The conference report version of the FAA reauthorization bill gives the industry a partial victory. Section 827 of the bill (on page 318), tucked away in the “Miscellaneous” section of the bill between sections on air passenger screening privacy and air transportation of lithium batteries, extends the current restriction on safety regulations, but only to October 1, 2015. The joint statement of managers of the conference report provides a few more details, on page 152 of the PDF document: “Nothing in this provision is intended to prohibit the FAA and industry stakeholders from entering into discussions intended to prepare the FAA for its role in appropriately regulating the commercial space flight industry when this provision expires.”

Update: Congressman Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), whose previously spoke out in favor of an extension of that CSLAA provision, issued a press release today taking credit for getting at least a limited extension into the final bill. The release quotes from several industry officials as well—Eric Anderson of Space Adventures and the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, Jeff Greason of XCOR Aerospace, Mirk Sirangelo of Sierra Nevada Corp., and George Whitesides of Virgin Galactic—praising the extension. McCarthy, the House majority whip, serves a district that includes the Mojave Air and Space Port, a hub of entrepreneurial space activity.

He adds, though, that he’s concerned that regulation could impede future growth of the industry, citing in particular the provision in the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act (CSLAA) of 2004 that prevents the FAA from enacting safety regulations except for cases linked to the “serious or fatal injury” of crew or participants, or events that “posed a high risk” of such injuries, during licensed or permitted flights. The expiration of that provision this December, he claims, “could mean a whole slew of new regulations on the growing $34 billion commercial space flight industry.” (The source of the $34-billion valuation for the industry isn’t cited.)

“There is no question that the safety of crew members and the public is of utmost importance, but unleashing Washington bureaucrats on this industry now could mean the end of private commercial space flight in America before it even gets off the ground,” he concludes. “That is why I am fighting to extend the 2004 provisions.” He doesn’t specify how he’ll seek to extend that regulatory restriction, but as noted here last week, the House version of an FAA reauthorization bill does provide an extension. A final version of the bill is expected to be completed in the coming weeks after House and Senate negotiators hammer out differences between their versions (the Senate version does not contain an extension) after reaching a deal last week on labor language that held up the bill for months.

Should the CSLAA provision not make it into the final FAA reauthorization bill, though, there may be additional opportunities before December 23 to include it in other legislation. For example, Congress will have to take up later this year another extension of commercial launch indemnification, as the current regime expires at the end of this year.

The relevance to space policy is that the bill could resolve an issue for the commercial human spaceflight community: a provision in the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act (CSLAA) of 2004 that limits the ability of the FAA to pass safety regulations for such vehicles. That provision is set to expire this December, but as noted here last month, some in the industry have been seeking an extension since the industry has built up less experience than expected when the CSLAA passed. The House version of the FAA reauthorization bill does provide an extension, while the Senate version does not.

It’s not clear yet if the final version of the reauthorization bill—which may take a few weeks to draft—will include CSLAA language, but one group of industry experts is skeptical. Earlier this week Special Aerospace Services (SAS) hosted the 2nd Annual Human Spaceflight Technical Forum in Boulder, Colorado. The event was closed to the media, but Wayne Hale, SAS’s director for human spaceflight programs and a former Space Shuttle program manager, talked about some of the issues raised at the meeting, including that CSLAA provision, in an interview on Friday. Most of the people at the meeting “were not actively lobbying for an extension” of that restriction, he said.

The discussion at the meeting instead revolved around what the FAA would do when its current restriction expires on December 23. Hale said there was an understanding that the FAA would not immediately promulgate a series of new safety regulations, citing the time it takes to develop and make open for public comment any new rulemaking. “No one at the FAA is working in a back office to deliver a bunch of new proposed regulations on December 24th,” he said.

The Planetary Society is in the first camp. This week the organization released a letter it sent to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on NASA science funding. In the letter the society asks OMB for a “small but significant” change in NASA science funding, so that it accounts for 30 percent of NASA’s overall budget. (In FY2012 science accounts for $5.09 billion out of the agency’s $17.8-billion budget, or 28.6%.) This “modest rebalancing”, the society argues, would support the agency’s portfolio of science programs in an era of tight budgets. “If NASA’s overall budget shrinks, we are concerned that the Science program will carry a disproportionate burden of any reduction,” the letter states. “Increasing the share of the NASA budget for Science is the best place for the agency to make the most effective use of the taxpayers’ money in today’s austere budget environment.”

The Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) is more pessimistic about the administration’s budget request, particularly for the planetary science portion of the overall NASA science budget. “The reality is that within NASA’s science budget, planetary science is nowhere near the Administration’s top priority and that does leave us vulnerable to budget pressures,” DPS chair Dan Britt writes in a DPS newsletter published this week. A cut to planetary science funding, he notes, would jeopardize a wide range of missions as well as research funding.

However, he is more optimistic about how Congress will deal with planetary science funding. “Planetary science has a lot of friends on both sides the aisle in Congress. Congress likes the results the planetary science program, they like the consensus plan in the Decadal Survey, and they want to see it continue,” he writes. NASA’s planetary science program got a largely sympathetic hearing by the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee in November, with the OMB blamed for problems like the apparent unwillingness to commit to cooperation with Europe on Mars exploration. Britt adds, though, that Congress won’t act on its own. “While Congress is a potentially friendly forum, it’s going to be up to us, the planetary science community, to make the case for continued priority support.”

“I know that some members of the AAS were upset at the prospect of the House Appropriations Committee canceling the James Webb Space Telescope,” he said. Smith explained that the move by the appropriations subcommittee chaired by Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) was to “draw attention to the management and budgetary problems facing the JWST” and get the White House to respond. “I do believe that Frank Wolf has now got the Obama Administration’s attention,” he said. “Contrary to what might have been written at the time, Congress supports the James Webb Space Telescope.”

Astronomers, though, can be excused if they thought otherwise. Just a month earlier, members of the House Science Committee grilled NASA and Northrop Grumman officials about the telescope’s cost overruns and delays, putting them on notice that the latest JWST “replan” was the agency’s final chance for avoiding cancellation. “In my view, NASA’s latest replan for the James Webb Telescope is the agency’s last opportunity to hold this program together,” committee chairman Ralph Hall (R-TX) said at the time.

Smith went on to say that Congressional criticism of NASA’s human spaceflight plans, particular by Hall and ranking member Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), don’t mean they’re similarly critical of the agency’s science activities. Hall and Johnson, he said, “have been unified in their criticism of the Obama Administration’s lack of planning for human spaceflight, and I share their skepticism,” he said. “However, I hope that the broad science community does not translate such criticism of NASA’s programs into a perception that arguments between Congress and the Administration mean that Congress is somehow anti-science.” Even people in Washington, he quipped, “are made humble” by various astronomical discoveries.

Speaking on the topic of “Big Science in Crisis” at the American Astronomical Society conference Monday night in Austin, Texas, Steven Weinberg said he was pessimistic that governments would fund the next step in particle accelerators beyond Europe’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), regardless of the scientific case for it. “It’s going to be a very hard sell, and it may be impossible to get the next accelerator built,” he said.

That pessimism, he said, stems from his experience two decades ago with the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), a large particle accelerator that was already under construction near Dallas when Congress canceled it in 1993. The project, he said, got an “undeserved reputation” for cost overruns and, with a limited constituency for the program within Congress, was vulnerable to being cut.

“Whatever else it is, a large scientific lab is a public works project,” Weinberg said. “It, therefore, will always get enthusiastic support from local politicians, as it [the SSC] did in Texas, and hostility, or at best apathy, form other legislators from other parts of the country.” Weinberg admitted later in his talk that the project compounded its problems by initially relying too much on a single political patron, then Speaker of the House Jim Wright (D-TX), who was forced to resign in 1989 because of a scandal, as well as not doing enough outreach to other members of the House (which led the later effort to cancel the SSC.)

Those issues, along with competition for funding elsewhere in science (another issue that hurt the SSC), remain today. “All of these problems are going to come up again when we go to our governments for the next big accelerator,” he said.

Weinberg says there are similar problems with the future of astronomy, in particular with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). “Its history is somewhat reminiscent of the SSC,” he said. “It’s facing accusations of overspending, but the problem again is that at the funding levels being requested, it’s being stretched out to the point where it’s getting more and more expensive.” Like the SSC, the JWST has a strong Congressional patron, in this case in the form of Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), “but you can’t really rely on it too much.”

Weinberg, who has long been a strident critic of human spaceflight, also brought that up in his talk. “All of the great discoveries that have made such great progress in cosmology in particular have been from unmanned observatories,” he said. “The International Space Station was sold as a scientific laboratory, but nothing interesting has come from it.” He did say the ISS now has “one real science experiment” on the ISS, in the form of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, but that experiment largely runs autonomously from the activities of the station’s crew. He also blamed the ISS in part for the SSC’s demise, as the Clinton Administration elected to advocate for the station’s continuation in Congress, but not the SSC, when both were threatened with cancellation in 1993.

Although Weinberg didn’t menton it, his description of scientific labs as public works projects could also apply to human spaceflight activities: they too have largely local support, with a few key patrons in Congress primarily from districts and states with NASA facilities, while the rest of Congress tends to be apathetic, at best. Interestingly, after his talk Weinberg could be seen chatting with NASA’s new associate administrator for science, John Grunsfeld, a former astronaut best known for his work on several Hubble Space Telescope servicing missions; perhaps he sought to remind him that human spaceflight and astronomy can coexist and even work together.

Weinberg didn’t offer specific solutions to the problems facing big astronomy and physics projects beyond an overall increase in government spending that would provide more funds for those projects without putting them into competition with infrastructure, education, and other priorities. “We mustn’t get into a conflict between science and these many needs of our society. For one thing, we’ll lose,” he said.

Without some kind of change that makes governments more willing to fund big science projects, he concluded, “we may see in the next decade or so an end to the search for the laws of nature which will not be resumed again in our own lifetimes.”

A former occupant of Bolden’s current office is similarly optimistic that sequestration will be avoided. “There is no question that this atmosphere is very, very tough. The budget environment is going to be challenging,” said Sean O’Keefe at a Washington Space Business Roundtable luncheon last week. Despite that environment, he said that the automatic across-the-board cuts required by the sequestration process is enough to get Congress and the administration to act to craft an alternative that will prioritize cuts. “The spectre of sequestration is so onerous that the notion behind it is that it will force everybody to act to avoid something mindless, driven by a computer formula,” he said.

He said that he was not surprised that the supercommittee failed to come up with its own plan, calling that diverse collection of members the “let’s give peace a chance” move that predictably failed. He expects that in the coming year both Congress and the Administration will work to find an alternative, not wanting to appear to have failed in cutting spending during an election year as well as risk more downgrades from ratings agencies. “The chances of coming to an alternative to sequestration, I think, is high.”

O’Keefe, who served as NASA administrator from the end of 2001 to early 2005 and is now CEO of EADS North America, touched upon a wide range of topics, many not related to NASA or space policy, in his talk. In one passage, he endorsed the idea of turning over routine transportation to low Earth orbit of cargo and crews to the private sector. “The logic behind all this that I found compelling,” he said, “is that NASA is an extraordinary place… that is designed for the purpose of doing things that haven’t been done before.” Repetitive flight activities is something that may be better suited to the private sector, he suggested.

That activity, designed to support continued operations of the ISS, is important because the station is “exactly one invention, discovery, something away from being the next wonder of the world,” he said. “When that happens, it will be exactly like Hubble,” he said, referring to the space telescope that became beloved by the public after corrected optics allowed it to return stunning images and perform cutting-edge science. “Just one breakthrough, and we’re going to see this station in a completely different way,” rather than questioning the expense of building and maintaining it.

However, the prospect of that cut has been averted after the Senate rejected the cut Saturday morning. The cut was contained in a separate piece of legislation from the actual disaster relief bill, allowing senators to vote for the disaster spending but vote against the rescission. Both bills passed the House on Friday.

“This is a surprising victory for common sense within NASA in getting the most benefit for the country out of a limited Commercial Crew budget,” concluded the Space Access Society in a statement released shortly after Thursday morning’s announcement. That organization had argued that a switch to contracts based on Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR) “was likely to fatally increase Commercial Crew Program costs and timelines.”

The Commercial Spaceflight Federation (CSF) also endorsed the NASA move, citing NASA’s desire to promote competition by funding at least two companies in this upcoming and future phases of the program. “Competition is the key to the Commercial Crew Program, and we are pleased to see that NASA is continuing to promote competition,” CSF executive director Alex Saltman said.

The chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX), was less enthused with the shift, citing a potential for increased risk because, under an SAA, NASA cannot direct companies to meet specific requirements. Hall suggested that NASA accelerate the competition by perhaps doing away with the competition that industry appears eager to support. “In order to reduce risk and cost, and to minimize further schedule slips, it would be my hope that two commercial companies would team together to jointly develop a cost-effective and safe launch system,” he said in a statement.

The committee’s ranking member, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), also expressed concerns about increased risk under the SAA approach in a separate statement. “I am concerned that NASA’s plan does not appear to contain sufficient margins and other risk reduction measures to give Congress confidence that it has a high probability of successfully meeting the objective of providing safe and cost-effective commercial crew transportation to and from the International Space Station by 2016 or even 2017,” she said.

Also yesterday, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued its own report on NASA’s commercial crew program, citing concerns about budget levels. Noting that the funding levels are about half of what was originally projected, “NASA’s ability to execute its approach as currently planned is unlikely.” (In the context of the report, “as currently planned” refers to the agency’s prior plans for a FAR-based contract, not the shift to SAAs announced Thursday morning.) That would force NASA to support perhaps a single contractor, increasing programmatic risks. The report recommended that NASA reassess the program before going forward with the RFP for the Integrated Design Phase contract—which is exactly what NASA did, concluding that it would shift back to SAAs.

Accompanying the omnibus is a disaster relief spending bill, which seeks to offset its $8.1 billion cost through a rescission of FY12 spending for non-defense discretionary spending. That across-the-board cut of 1.83 percent implies, for NASA, a cut of $325 million from its $17.8 billion topline for 2012.

Meanwhile, the 2012 presidential campaign trail has been quiet on the topic of lunar colonies and space mirrors the last few days, although we’ll have to see if it comes up again at the next debate tonight in Sioux City, Iowa. One person coming to the defense of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is Patrick Caldwell, who offers a bit of an odd compliment in The American Prospect: “Gingrich indulges a number of fantasy ideas, but he gets it right for space exploration,” he writes. He cites comments made at the International Space Development Conference in May by Jeff Greason and Paul Spudis about the importance of space exploration and settlement. “[I]t will take a direct vision to reach that end, and Gingrich is far ahead of his Republican opponents—as well as the incumbent president—in articulating those ideas,” Caldwell argues.