Another politician who is going to be talking about NASA in Washington this week is Houston Mayor Annise Parker. She plans to meet with local members of Congress, NASA administrator Charles Bolden, and White House advisor Valerie Jarrett, among others, during the two-day visit, with a particular emphasis on trying to save Constellation. “I don’t know what the best plan is for going back to space, for continuing human spaceflight,” she told the Houston Chronicle. “I want to ensure that we are and remain one of the centers of human spaceflight.” She fears a loss of 7,000 jobs in the Houston area and economic losses of over $500 million should the cancellation of Constellation go through.

Congressman Robert Aderholt (R-AL) is also worried about Constellation, and concerned that NASA is already working to end the program and start the new plan despite legislation that prevents the agency from terminating Constellation or initiating new exploration programs this fiscal year. He and 15 other House members have asked the GAO to investigate NASA’s activities since the unveiling of the FY11 budget proposal to see if NASA is in violation of that law. “While the word contract does not appear in the bill language (it is in the report language), this question naturally occurs: to what extent can planned contracts be canceled, suspended, or slowed and the agency still be considered to have not terminated the program?” the GAO letter asks.

That people and organizations in the Huntsville area would contribute to Mikulski’s campaign is itself not surprising, given her powerful position within the appropriations committee to alter the budget of an agency, NASA, which plays a major role in that city’s economy. It’s also not surprising that “Alabama business and industry leaders” held a fundraising breakfast for Mikulski last fall in Huntsville less than a week after the release of the final report of the Augustine Committee. What is a little more surprising is the person who reportedly played a role in that event’s success: Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), ranking member of Mikulski’s subcommittee. While Shelby’s spokesman said that the senator didn’t help organize the fundraiser, he “worked behind the scenes to make sure the event was a success”, according to the Sun, which calls this “an extremely unusual example of fundraising cooperation across party lines”.

Mikulski and Shelby have a long record of working together, the article notes, and her trip to Huntsville last October was not the first fundraiser that she has held there during her time in the Senate. It does come, though, as Congress debates the shift in NASA’s direction the White House has proposed in its FY2011 budget, one that has not gone over well in Huntsville as it calls for canceling Constellation, including the Ares 1 and 5 rockets. She has been quiet about the plan so far other than a letter to Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) last month saying that any new NASA plan should be “mission driven” and expressing concerns about the NASA workforce. That silence will be broken for certain later this month when her subcommittee holds a hearing about the NASA budget proposal.

ITAR reform

• Support the addition to the Senate version of the Foreign Relations Authorization Act the authority to remove widely available satellite systems and components from the ITAR list.
• Make certain that the bill presented to both the House and Senate for final passage retains this provision that is so vital to this nation’s international competitiveness.

Exploration

• Require NASA to focus its human space flight development programs on technologies and processes designed for travel in space beyond low earth orbit.
• Support robust funding for space exploration technology demonstration projects.

Commercial Services

• Support the transition to commercial crew and cargo services for the International Space Station.

ProSpace will be performing training on Sunday the 28th and making Congressional visits on Monday and Tuesday.

One of the key members of the SEA, the National Space Society, issued its own take on the budget proposal earlier this month that hints at what might be in the SEA platform. The NSS supports the technology development programs included in the budget proposal but “calls for the President and Congress to restore funding for human spaceflight beyond low-Earth orbit”. In particular, it called for amending a goal from the original Vision for Space Exploration, with a human return to the Moon by 2025, instead of 2020.

After the SEA’s visits on the Hill, ProSpace arrives the following week for March Storm 2010. Its take on the budget proposal is markedly different from the NSS’s. “For more than a decade, participants in ProSpace’s annual March Storm have advocated for NASA’s use of commercial crew and cargo service providers to access the International Space Station and low-Earth orbit,” the organization states in a February 3 press release. “This week, we got what we’ve been asking for.”

ProSpace’s agenda, included in the press release, focuses on three areas: spaceport infrastructure, commercial crew and cargo services, and export control reform. They will be performing training on February 28th (presumably not the 29th, as stated in the press release), and making visits to the Hill on March 1 and 2.

The group is made of about 25 people from business, academia, and other organization, although you don’t have to be a local to recognize some of the names: former NASA administrator Mike Griffin (now at UAH), former MSFC director Dave King (now at Dynetics), and former Ares manager Steve Cook (also now at Dynetics).

However, this is only the latest in a series of moves at the local and state level to try and salvage Constellation. On Thursday the state legislature passed resolutions asking the president to reverse his decision to cancel Constellation. The resolutions, SJR 58 and HJR 261, passed in the Senate and House respectively without dissent. The resolutions don’t speak about the importance of spaceflight or the threat of falling behind other nations; instead, it bluntly notes, “cancellation of the Constellation program would significantly harm the citizens and economies of the City of Huntsville and the State of Alabama.”

Also, earlier in the week Rep. Artur Davis, a Democrat from Birmingham, met with Huntsville-area space industry officials and others and left saying he would fight for Constellation. “We cannot do to ourselves what our enemies have tried to do to us, and that’s to retreat from human spaceflight,” the Huntsville Times quotes him as saying. Why Davis, who has not been very outspoken on space issues in the past, took a strong interest in Constellation wasn’t mentioned in the article; however, it did note that Davis is running for governor.

“Contact your elected officials and let them know that NASA and its space exploration programs are on the right trajectory,” the sites states in bold, red text. “As the President and Congress weigh the options for our nation’s future space exploration policy, it’s important our elected officials know that you support the Constellation and Ares rocket programs.” (Isn’t Ares part of Constellation?)

Meanwhile, the Space Frontier Foundation is gearing up to lobby, in part, on behalf of the Flexible Path option. As you may recall, last month the Foundation said planned to revive March Storm, the annual lobbying blitz on Capitol Hill that had been canceled in 2009, only to be rebuked by ProSpace, the organization that has run March Storm for most of its history. Instead, the Foundation is calling its effort First Flight, scheduled for the week of February 7th. (The announcement does note that the training scheduled for Sunday the 7th will be done in time to watch the Super Bowl.)

The First Flight agenda includes a number of topics, including increased funding for NASA’s Centennial Challenges prize program and “full funding” for the agency’s new Commercial Reusable Suborbital Research (CRuSR) program. The agenda also backs the Flexible Path option as part of an effort to restore “NASA’s focus on research and exploration”; it also calls for the cancellation of Ares 1.

First Flight will be the beginning of a busy month of advocacy on the Hill for space organizations. The Space Exploration Alliance is planning its 2010 Legislative Blitz, similar to March Storm and First Flight, on February 21-23, while ProSpace plans to resume March Storm on February 28-March 2.

I am writing with serious concerns regarding the Augustine Commission [sic] staff, their vocation, and their conduct while serving as Commission staff. It has come to my attention that several members are, in fact, federally registered lobbyists and that some of these individuals have taken direct advantage of their temporary roles on the Commission to further their personal business. Further, there are lobbyists that worked as Commission staff that are not even acknowledged in the report. This is both disturbing and unconscionable.

Shelby goes on to ask Martin to conduct “a thorough investigation” of those claims. However, nowhere in the statement does he name the staff members of the committee (not commission, senator) that he claims are registered lobbyists “who represent the commercial space industry in their full time profession”. It does not appear that he’s referring to any of the ten committee members, who don’t show up in lobbying databases like OpenSecrets.org. The final report includes a three-page appendix of committee staff, but most of these people are NASA employees or technical contractors; no one there immediately stands out. The Orlando Sentinel tried to get more information from Shelby’s office but has yet to get a response.

If Shelby is serious about these accusations, it would seem that a good next step would be to identify exactly who these individuals are, so, if nothing else, the accused know who they are and have an opportunity to respond. Otherwise, this begins to look more like a bit of FUD thrown into the ongoing debate about the future of NASA’s human spaceflight program.

• Both ProSpace and the Space Frontier Foundation are proceeding with their planned lobbying efforts early next year, although Mike Heney, project manager of the Foundation’s project, said that they’re “not worried about naming the event at this point”.
• Frank DiBello, president of Space Florida, provided a little more information about the source of that claim that the campaign had reached its goal of a half-million letters, saying that a White House staffer he ran into on Capitol Hill mentioned the large number of letters, originally a couple hundred thousand but later increased to 400,000 to 500,000.

Also, to make it clear that it isn’t just the space activist community that has problems with its advocacy, Dwayne Day profiles the lackluster PETA protest outside NASA Headquarters last week: “their theatrics were so underwhelming that they might have failed to make their point.” (The PETA protest, if you missed it, was about plans by NASA to fund research that will involve irradiating monkeys.) Perhaps PETA should have gone with a backup plan: “I’d rather go naked that irradiate monkeys.” At least the passers-by would have appreciated it…