Another reason why it’s unlikely space would get much a mention in the address is that the administration may have something along the lines of space policy fatigue. This week’s issue of The New Yorker features a long article that takes readers behind the scenes of the Obama Administration, based on hundreds of pages of internal memos obtained by the magazine. The article takes a broad look at the administration acted and reacted to various issues, including, as it turns out, space.

The article notes that as a candidate for president in 2008, Obama “had promised a bold space program”, a reference to his space policy white paper the campaign released in August 2008. However, according to the New Yorker article, those plans foundered on projections of growing budget deficits. “Especially in light of our new fiscal context, it is not possible to achieve the inspiring space program goals discussed during the campaign,” a November 2009 memo (authorship unstated) advised the president. That sentence, the article noted, was in bold and underlined for particular emphasis. The result:

Obama was told that he should cancel NASA’s Bush-era Constellation program, along with its support projects, like the Ares launch vehicles, which were designed to return astronauts to the moon by 2020. The program was behind schedule, over budget, and “unachievable.” He agreed to end it. During the stimulus debate, Obama’s metaphorical moon-shot idea—the smart grid—was struck down as unworkable. Now the Administration’s actual moon-shot program was dead, too.

Later, the article notes the president received a letter dated February 2, 2010—one day after the release of the 2011 budget proposal that announced plans to cancel Constellation, as Obama was advised the previous November—from a Virginia woman whose husband was working on the program. “I voted for you. I supported you. But I am very disappointed in you. You are not the President I thought you were going to be,” the woman, identified only as “Ginger”, wrote, after criticizing the president for cancelling Constellation while continuing to fund wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Obama’s response to his staff: “can I get a sense of how Ares fit in with our long term NASA strategy to effectively respond”. A few days later he got that information and then instructed an aide to “Draft a short letter for Ginger, answering her primary concern—her husband’s career—for me to send.” What the president was told, and how he decided to respond, aren’t disclosed.

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.

“One could say accepting the role of associate administrator at NASA is slightly crazy, and I certainly think it’s higher risk than anything I’ve ever done before,” said the former astronaut who flew on five shuttle missions, including three to service the Hubble Space Telescope. He told the astronomers who packed the ballroom for the hour-long session that “I do feel the full weight and responsibility of carrying an enormous science program to help enable all of you to be great scientists. My job is to help all of you to change the world.”

Grunsfeld indicated he would look beyond the traditional boundaries of NASA’s science programs to leverage capabilities elsewhere in the agency and get the most of out the directorate’s budget. He said he planned to work with Bill Gerstenmaier, the associate administrator for the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, “to see what synergies we have.” He cited in particular the potential use of the Space Launch System (SLS) heavy-lift rocket to launch large science missions. (That, of course, assumes funding will be available to build such flagship-class missions down the road, let alone afford the cost to launch them on the SLS.) He also cited potential cost reductions for science missions from using emerging launchers like the SpaceX Falcon 9, and also opportunities to use the International Space Station as a testbed to demonstrate technologies for use on future missions.

Not surprisingly, much of attention devoted to NASA’s space programs is focused on one of its biggest, and most controversial, missions, the James Webb Space Telescope. “The James Webb Space Telescope is one of the primary goals of NASA, and one of its highest priorities,” alongside utilization of the ISS and development of the SLS and Multi Purpose Crew Vehicles, he said. “That means astrophysics is very important to NASA, and we should all be happy about that.”

Grunsfeld and other NASA officials were upbeat about the “replan” of the telescope’s development developed last year. “We’ve got a really good plan going forward,” he said. “I really do feel that we have a good handle on the programmatics and the science system engineering.”

He acknowledged, though, that the program went through a tough experience last year with the replan and the threatened defunding by Congress. “It was real drama,” he said of the effort to win funding for the telescope, thanking AAS members for their efforts the Congress, which he called “a loud and clear voice about basic science research.”

“About a year ago, I didn’t know we would be having this town hall this year,” Eric Smith, deputy program director for JWST, said Monday at a separate town hall meeting devoted to JWST. That was because of the uncertainty about the telescope’s future at that time. “We are here this year, so I’m very optimistic” about the program’s future.

At Wednesday’s town hall, Grunsfeld acknowledged that NASA’s science programs are facing a “constrained” budget environment that will pose a challenge going forward, but cautioned scientists against internecine battles among the community, or between the science and human spaceflight directorates. “We are only as strong as our whole, and if we pit community against community, everybody loses,” he said.

Grunsfeld and the new acting director of the astrophysics directorate, Paul Hertz, offered few specifics about future funding, since that is pending the FY2013 budget request due for release on February 6. Both talked about the importance of “balance” among funding new missions versus existing missions versus research, but didn’t offer additional details. “I’m not planning any big radical changes,” Grunsfeld said.

While unable to take beyond the current fiscal year, Hertz noted at the town hall that astrophysics, when JWST is included (it is now a separate program but still widely perceived as part of astrophysics), accounts for over $1 billion of NASA’s budget. Therefore, he said, the agency and the scientific community need to maximize the value which that significant amount of money can provide. “That’s not small change,” he said. “We have a substantial allotment of federal funding to support the astrophysics program that we do. We have to spend it wisely.”

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.

In a telecon Thursday morning with reporters, Bill Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for NASA’s Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, said the limited funding available for commercial crew in 2012—$406 million instead of the requested $850 million—as well as uncertainty about future budgets, led to the decision to shift its procurement strategy. “In a dynamic budget environment, it makes it tough for us to deal with that budget fluctuation” when using fixed-price contracts, he said. “If we don’t get the funds that we anticipated, it makes it tough for us to negotiate the contract and inefficiency in renegotiating that contract.” That budget uncertainty in future years, he said, drove them to make the shift back to SAA.

The new SAAs will replace the Integrated Design Phase contracts, which had been intended to get system designs to the critical design review (CDR) level of the development. The goal of the new SAAs will also to get designs as close as possible to CDR, although Gerstenmaier warned that, since NASA cannot direct companies under an SAA like it can under a contract, “there is a risk there what we won’t get exactly what we anticipated.” However, he said that risk is mitigated in part by the publication of NASA requirements for crew transportation systems and later contracts for providing those services.

The decision comes several months after NASA announced its plans to switch from SAAs to a more conventional contract for the next commercial crew phase, despite strong feedback from much of industry not to do so. The rationale at the time was the need to direct companies to meet NASA requirements, something that NASA now hopes companies will do without explicit direction from the agency. While industry might support this move back to SAAs, Gerstenmaier said that NASA made this decision without consulting industry. “We really made this decision on our own,” he said, with budgets as the driving factor.

However, NASA did consult with Congress on this, he said, “and they kind of understand our position and they understand the logic behind why we made this shift.” (It’s worth noting that as recent as September the Senate directed NASA to limit its use of SAAs in future commercial crew procurements.) He added that NASA is also working with Congress on an extension to its existing Iran North Korea Syria Nonproliferation Act (INKSNA) waiver to allow it to continue purchasing Soyuz seats, as budgets will likely delay the entry of commercial crew systems into service to 2017.

Asked if this was as far as NASA could go with SAAs for the commercial crew effort, Gerstenmaier said this morning that he thought so, but “I wouldn’t definitively say that at this time.”

“Not too many years ago, NASA’s stakeholder community would not be overly surprised with cost and schedule slippage,” said Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX), chairman of the full committee, in the opening statement of a hearing by the committee on JWST. He added that while he supports the telescope, that tolerance for delays and overruns has run our. “In my view, NASA’s latest replan for the James Webb Telescope is the agency’s last opportunity to hold this program together.”

The witnesses, which included the NASA and Northrop Grumman managers for the project and two astronomers, expressed a mix of contrition about the past problems and confidence that the program was now on track. “We at NASA recognize that we made your already difficult task of funding important programs in these distressed fiscal times even more difficult through our poor past performance on JWST,” Rick Howard, NASA’s JWST program manager, told the committee. He went on to say that that the program’s recent restructuring has improved its performance: of 21 major milestones planned for JWST in fiscal year 2011, he said later in the hearing, 19 were met on ahead of schedule and one was a month later; the remaining milestone was deferred because of a planned redesign of a component.

“NASA has actually done a very good job on this replan,” said Garth Illingworth, a Univ. of California Santa Cruz astronomer who served on an independent panel last year that reviewed the state of JWST. “I’m highly encouraged by what I have seen over the last six to nine months on this program.”

“The Webb telescope represents a capability beyond anything attempted by NASA, our nation, or anywhere,” said Northrop Grumman vice president Jeffrey Grant. “The Webb telescope has a clear path forward and we have evidence that the current plan is proceeding on track.”

While some committee members appeared satisfied with those explanations, as well as a reiteration of the scientific importance of the telescope, others were more skeptical. “I hat to be the skunk at the lawn party, but somebody’s got to be the skunk,” said Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) as a prelude to questions about the cost of JWST. (Later, he invoked the movie The Money Pit.) At one point he asked Howard what would happen if JWST, like Hubble, was found to have a flaw after launch. Howard explained they have done, will continue to do, extensive testing before launch. “We know we only have one chance to get this right,” he said, because JWST will be located at the Earth-Sun L2 point, beyond the range of any foreseen servicing options. “So we are taking every step we can to mitigate the risks.”

“You’ve just increased my skepticism,” Sensenbrenner responded.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) also had some strong words for the witnesses, asking Howard what programs would be “totally defunded” to pay for JWST’s increased costs. (Howard noted that, at least for FY12, the increased JWST cost would be split evenly between NASA’s other science programs, exluding Earth science, and the Cross Agency Support budget, details of which will be included in the agency’s operating plan that will be released next month.) “Who has been reprimanded or fired from NASA for this?” Rohrabacher asked. Howard responded that the senior managers involved with the project at NASA Headquarters and Goddard Space Flight Center have all been replaced, but reassigned and not fired (to the apparent disappointment of Rohrabacher.)

“If you keep having cost overruns, you’re going to be the laughingstock of the federal budget process, because we will know that we can’t count on what you’re telling us,” Rohrabacher warned NASA. That might be a bit of hyperbole, given the cost overruns experienced by many other programs outside NASA, but additional cost overruns with JWST might not be met with laughter but instead the slicing sound of a budget-cutter’s scissors.