appropriations bill (the authorization helps but…) some of the money could be reprogrammed with few legal complications.

    So right now we have many expenditures that are required – since we do not have a new appropriations bill – that are for Ares facilities, etc. We have signed contracts requiring those deliverables and do not have the authorization from Congress to renegotiate them.

    We are seeing deliverable deadlines pass since so much money is tied up in contract cancellation accounts – for Orion contracts that will not now be cancelled. Many people were laid off so that the money could be directed to those cancellation accounts – people that could otherwise been occupied generating the deliverables.

    A Constellation sized program is not like designing an Estes rocket – it has tremendous legal and regulatory inertia. When you try to pivot that around a point you are gonna waste lots of money for no gain. If people do not like this answer they need to revise the Federal Acquisition Regulation. The only conclusion we can draw is that the Obama Administration, with its lack of experience and its unwillingness to listen to its Agency experts, has crippled our space enterprise and confused our potential commercial partners for a year.

  • Shaggy

    What is with the ATK bashing on this site? They are only doing a job that NASA has agreed to. It is still congress’s responsibility to pass an FY11 budget. ATK is only doing the job that Congress has told NASA to do also. If you want someone to point fingers at, point it at congress and the administration.

    If you’re looking for a reason to have the 5 seg booster, you could say that it’s a planetary asset since it is the largest, most powerful, rocket motor in existence. That alone is reason enough in my mind.

  • Martijn Meijering

    Not a good reason if it were, but it’s not actually in existence.

  • If you’re looking for a reason to have the 5 seg booster, you could say that it’s a planetary asset since it is the largest, most powerful, rocket motor in existence. That alone is reason enough in my mind.

    Unfortunately, there is no need for the “largest, most powerful, rocket motor in existence.” What is needed is affordable space transportation.

  • Robert G. Oler

    CharlesHouston wrote @ December 22nd, 2010 at 8:16 pm

    thats a reasonable explanation of the situation…the words “amateur President” are a tad incendiary but excusable. Having said that most of the issues are caught up in the inability to pass a budget in a timely manner that includes realistic cost in terms of changing things.

    Robert G. Oler

  • Vladislaw

    CharlesHouston wrote:

    “So, the crafty amateur might come up with the idea of interpreting a contract clause to force the companies to retain money for contract cancellation”

    I thought the contract includes that the contractor is liable for the close out costs. A contractor, based on how strongly they believe the program will go forward, can use those close out funds for other things believing close out will never occur so why bother with saving them.

    I listened to Bolden outline this, all he said was those companies better have all their ducks in a row because if the program got shut down, they better have the funds available because NASA was not going to provide them double funding for them because of a tight budget. ( I believe in more than one instance, NASA has canceled a program and then gave the company those close out costs again because the contractor already spent them and Bolden said it was not happening again.)

  • Robert G. Oler

    Shaggy wrote @ December 22nd, 2010 at 8:56 pm

    “If you’re looking for a reason to have the 5 seg booster, you could say that it’s a planetary asset since it is the largest, most powerful, rocket motor in existence. That alone is reason enough in my mind.”

    easily satisfied Robert G. Oler

  • Aremis Asling

    “The GOP does not trust the NASA leadership not to sabotage the Constellation project before they can reorganize it in 2011 or not to cram down new projects that cannot be sustained. So they must be explicit.”

    Actually, that doesn’t explain anything. The GOP doesn’t trust the Dems on anything, generally speaking, but that is entirely beside the point that I was making. Congress is at once ordering NASA to stick to the old path and asking how they plan to implement the new law. I don’t care which side of that fence you sit on, you can’t do both, unless there’s an interpretation of the CR or the authorization bill I’m not aware of. The GOP can have all the lack of trust they can muster, but they can’t, or at least they shouldn’t, in the same breath demand we implement the new direction. Nelson may be the one saying it, but I didn’t hear any GOP’ers disagreeing with him.

  • NASA Fan

    @Charles Houston
    Well said; and IMHO the difficulty and inefficiency and wasted resources of ‘pivoting’ in a new direction by canceling Cx is exactly the gamble Mr. Griffin took in pushing forward the Cx architecture he did. He wanted to get hardware built, moving forward making it very difficult to cancel. Didn’t matter much if his architecture was too expensive to impelemtn…he wanted something ‘cancel proof’ Admiral Stiedle was simply pushing paper around during his tenure over VSE, something that is easily canceled. Griffin’s gamble didn’t pay off of course as in the end, well…enuf on that thread.

  • silence dogood

    So, how will it work, really? Charlie B. is beholden to the president/congress/the law; Lori G. can’t help but be influenced by her history of commericial space policy. Seems fractionated to me…

  • GuessWho

    “Who is to blame for the budget mess is mostly Obama’s fault but in the end the GOP has almost been non patriotic in how they have dealt with this.

    Robert G. Oler”

    “…the words “amateur President” are a tad incendiary but excusable.

    Robert G. Oler”

    Pot, kettle, … You get the picture.

    Given that Dems controlled the White House for the past 2 years and Congress for the last 4 years (with Obama as a part of that in the Senate), they have had ample time to change the direction of NASA. Despite Oler’s constant jibes at the GOP, the minority party was in no position to stop the Dems on NASA or anything else. The Dems punted on the 2010 budget fearing an even larger slaughter in the falls elections. The ~2000 page omnibus they tried to ram through at the 11th hour was written last February as part of a strategic play to get as much of the Dem agenda passed without public outcry after the elections. Thankfully that strategy failed. Yet another example of how clueless and/or dishonest the Dems are. The past year of NASA mismanagement is testament to the inability of the Dems to lead or play it straight with the American taxpayers.

  • Dennis Berube

    Well Constellation is still on the books!!!!

  • vulture4

    It’s not quite fair to blame Obama. Bush created Constellation and then cut taxes so much it was completely unrealistic. It took months to organize the Augustine commission and they provided exceptionally poor advice. The best alternative would have been to extend the Shuttle program but NASA resisted this and eventually it became apparent that so many logistics contracts had been canceled under Bush that it was virtually impossible. Constellation continues to spend money hand over first even though there is no money for any BEO work and no point in flying Orion in Earth orbit since it is distinctly inferior to Dragon in this role.

    When I ask NASA people what practical value Constellation has I get meaningless answers like “well, we don’t want the Chinese to beat us to the moon”. The Constellation contractors and their allies in Congress assume that if Obama is defeated the program will magically continue. This is pure fantasy. The Republican Congress plans to cut spending drastically and even the most ardent Constellation supporters also demand tax cuts.

    The irony is that we have Republicans fighting to maintain a monolithic government program that wastes billions of taxpayer dollars while a Democratic president tries to shift NASA funding to more efficient private industry which might just possibly be able to use some of the technology to sell commercial services in the free market.

  • Bush created Constellation and then cut taxes so much it was completely unrealistic.

    There is zero correlation between NASA budgets and tax rates.

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