Space Politics
Because sometimes the most important orbit is the Beltway…
Archive for NASA
May 8, 2008 at 7:53 am · Filed under Congress, NASA
Wednesday’s hearing of the space subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee on the planned reauthorization of NASA and the Vision for Space Exploration covered familiar ground: discussion of the Shuttle-Constellation gap, the belief that NASA is being asked to do too much for too little money, worries about being dependent on the Russians, and a little bit of concern about Chinese space developments. The only senators present were the chairman, Bill Nelson (D-FL), and the ranking member, David Vitter (R-LA), who had to leave for another event partway through the hearing.
The agency’s staunchest supporter at the hearing arguably was not either senator but instead former NASA flight director Gene Kranz. He spoke strongly in favor in NASA’s current approach to implementing the Vision, heaping praise on both it and the agency’s current leadership. “This is the best game plan that I have seen since the days of President Kennedy,” Kranz said of ESAS, comparing it to the DC-3 and the B-52. “The system that Griffin’s team is putting into place will be delivering for America 50 years later… so the message I would give to you and to the US Congress is to stay the course, stay on track.”
In one of the few questions Vitter was able to ask before leaving, he asked Kranz whether the future reauthorization bill should devote any language to studies of alternatives to ESAS, citing in particular the “Jupiter-120″, a shuttle-derived concept from the Direct proposal. Kranz rejected that suggestion. “I believe it’s important that we don’t waste too much time looking back,” he said. “I have personally been a victim, and I believe NASA has been a victim, of so many studies that seem to be never-ending that burn up the resources, delay the schedule, [and] disenchant the people who are executing them.”
Later, Robert Dickman, executive director of AIAA, offered another alternative to closing the gap involving EELV. “For less than the cost a single space shuttle mission, they could be human-qualified and… a relatively simple capsule to go to low Earth orbit could be built” for access to ISS, he suggested.
Nelson pushed back on this idea, seeing it as something of a threat to Constellation. “The question is, where are we going to get the money?” Nelson asked at one point.
“Chairman, I would simply say, the same question of where you going to get the money is the question if you try to accelerate Constellation,” Dickman responded. “It’s the same dollars, it’s just the question of whether you use it to accelerate Constellation or you keep Constellation on its current path and build something that has a unique capability to haul humans to station and back.”
“I am told that the cost estimates for human-rating of an EELV range from 500 million to a billion dollars. And under this funding profile, I just don’t know where we’re going to get that,” Nelson said.
Fortunately for Nelson, Kranz stepped in and described the cost in money and schedule he experienced man-rating the Atlas and Titan for the Mercury and Gemini programs. “I don’t see how this helps close the gap,” he concluded. “All I see it, again, is as a diversion from the basic plan that you’ve got. As I said, I think you’re building the DC-3 or the B-52 and this is the right plan.”
May 8, 2008 at 6:54 am · Filed under NASA, Lobbying
The Capitol Hill newspaper The Hill reviews the concerns about the gap in US government human spaceflight, arguing that “[a]erospace companies are using memories of the Cold War and the prospect of American astronauts having to hitch a ride on a Russian rocket” in an effort to increase NASA funding. The article profiles both SpaceX, which is seeking additional money to fund COTS Capability D (the crew transport option), and United Space Alliance, which wants additional funding to accelerate Constellation.
What’s noteworthy is that these companies are drawing increasingly on big-name lobbying firms in their efforts. SpaceX, the article notes, has hired the Podesta Group to lobby for additional NASA funding, while USA has hired the new Breaux-Lott Leadership Group (founded early this year by former senators John Breaux and Trent Lott) in addition to its existing lobbyists.
May 7, 2008 at 7:39 am · Filed under Congress, NASA
While the attention of most people has been focused on issues like food and fuel prices, the presidential campaign, and so on, a problem has been developing that potentially could have repercussions for space policy. In the last few weeks tensions have been rising between Russia and the former Soviet republic of Georgia over two separatist regions of Georgia. This has included reports of shooting down unmanned reconnaissance aircraft in Georgian airspace, either by the Russians or separatist groups. Yesterday the White House criticized Russia for its actions in the region in recent weeks. Russia’s envoy to NATO, meanwhile, claimed that Russia and Georgia were “very close” to war and that Georgia was to blame.
Should hostilities break out between the two countries, would it affect US-Russia cooperation on the ISS, and if so, how? Would Congress be less disposed to grant an extension to NASA’s ability to purchase Soyuz spacecraft after 2011, or put additional conditions of some kind on that capability? Or, fearing that such a move would effectively keep the US off the station until Orion or a commercial vehicle entered service, would they do nothing? Hopefully we won’t have to find out.
April 29, 2008 at 7:06 am · Filed under Congress, NASA, Campaign '08
On Monday several members of Congress, including Sen. Bill Nelson and Congressmen Tom Feeney and Dave Weldon, held a “workshop” on space issues Monday in Brevard County, Florida, where people are understandably concerned about life after the space shuttle. According to Florida Today, Nelson said that his subcommittee had proposed holding a field hearing this summer to review the future of KSC but that NASA was opposed: “I’m sad to tell you, NASA has asked me not to have a meeting, because they don’t want to stir up the people.” A NASA spokesman later contacted by the paper said that the agency would support any hearing the committee held.
The Orlando Sentinel focused on another claim made by Nelson: that space could, in effect, be a key issue in the general election because of the pivotal role of Florida, and within the state, the “I-4 corridor”, including the Space Coast. “The next president is going to decide a lot [about the space program],” Nelson said. “And East-Central Florida has an opportunity to influence the next president because, at the end of the day, Florida is going to be important this November.” However, as the Republican primary this January showed, space may not nearly be as critical issue in the state or region as some supporters hope.
April 24, 2008 at 6:07 am · Filed under Congress, NASA
As noted here earlier, the space subcommittee of the House Science and Technology Committee is holding a hearing on the ISS this morning. While it’s not specifically mentioned in the hearing charter, one would expect that committee members would ask NASA’s Bill Gerstenmaier some questions about the Soyuz reentry Saturday that experienced what may be significant problems, especially since NASA is now asking Congress to extend its authority to purchase Soyuz flights beyond 2011.
The Orlando Sentinel reported yesterday that at least one member of Congress is seriously concerned about the Soyuz problem. “I don’t know how to reliably interpret everything they [NASA] are telling me about things like this,” Rep. Dave Weldon (R-FL) told the paper. Weldon, of course, is pushing a bill to keep the shuttle flying after 2010.
The Sentinel article also notes that county commissioners in Brevard County, Florida (home to Cape Canaveral and KSC) “passed a resolution saying ‘resources to be spent on procuring Russian Soyuz#8230; would best be devoted to the development and procurement of domestic crew and cargo logistic capabilities.’” (The county board’s minutes aren’t available this morning.) Not that the Brevard County board has much influence on affairs in Washington…
April 20, 2008 at 1:46 pm · Filed under Congress, NASA
The space subcommittee of the House Science and Technology Committee is holding a hearing this Thursday morning on “NASA’s International Space Station Program: Status and Issues”. The rather crowded list of witnesses:
- Mr. William Gerstenmaier, Associate Administrator, Space Operations Mission Directorate, National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- Ms. Cristina T. Chaplain, Director, Acquisition and Sourcing Management, Government Accountability Office
- Dr. Edward P. Knipling, Administrator, Agricultural Research Service, Department of Agriculture
- Dr. Cheryl Nickerson, Associate Professor of Life Sciences, Arizona State University
- Mr. Thomas Pickens, III, President and CEO, Spacehab, Inc.
- Dr. Louis Stodieck, Director, BioServe Space Technologies and Aerospace Engineering Science, University of Colorado at Boulder
- Dr. Jeffrey Sutton, Director, National Space Biomedical Research Institute
April 18, 2008 at 7:46 am · Filed under Congress, NASA
While NASA is not focusing on crew transfer services as part of the COTS program right now, it is pretty much going all-in on cargo resupply with COTS. Aerospace Daily reported Thursday that NASA is not asking for an Congressional extension of its authority to purchase Progress missions after the current authority to purchase Progress and Soyuz missions, granted in the Iran Nonproliferation Amendments Act of 2005, expires at the end of 2011. NASA has formally requested to Congress that it be able to purchase Soyuz flights for crew transfers after 2011, but instead plans on relying on one more commercial providers to transport cargo to the station. (The NASA proposal would end authorization for Soyuz purchases once Orion or a commercial crew transportation provider enters service.)
And what if SpaceX, Orbital, or anyone else isn’t ready by the end of 2011? NASA associate administrator Bill Gerstenmaier told Aerospace Daily that NASA would “live off the spares” that the final shuttle flights will bring to the station. (Presumably there will be enough consumables brought on Progress, ATV, and/or HTV missions for this strategy to work.) It does suggest that NASA feels confident enough that someone will be ready to start carrying cargo to the station by the beginning of 2012, but that confidence doesn’t extend to crew transportation.
April 16, 2008 at 8:18 am · Filed under Congress, NASA
That’s the argument made in an article yesterday in the Orlando Sentinel, which makes the case that Lampson’s fight to raise NASA’s budget will help keep jobs at KSC. Lampson, the article notes, wants an extra $3 billion for NASA’s budget to reduce the Shuttle-Constellation gap. To aid those efforts, he organized a meeting between NASA administrator Mike Griffin and a group of fiscally conservative “Blue Dog” Democrats, and also organized a Congressional trip to last month’s shuttle launch.
However, those efforts hold a slim chance of success. The article hints that House Democratic leaders might be willing to increase NASA’s budget to help Lampson in a tough reelection battle in his Texas district (which includes JSC); the question is, is his seat worth $3 billion—or $1 billion or less—to party leaders? Recall last fall that there was a push to get the House to sign onto the $1-billion “Mikulski Miracle” as a way to help Lampson, but that effort failed. And, as the article notes, there may be other ways to help Lampson without spending billions, such as simply asking fellow Democrats who are critics of the agency or human spaceflight to keep quiet this year. One fellow Democrat who was on the shuttle launch junket last month was unconvinced of the need to spend billions to close the gap. “Of course they [NASA] told us that they weren’t getting enough money,” Rep. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) told the Sentinel, saying that NASA should focus instead on “efforts that could bear the most fruit”, like robotic spaceflight.
One additional tidbit at the end of the article: Lampson said that if he does win reelection this fall, he hopes to become chair of the space subcommittee of the House Science and Technology Committee. That position is currently held by Rep. Mark Udall (D-CO), who is running for the Senate seat being vacated by Wayne Allard.
April 14, 2008 at 8:01 am · Filed under NASA
In response to the avalanche of comments to an earlier post about a presentation Charles Miller gave at the Space Access conference last month about the budgetary pressures NASA is facing and one potential solution, Charles approached me about fleshing out that talk into a more detailed essay. Part one of that essay appears in Monday’s issue of The Space Review and goes into detail about the budget crunch NASA and other discretionary spending programs will be facing in the near future as the Baby Boomers retire. That wave of retirements will cause mandatory spending (Social Security, Medicare, etc.) to increase, putting pressure on other programs. While NASA has done reasonably well in the current administration, when there has been little pressure to balance budgets, it did suffer a cut of nearly 20 percent during the Clinton Administration when there was a bipartisan push to balance the budget—a portent of what may come when there are similar pressures to cut spending.
A key paragraph from the article:
These fiscal pressures will force the next president—regardless of whoever is elected in November—to make some hard decisions in the years to come about discretionary spending. It is unrealistic to expect that NASA will somehow be immune to pressures to cut spending. A budget cut in the next Administration that is equivalent to last decade’s cut would result in reduction of NASA’s budget of over $3 billion per year. If that happens, it will be difficult, if not impossible, for the current exploration architecture to continue in anything resembling its current form and schedule. It will be significantly delayed, radically altered, or even cancelled.
The next part will focus on what Charles proposed in his Space Access talk on how to preserve the Vision in such an austere budgetary environment.
April 7, 2008 at 3:36 pm · Filed under Congress, NASA
Mike Griffin has made it clear on a number of occasions that, while he is open to international collaboration in the exploration vision, he is not happy with the current state of affairs regarding US dependence on Russians for ISS access and resupply once the shuttle is retired.
“Do not confuse my desire for international collaboration for a willingness to rely on others for strategic capability,” he said in open remarks at a subcommittee hearing of the Senate Appropriations Committee last week. Dependence on Soyuz “is not an option we would choose, but it is where we are today. In fact, we must seek an exception to the Iran Syria North Korea Nonproliferation Act because we have no immediate replacement for the shuttle and no other recourse if we wish to sustain the ISS.”
Given that statement, you would think that Griffin would be interested in accelerating domestic commercial options like COTS that would lessen or eliminate an reliance on the Russians. Yet, in his comments later in the hearing, he was not that interested in pursuing a crew option for COTS (also known as Capability D) on an accelerated schedule.
“Is COTS an answer in terms of beefing up COTS to take people up there, where we’d have our own kind of version of a Soyuz?” Sen. Barbara Mikulski, chair of the subcommittee, asked Griffin. “There’s a lot floating around that COTS could be the answer to the gap.”
After providing an overview of COTS, he said, “we are focusing initially on cargo because, I just want to be clear with everybody, we already have a mechanism for getting crews to the station with the Soyuz system, but unless we can bring some new commercial capabilities online, we really have no cargo resupply. So, actually, of the two, the most important COTS capability to me right now is cargo, and I must be honest about that.”
He added that he would “very much like to see” a COTS crew capability developed, but that he doubted that “even with their [the COTS companies’] best efforts, even if more money were provided, that COTS crew transportation capability will arrive in time to be available after the shuttle retires or even by the end of the current contract with Russia in 2012.
Mikulski then summarized that there was no “silver bullet” for solving the US government human space access gap once the shuttle is retired. “At the same time, sure, COTS has promise, but you [Griffin] want to make sure what is firmly in place is the cargo capability, but while they’re developing their technologies, of course, we would look forward to possibilities of adding a human element. But that’s an add-on to the mission. Do I have that right?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Griffin managed to get in before Mikulski started talking again.
“So the only prudent fiscal way to go,” she concluded, “is to accelerate Ares and Orion by two years and, at the same time, keep COTS on track so we have the cargo capability.”
“Ma’am, I think you have it perfectly,” Griffin said.
Mikulski then apologized for spending such a long time on the topic (which also included discussions of Soyuz purchases and accelerating Constellation), saying, “there are a lot of ideas in the ethers out here.”
Meanwhile, in another twist, at the same time that Griffin was testifying on the Senate side of Capitol Hill, Richard Gilbrech, NASA’s associate administrator for exploration, was telling a hearing of the space subcommittee of the House Science and Technology Committee that NASA was finishing up a study on accelerating the COTS crew capability, and would share the results with members of Congress once it is completed.
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