Space Politics
Because sometimes the most important orbit is the Beltway…
Archive for March, 2011
March 31, 2011 at 12:57 pm · Filed under Congress, Lobbying, NASA
Space News has some updates on the latest perspectives on heavy-lift development. In one, administration officials are “pushing back” on development of the Space Launch System (SLS) heavy-lift rocket included in last year’s authorization act. OSTP director John Holdren told Space News said that delays in getting a final FY11 budget mean that it would be effectively impossible for NASA to spend the full amount authorized in FY12 for SLS, $2.65 billion, even if appropriated. “There is, I think, a real question as to whether it can be done in the time that the Congress would like, but in the end it’s difficult to legislate scientific and engineering reality,” he said. Meanwhile, in a House hearing yesterday, members pressed NASA to press ahead with SLS. Referring to the language in the authorization act, science committee chairman Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX) said, “The administration needs to acknowledge this and act accordingly.”
Speaking of SLS and ongoing Congressional budget debates, the Space Frontier Foundation warns, “It’s Silly Season Again!”. It contrasts the full-year House CR, HR 1, with a Senate version that, as previously noted, appeared to mandate NASA move ahead immediately with a 130-ton SLS and not a 70-to-100-ton initial version included in the authorization act. “[S]ome in Congress want to make NASA build their favorite rocket, without competition, even though NASA has already told them it can’t be done for the resources available on anything like the timetable Congress wants,” the Foundation states in their release, asking people to contact their Congressional representatives and ask that any SLS development be competed openly. “It’s time to stop the Congress from mandating the Senate Launch System, and let NASA compete ideas for one (or more) Space Launch System(s).” [emphasis in original]
Bart Gordon, the former chairman of the House Science Committee who retired last year, has a new position: partner in the public policy and law practice of K&L Gates in Washington. Gordon’s areas of work will include “innovation and technology-related issues”, according to the release, although aerospace is not explicitly mentioned.
March 31, 2011 at 7:00 am · Filed under Congress, NASA
Yesterday the House Budget Committee took testimony from fellow members of the House on various issues as it prepares work on a budget resolution for fiscal year 2012. That included a statement from Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL), who spoke out on the need to fully fund NASA’s human spaceflight programs, cranking up the rhetoric in the process.
Posey’s statement followed familiar themes: NASA’s human spaceflight program was adrift thanks to the Obama Administration’s decision to cancel Constellation, with implications for American leadership and national security, even while the administration sought increase spending on climate change research and commercial spaceflight. And he sought to make those points with blunt language.
“By failing to set priorities within NASA’s budget, the Administration has left NASA with no priorities,” he said. “Should Congress fail to step in where the Administration has left a leadership void we will be making an unacceptable compromise in our national security and lose economic and intangible benefits from our space program.”
Among his other statements, he claimed that China and Russia “have announced plans to colonize the Moon–they are not going there to collect and study rocks like we did.” What they are going to do is left to our imaginations, but it was clear he was playing up the military significance of space: “Human space flight is a matter of national security. Space is the world’s military high ground, our Golan Heights if you will.” Later, he warns of the consequences of “one day without your cell phones, one day without your laptops, one day without a weather report, one day without your GPS, one day not being able to use your credit card or withdraw cash from the bank,” all made possible by satellites (but not related to human spaceflight).
Posey, in his statement, claimed that the administration’s 2012 budget proposal “is a substantial departure from the Authorization Bill that he signed into law in October–cutting $2 billion from the heavy lift program while increasing taxpayer subsidies for the low earth orbit commercial space companies.” While the administration does fund the Space Launch System below authorized levels, the source of the $2 billion figure isn’t clear: in the 2012 proposal SLS would receive $1.8 billion, compared to the 2012 authorized level of $2.65 billion.
There are some real issues worth debating about the agency and its budget proposal, such as what kind of human spaceflight program it should have, including launch vehicles and spacecraft, and how much funding it should receive. However, it’s not clear that statements like Posey’s do much to advance the debate, particularly when the heavy lifting on these issues will be done not by the budget committee but instead by appropriators months (perhaps many months, if FY11 is any guide) from now.
March 30, 2011 at 6:46 am · Filed under Congress, NASA
Thursday’s scheduled hearing by the Commerce, Justice, and Science subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee on the NASA budget, scheduled for Thursday, has been postponed, according to the committee’s calendar. NASA administrator Charles Bolden was scheduled to testify. The hearing has been rescheduled for Thursday, May 5th, at 10:30 am. No reason for the postponement was announced.
A reminder that a hearing on NASA’s exploration program by the space subcommittee of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee remains on for this morning at 10 am. The witnesses are Doug Cooke, NASA associate administrator for exploration; Scott Pace of George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute; and Jim Maser, chairman of AIAA’s corporate membership committee and also president of Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne. The hearing will be webcast.
March 29, 2011 at 7:33 am · Filed under Congress, NASA
At a Women in Aerospace panel event last week, several Congressional staffers had a clear message for NASA: they have little interest in renegotiating, or simply ignoring, provisions of the NASA Authorization Act the Congress passed last year.
“This isn’t a negotiation,” said one participant of the panel, held under the Chatham House Rule of non-attribution.* “There is no interest in renegotiating that framework.” Another panelist said that there was interest in no more than “minor relative changes along the margins” to the authorization act that could be implemented in future appropriations bills, without going into further detail.
One particular area of concern several panelists cited was NASA’s support—or lack thereof—for the Space Launch System (SLS) and Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV), which combined get about $2.8 billion in the administration’s FY12 budget request, compared to just over $4 billion in the authorization act. One panelist suggested Congress might have to look elsewhere within NASA, or even outside the agency, such as the Departments of Commerce and Justice, which share the same broader budget allocation as NASA, to fully fund those programs.
Likewise, one panelist expressed disappointment that NASA hadn’t delivered an acceptable report on the development of the SLS and MPCV that the act required 90 days after enactment. The agency did deliver a report in January, but many key members effectively rejected it. “NASA, with no consultation with the authorizing committees, decided to produce what they called a preliminary report, and sent that up and said, ‘We’ll get back to you when we decide on the rest of it,’” the panelist complained. “That’s an approach that’s simply not going to work in this environment.”
Participants also wondered why, while NASA was proposing funding SLS/MPCV below authorized levels, it was also proposing funding commercial crew development above authorized levels: $850 million in the FY12 request versus $500 million in the authorization bill. One panelist said that while there was general suport for commercial crew development, there remained some skepticism that there was a need for multiple providers.
That led one participant to state that there’s an “absolutely zero chance” the administration’s FY12 budget proposal would be supported by Congress, echoing comments by Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) at a hearing of the Senate Commerce Committee’s space subcommittee earlier this month: “The president’s budget is not going to be enacted.”
* There was some confusion at the event about whether the event was under the Chatham House Rule or completely off the record. However, others, such as SpacePolicyOnine.com and Space News, have reported on the event under the less restrictive Chatham House Rule, so this report will as well.
March 27, 2011 at 10:12 am · Filed under Congress, NASA
With Congress in recess this past week, members have been in their home districts talking about policy issues—which, in the case of certain districts in Alabama and Florida, means talking about space. Florida Today reports that Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL) told an audience of local retired military officers that the US is making “a horrible mistake” by not having a clear path forward for human spaceflight, saying that space is the “ultimate military high ground” (but not further explaining the link between human spaceflight and military space applications, which rely on unmanned spacecraft.) By contrast, Rep. Sandy Adams (R-FL), whose district includes KSC, did not mention space in a luncheon speech Friday, telling Florida Today afterwards that her constituents “all know that I am working hard for NASA.” One constituent interviewed after the speech, in fact, said she would have liked to hear more from Adams about space issues.
With all the concerns about funding levels, heavy-lift launch vehicle programs, commercial crew development, and the like, Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) decided to focus instead Saturday on another NASA issue: outreach to Muslim countries. “Quite frankly, I don’t think that’s the mission of NASA,” he told a town hall audience in Athens, Alabama, the Huntsville Times reports, referring to comments made by NASA administrator Charles Bolden last year. (The administration would agree with Rep. Brooks: they later said Bolden misspoke.) Brooks said he hopes that Congress will stop those outreach plans, the Times reported, and “focus on strengthening NASA and the space program” in the name of “American exceptional ism”.
Novelist and Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiaasen doesn’t say much about space, but NASA’s current situation, where it’s forced to continue to spend money on Constellation programs, even those elements cancelled in last year’s authorization bill, was too much for him to ignore. Hiaasen directed his invective at Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), who authored the provision in the FY2010 appropriations act, still in effect thought the series of continuing resolutions, that keeps NASA from cancelling elements of Constellation. “Yet instead of doing what’s best for all American taxpayers (and for NASA, which is scraping for funds), the senator is content to sit back and watch nearly $280 million go down a black hole – and into the hands of major campaign contributors,” Hiaasen wrote, referring to campaign donations Shelby received from ATK and its employees. (It does seem at times as though we’re in the middle of a plot of a Hiaasen novel: all we need is an epic showdown in The Everglades.)
March 26, 2011 at 11:08 am · Filed under Congress, NASA
What kind of heavy-lift vehicle does NASA want to build, or at least thinks it can build? That was one central topic of discussion in a speech and Q&A session by NASA administrator Charles Bolden on Capitol Hill on Friday, organized by the Space Transportation Association.
Congress has already provided direction to NASA on this in the 2010 NASA authorization act: build a “Space Launch System” (SLS) that can launch 70-100 tons into low Earth orbit, starting by the end of 2016, and is eventually upgraded to 130 tons. NASA, though, is still studying what the SLS would look like, and, to the consternation of some members of Congress, delivered an initial report to Congress in January that said an SLS concept that meets the payload and schedule constraints of the act isn’t possible within projected budgets. Bolden said those study efforts were proceeding, with an emphasis now on deciding on the propulsion system: “whether you go with LOX/hydrogen the way we did with shuttle, or LOX/RP the way we did back in the Saturn days… whether you use solids.” He said NASA is getting “really close” and, later, “perilously close” on making decisions on this.
However, it wasn’t clear from Bolden’s comments whether what emerged from those studies would meet the act’s requirements for payload capacity and schedule. Asked why the agency could’t just announce that it would develop the vehicle in the act, Bolden said, “Because I don’t want to, for one thing, and because it may be that we can’t do that. We don’t know.” (It’s unclear whether Bolden meant that he doesn’t want to build the SLS as specified in the act, or instead meant that he doesn’t want to say now that NASA will build such a vehicle; he later claimed he meant neither of those things.) Bolden cited budget uncertainties for 2011 and beyond in the new climate of fiscal conservatism as a key factor in determining what NASA can do for an HLV. “This time last year, the worst you could do [for a fiscal year 2011 budget] was 2010 level,” he said. “Today, 2010 level is pretty good.”
Bolden emphasized that his interest is on an evolvable launch system, in contrast to Constellation’s plans to develop the Ares 5 with only the Ares 1 as an intermediate step. “What got us in trouble with Constellation was there were people in NASA who believed that they were going to get one shot, and one shot only, at a heavy-lift launch vehicle, and ‘I gotta build the biggest rocket known to man because I’m never going to get to come back to that,” he said. “I don’t live by that philosophy. I think we have to be able to do small, incremental steps, demonstrate that we can keep to cost and schedule, and then people will begin to have confidence that we know what we’re talking about. If we can’t do that, we’re not going very far with anything.”
“NASA does not need a 130-metric-ton vehicle probably before the next decade,” Bolden said later. “We know we’re going to need it if we’re going to go to an asteroid, in a reliable way, and we’re definitely going to need it when we talk about going to Mars. But we would take a lesser capability in an earlier heavy-lift system so that we can get the job done,” he said, not specifying how lesser that initial capability could be. He added that “traditional rocket companies that want to sell me a 130-metric-ton vehicle, but don’t want to evolve it, they may lose. They may lose because there’s some other company that wants to give me the capability that I need right now that can be evolved to what we will need down the road.”
This is not the first time that Bolden has spoken out on heavy-lift development. In an appearance earlier this month at CSIS, Bolden said that “we can’t” go directly to a 130-metric-ton vehicle, and that NASA would “continue to negotiate and discuss with the Congress why that is not necessary.” That speech came shortly after the Senate Appropriations Committee had put forward a full-year continuing resolution that appeared to call for immediate development of a 130-ton HLV.
(As an aside, it’s worth noting that the NASA authorization act refers to payload capacity in “tons”, while Bolden’s comments, and some previous NASA documents, make use of “metric tons”, which are about 10 percent heavier (2,205 versus 2,000 pounds). It’s a minor point in the grander scheme of things, but you would think that an agency that lost a spacecraft because of a mismatch in metric versus English units would be more attuned to that.)
Bolden also, curiously, suggested that NASA would not be the only user of any heavy-lift vehicle it develops. “When I talk about a heavy-lift launch vehicle, it’s not a NASA vehicle any more. In this day and age, it’s a heavy-lift launch vehicle that’s going to be used by the national intelligence community, the DOD, because we’re the only ones building a heavy-lift launch vehicle, and we’re building it for that purpose,” he claimed. Later, when talking about a 130-ton vehicle, he suggested that while NASA does not have an immediate need for such a rocket, “probably the intelligence community can use it as soon as I can give it to them.” While there may be some concepts floating around the national security space community, unclassified and classified, for projects that could require a heavy-lift launcher, there are no existing projects under development or consideration that need anything larger than the Delta 4 Heavy, which can put about 25 tons into LEO.
For some additional reporting and commentary on Bolden’s speech Friday, I recommend SpaceRef and SpacePolicyOnline.com.
March 25, 2011 at 6:06 am · Filed under Congress, NASA, Other
While Congress has been in recess this week, it will be back in business next week, with a busy schedule of hearings on tap:
At 10am on Wednesday, March 30, the space subcommittee of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee will hold a hearing titled “A Review of NASA’s Exploration Program in Transition: Issues for Congress and Industry”. Scheduled to appear are Doug Cooke, NASA’s associate administrator for exploration; Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University; and Jim Maser, who is listed as chairman of AIAA’s Corporate Membership Committee but is perhaps better known as president of Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne (and who recently warned that that continued uncertainty in space policy could hurt the country’s space industrial base.)
At 10:30 am on Thursday, March 31, NASA administrator Charles Bolden will appear before the Commerce, Justice, and Science subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee for a hearing on the FY2012 NASA budget request.
The Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee has two hearings scheduled next week of at least tangential relevance to space policy. On Thursday at 10 am the subcommittee will host John Holdren, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, while at the same time on Friday the subcommittee will hold a hearing on NOAA, with administrator Jane Lubchenco testifying.
March 24, 2011 at 1:03 pm · Filed under Congress, NASA
While the current situation involving NASA’s budget and restrictions on terminating Constellation contracts is familiar to most readers here, the Orlando Sentinel lays it out in dollars and cents: NASA is forced to “waste” $1.4 million per day on Constellation contracts it can’t cancel because of a provision in the FY2010 appropriations bill, even as we approach the halfway mark of FY2011. A spokesman for Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL), who vowed earlier this year to remove the so-called “Shelby provision” (after Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), who got it included in the FY10 appropriations act), blamed “partisan politics over a broader government spending measure” for the failure to get that provision eliminated. (Republican appropriators earlier this month also said that they would seek to eliminate that provision in the next CR, but failed to do so.) NASA officials, including Administrator Bolden in a House appropriations hearing earlier this month and his associate administrators in a Senate hearing last week, have shied away from claims that the current situation has been causing them to waste money, but made it clear they’d like the language removed sooner rather than later.
In an editorial today, Florida Today calls on Congress to fund commercial crew development as the best means to limit the impending gap in US human spaceflight capabilities. The paper notes that the current situation the US finds itself in, with the US reliant on Russia for access to the station for at least several years after the shuttle’s retirement this year, is an artifact of the original implementation of the Vision for Space Exploration back in 2004, which was endorsed by Congresses with both Republican and Democratic majorities. “In the hyper-partisan climate in Congress, the announcement brought familiar criticism from Republicans that the Obama administration is ceding U.S. human spaceflight to Russia,” the editorial states, referring to the latest NASA contract for Soyuz flights. “The rhetoric accomplishes nothing, further poisoning the atmosphere when level-headed bipartisan leadership is necessary to steer NASA through the post-shuttle transition.”
March 24, 2011 at 7:17 am · Filed under Congress, NASA
In less than a month, on April 12, NASA administrator Charles Bolden is scheduled to announce which sites will receive the agency’s three shuttle orbiters—Atlantis, Discovery, and Endeavour—when the fleet is retired later this year. That means the sites seeking the orbiters are ramping up for one final lobbying push, and often calling on their Congressional delegations to twist (or, at least, try to twist) the arm of Bolden to win one of the orbiters.
Florida: On Wednesday, Rep. Sandy Adams (R-FL) called on NASA to give one of the orbiters to the Kennedy Space Center, citing the spaceport’s three-decade history of launching the shuttles. “The Space Shuttle is as much a part of Florida as sunshine and beaches,” she writes in a letter to Bolden. “I urge you to consider the important role the people of Florida have played in this era of exploration and adventure, and that you choose to house one of the Shuttles at the KSC complex.”
Houston: While conventional wisdom puts Florida as one of the frontrunners for a shuttle, people in Houston are more nervous, fearing they may lose out to another site in the middle of the country, such as the Air Force museum in Dayton, Ohio. Earlier this week 18 members of the Texas Congressional delegation, including Houston area members as well as others such as Ralph Hall (R) and Joe Barton (R), sent a letter to President Obama asking that NASA award Houston an orbiter, claiming that failing to do so “would forever diminish the service rendered by the City of Houston and create a blemish on its significance to the legacy of NASA as it closes this chapter in its history.” Leading the effort is Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D), who notes in a release accompanying the letter that she is “a zealous advocate for NASA” and was spurred into action after hearing that Houston “had fallen to the bottom of a list of cities being considered ” for a shuttle.
That appears to be a reference to a Houston Chronicle article about Houston’s prospects, noting that the Air Force budget request for FY2012 includes $14 million for the Air Force museum to prepare to receive a shuttle orbiter. The newspaper followed that report up with an editorial calling for the city to receive a shuttle, asking Bolden “to look beyond the politics of placement and do the right thing”. (The same editorial also claims that “Congress has passed legislation exempting the Smithsonian from preparation charges”; that appears to be incorrect, as that provision was in a House appropriations bill it passed last December but was not approved by the Senate.)
Houston is relying on more than just positive history to win an orbiter: Local TV station KTRK reported that Bolden met Wednesday with families of astronauts lost in the Challenger and Columbia accidents, who lobbied to get Houston an orbiter. Bolden didn’t comment on the meeting in an interview with the station, but said that he thought there were “six to ten places” that he thought qualified for an orbiter, not disclosing what those sites were.
Chicago: That city’s outsider bid for an orbiter got support last week in a letter to Bolden by the state’s two senators, Richard Durbin (D) and Mark Kirk (R). With ties to the shuttle program tenuous, the senators played up the city’s ability to secure funding for major projects (as Chicago’s bid calls for a new building for Adler Planetarium on the city’s lakefront, as well as Adler’s expertise in education and public outreach. While the senators were polite, the Chicago Sun-Times was a bit more blunt in an editorial this week: “Not to be unkind, but for NASA to give the shuttle to any other Midwestern city would be a comparative act of charity.”
New York: Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is doing more than just write letters: he invited Bolden to tour the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum, the New York City museum vying for an orbiter. “It’s time for the Intrepid to do one last recovery mission by permanently hosting a retired shuttle,” Schumer wrote. (Bolden declined the invitation, the New York Daily News reported, as a spokesman explained that Bolden had already visited the museum “on numerous occasions”.)
As this lobbying continues for a couple more weeks, it’s interesting that the space-related topic that generates the most interest among members of Congress, particularly those who ordinarily pay little attention to space issues, has nothing to do with NASA’s future in space but instead is about disposing of its past.
March 23, 2011 at 6:42 am · Filed under NASA
Tucked away in last year’s NASA authorization act is a provision calling for an independent study about human spaceflight:
SEC. 204. INDEPENDENT STUDY ON HUMAN EXPLORATION OF SPACE.
(a) IN GENERAL.-In fiscal year 2012 the Administrator shall contract with the National Academies for a review of the goals, core capabilities, and direction of human space flight, using the goals set forth in the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Act of 2005, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Act of 2008, the goals set forth in this Act, and goals set forth in any existing statement of space policy issued by the President.
The study’s scope, timeframe (the legislation calls for “findings and recommendations” for fiscal years 2014-2023), and use of the National Academies has caused many people to liken this to the decadal surveys used in various space science disciplines, such as the recently-released planetary science decadal survey. But would such a study for human spaceflight be effective?
That question was debated last week during the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation “Living in Space” session, part of the Satellite 2011 trade show in Washington. While the session was sparsely attended, with no more than about 15 people in the audience, the event featured a good debate about whether such a study will make much of a difference in shaping the long-term future of human spaceflight.
“Part of the problem, the reason why we’ve been going around and around and around, is that we have not been forced to reach a consensus” on the goals of human spaceflight, said NASA’s Phil McAlister. “This is why I believe in this Academies-like study that will allow the human spaceflight community to come together, like the science community has done for years and years, effectively.”
“With that kind of document and blueprint… then finally, maybe, we can get the long-term consensus required to actually finish one of these programs,” he said. “That is my sincere hope.”
Marcia Smith of SpacePolicyOnline.com, who previously worked at the National Academies, is more skeptical of the utility of a human spaceflight decadal survey. One concern she has is the scope of such a study. “You don’t do a decadal survey for ‘space science.’ The communities are too diverse,” she said. Instead, there are separate decadals for astronomy, planetary science, and other fields, narrow enough to make it likely to achieve consensus on goals. “I do not believe you can do that with human spaceflight, and I have been encouraging everyone I know to not call this thing that Congress is requesting a decadal survey.”
Scientific decadal surveys also benefit from strong leadership from scientists universally accepted by the community, such as Mars scientist Steve Squyres in the recent planetary science decadal or Roger Blandford in the astronomy and astrophysics decadal released last year. Smith wondered if there was a person with similar standing in the human spaceflight community to lead this study. “The human spaceflight community is so fragmented, and there are so many groups that want to do this, that, or the other, I cannot think of a single individual” with the standing of a Blandford or Squyres, she said. Anyone selected, she suggested, should be somewhat younger than chairs of past space studies like Norm Augustine and Tom Young. “I don’t know an individual who has that kind of support in the human spaceflight community, whatever that is,” she said.
Smith added that while decadal surveys look good to outsiders, they have their flaws and drawbacks as well. Well-connected scientists, she said, can do end runs around the surveys and win funding for their own programs regardless of their standing in the surveys’ final reports. Last year’s astrophysics decadal survey generated controversy when, instead of recommending one of the many mission concepts presented to it as the community’s top priority, it created a new mission called WFIRST. “There is this myth that somehow decadal surveys solve all of your problems,” she said.
McAlister, though, saw a decadal survey, as imperfect as it might be, as better than the current state of affairs. “I don’t see any plan for getting this community together that even has a hope or a chance as good as the decadal,” he said. “Noting its issues, that, to me, that has by far the best potential for bringing the community together.”
Next entries »
