A House committee, though, plans to at least start the process of examining what needs to be changed in commercial space transportation law. The House Science Committee’s space subcommittee will hold a hearing next Tuesday afternoon titled “Necessary Updates to the Commercial Space Launch Act.” George Nield, associate administration for commercial space transportation at the FAA, will testify, along with Alicia Cackley of the GAO and Henry Hertzfeld of George Washington University. Nield and Cackley testified before the same subcommittee in mid-2012 specifically on launch indemnification.

That hearing, incidentally, comes on the eve of the FAA’s annual Commercial Space Transportation Conference on February 5-6 in Washington. Among those scheduled to speak: Rep. Steven Palazzo (R-MS), chairman of the space subcommittee.

In a seven-page letter released by his office Tuesday, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) wrote to NASA administrator Charles Bolden about the news, first reported by The Guardian, that Chinese scientists are not being allowed to attend the conference. In the letter, he argues the provision in the fiscal year 2013 continuing resolution that funded NASA, and similar provisions dating back two years, don’t prohibit NASA from hosting Chinese scientists at scientific meetings like the Kepler conference.

The law, he said, “primarily restricts bilateral, not multilateral, meetings and activities with the Communist Chinese government or Chinese-owned companies. It places no restrictions on activities involving individual Chinese nationals unless those nationals are acting as official representatives of the Chinese government.” Any interpretation of the law to block all Chinese visitors to NASA centers, as a NASA official stated in a message included in The Guardian article, “mischaracterizes the law and is inaccurate.”

The relevant section of the FY2013 CR includes these provisions:

Sec. 535. (a) None of the funds made available by this Act may be used for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) or the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to develop, design, plan, promulgate, implement, or execute a bilateral policy, program, order, or contract of any kind to participate, collaborate, or coordinate bilaterally in any way with China or any Chinese-owned company unless such activities are specifically authorized by a law enacted after the date of enactment of this Act.

(b) The limitation in subsection (a) shall also apply to any funds used to effectuate the hosting of official Chinese visitors at facilities belonging to or utilized by NASA.

While Wolf writes that the restriction “primarily restricts bilateral, not multilateral, meetings,” the language of subsection (b) above appears to cover all “official Chinese visitors” at NASA facilities, regardless of the nature of the visit. What constitutes an “official Chinese visitor” isn’t defined: presumably an individual from the Chinese space agency or other government organization would qualify, while, say, a Chinese student would likely not.

Wolf believes that the conference instead ran up against a blanket moratorium on visits to NASA centers by Chinese (and some other) nationals put into place by NASA in March after security concerns. Wolf added that he understood the moratorium had already been lifted by NASA.

If true, that’s not the message that conference organizers got. In a message Tuesday, members of the conference’s scientific organizing committee (SOC) said they heard about the moratorium only in late September, when six Chinese participants had their registrations denied—timing that would presumably have been after the moratorium had been lifted, in Wolf’s view. “Had we been aware of this possibility at the onset of planning KSC2, alternate venues to NASA/Ames would have been pursued,” said a statement Tuesday by members of the SOC.

While the SOC said any prohibition, by law or NASA policy, is “deplorable,” they admitted there’s little they can do so close to the conference (scheduled to start November 4), and with NASA personnel involved with the conference furloughed. “With no registration fee, and complete lack of ability to communicate with colleagues at NASA/Ames, seeking options for an off-site venue in the Bay Area is challenging,” the SOC writes, adding they’re looking into unspecified ways to allow all interested people to participate in person or remotely. (The conference already had plans to webcast sessions, with the ability of those watching the webcast to ask questions.)

In his letter to Bolden, Rep. Wolf did not single out agency leadership for criticism. He spent more than a page criticizing NASA Ames specifically, calling it “a rat’s nest of inappropriate and possibly illegal activities that appear to have occurred with the concurrence of the center’s leadership.” He also called out scientists who said they planned to boycott the meeting, asking if they “will draw a similar line when it comes to cooperation with Chinese government funded agencies and programs due to their systemic human rights abuses.” And, of course, there was criticism of China itself, both for its human rights record and “prolific Chinese cyperattacks and espionage.”

The situation has been criticized by Chinese officials. “We think that these academic meetings should not be politicized,” a spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry told the South China Morning Post. However, among the general public in China, the news has gotten a mixed reaction, according to Bloomberg News. While some are angry that Chinese participants were rejected from attending the conference, others said they understood the rationale for doing so. “I believe it’s our bad record in regard to intellectual property that makes NASA overcautious,” one person said in comments to a Chinese article about the situation. “So, in light of China’s poor record on intellectual property protection, the act of NASA is reasonable.”

Update 6:35 pm: NASA administrator Charles Bolden has provided a brief response to Wolf’s letter, according to a two-paragraph email from Bolden to Wolf provided by Wolf’s office to selected media. In it, Bolden blamed the barring of Chinese participants for the Kepler conference on “mid-level managers at Ames” acting on their interpretation of NASA rules and without consulting with NASA Headquarters. Bolden said that any individuals barred from the conference could have their applications reconsidered once normal operations resume at Ames and attend, provided they meet “the clearance requirements in place for foreign citizens.” It’s worth noting, though, that the registration deadline for foreign participants, regardless of nation, was September 20, so it may be too late even if the shutdown ends in time for the early November conference to take place.

The effects of the shutdown, though, go beyond shuttered websites and furloughed workers at NASA. Several conferences and meetings were forced to scramble after NASA and other federal employees were unable to attend because of the shutdown. According to reports, about 10 percent of the estimated 600 registered attendees of this week’s American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences conference could not attend due to the shutdown (more may have wanted to attend but couldn’t register at all due to earlier sequestration-related restrictions). That forced organizers to, among other things, revamp the “agency night” during the conference since none of the planned NASA or NSF speakers could attend. The “other” AAS, the American Astronautical Society, has also had to make changes to its Von Braun Symposium this week in Huntsville after NASA speakers had to back out. (The first morning of the conference, on Tuesday, will be webcast.)

While most NASA centers have all but closed, with only a handful of essential personnel reporting for work, JPL remains open as its staff are employees of Caltech and not NASA. JPL will be reassessing its situation on a weekly basis as the shutdown continues. On Friday, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), which had kept its federally-funded radio telescopes open for the first few days of the shutdown, closed its telescopes in New Mexico and West Virginia and its Virginia headquarters. And management of the giant Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico is planning to furlough all its employees in the middle of this month if the shutdown continues. The HiRISE experiment on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), run out of the University of Arizona, said today via Twitter that the spacecraft has enough funds on hand to operate through the end of the month. “Don’t know what happens after that if shutdown not resolved by then.”

The shutdown has also forced the FAA to cancel this week’s meetings of its Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee in Washington. While the COMSTAC webpage has not been updated since the shutdown began, COMSTAC chairman Mike Gold of Bigelow Aerospace confirmed late Monday that twice-yearly meeting won’t take place this week. COMSTAC, he said, would wait until after the shutdown ends before evaluating what kind of replacement meeting, if any, they would hold.

The shutdown’s effects are making their way into businesses. On Friday, Lockheed Martin said it would furlough 3,000 employees on Monday because of the shutdown, adding that additional employees would be furloughed as the shutdown continued. Lockheed Martin revised that number on Monday down to 2,400 employees, most of which work on unidentified “civilian agency programs.” On Monday, the Aerospace Corporation announced it was furloughing almost 60 percent of its 3,500 employees because of stop work orders imposed by the Air Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center.

Other than those furloughs, most military space programs have been largely unaffected by the shutdown because of their essential nature. On Saturday, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel announced most furloughed civilian workers would return to work this week provided their activities “contribute to the morale, well-being, capabilities and readiness of service members.” There have been a few other effects: late last week DARPA postponed an industry day for its Experimental Spaceplane program that was scheduled to take place Monday.

This could be seen clearly in the midday panel about the International Space Station, which was to feature four NASA astronauts, including a video link to astronauts Mike Hopkins and Karen Nyberg on the station. That live link wasn’t possible, but the organizers were able to get a brief recorded video message from the two astronauts. Another scheduled participant, astronaut Chris Cassidy, was actually at the event but could not be on the panel because of the agency’s interpretation of the shutdown rules. However, it did not prevent Cassidy, a Naval Academy graduate and active duty Naval officer, from talking to a crowd of midshipmen during a break in the conference.

The shutdown also prevented NASA administrator Charles Bolden from participating in the last panel of the day, featuring representatives of companies developing commercial cargo and crew systems. Bolden, though, did provide a statement that the panel’s moderator, Commercial Spaceflight Federation president and former astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, read at the beginning of the session. In it, Bolden emphasized again the need for full funding of NASA’s commercial crew program. “Any reduction to the proposed level of funding for the commercial crew program will result in a delay” from the planned 2017 date for beginning those flights, according to the statement. “We are not helped by the current shutdown and will likely threaten our ability to make the already-delayed operational readiness date for commercial crew.”

One of the three commercial crew companies currently funded by NASA has already experienced some effects of the shutdown. Mark Sirangelo of Sierra Nevada Corporation said that the good news in the development of his company’s Dream Chaser vehicle is that they were able to anticipate many of the issues they faced in preparing the Dream Chaser engineering test article for its upcoming first glide flight at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center. “The bad news is that I didn’t anticipate everything I needed to anticipate. No one told me that, in the event of a US government shutdown, that the gates of Edwards Air Force Base would be locked and I can’t get to my space vehicle,” he said. “Assuming the government does get its act together and they un-padlock the gates, we will be flying the first test flight of our vehicle here very shortly.” Sirangelo said afterwards that the Dream Chaser was effectively ready for the test flight when the shutdown started, but that they need the NASA and Air Force personnel and resources currently unavailable during the shutdown to carry out the flight.

The agenda changes caused by the shutdown, though, offered some different, and no less interesting, insights from replacement speakers. The revised ISS panel replaced the active-duty NASA astronauts with some former astronauts, as well as former NASA administrator Michael Griffin. In his comments, Griffin said that the greatest long-term value of the station is its multinational partnership. He suggested, though, that this international partnership wasn’t alone sufficient to keep it operational. “The current administration hasn’t found any difficulty in canceling multinational programs,” he said, referring to the Constellation program. When pressed on this by the panel’s moderator, Miles O’Brien, Griffin confirmed that he considered Constellation, whose key elements—the Ares 1 and 5 rockets, Orion spacecraft, and Altair lander—were all planned to be developed by NASA, a multinational effort. “It was a multinational effort… It was fully intended to be.”

Later in the panel, Griffin endorsed continued operation of the ISS through at least 2020, if not beyond. “We spent all this effort, all this political capital, all this fiscal capital to built the space station, why would you think about anything other than trying to keep it functioning as long as you possibly could?” he said. “I don’t know of another large capital project on Earth that somebody puts a sunset on like that.” Of course, during Griffin’s tenure as administrator, NASA had committed to using the space station only through 2015.

The University of Nebraska College of Law will be hosting a free one-day conference on national space policy on Friday, September 10, at the Newseum in Washington. Keynote speakers include Gen. James Cartwright, vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver.

Congressman C.A. “Dutch” Ruppersberger (D-MD), in a visit to Huntsville, said that he wants a “roadmap” of the country’s long-term goals for space exploration over the next 10-15 years. He appeared concerned that without an aggressive space exploration plan, “it gives a head start to a lot of our competitors, especially the Chinese.” However, as the video accompanying the article reveals, Ruppersberger is not necessarily advocating a complete restoration of Constellation and an increase in NASA spending. “Let’s be perfectly clear: the president canceled the program, so we have to build upon where we are,” he said. “And again, the issue of cost is there, especially in this economy.”

At 2:30 pm this afternoon Space News is hosting a live webcast with NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver titled “NASA’s New Direction: An Update from the Top”.