Under what the GAO calls the “leading proposal” for a launch vehicle acquisition strategy, government agencies would agree to acquire eight EELV boosters cores a year for five years. This would, DOD officials argue, provide some stability for the the industrial base and help contain costs over the current approach of effectively buying one launch at a time. A block buy today of EELV-class booster cores, though, would effectively be a sole-source award to United Launch Alliance (ULA), which manufactures the Atlas and Delta rockets. A long-term award could effectively lock out emerging competitors like SpaceX, even as the Air Force, NRO, and NASA are developing criteria for certifying new vehicles, as those agencies announced just last week.

“We do have a bit of a challenge with the Air Force,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said last month at the National Press Club, citing the proposed block buy. One of the rationales for the block buy, he said, was preservation of the nation’s industrial base, “although for some reason, oddly enough, we’re not included in the industrial base.”

The GAO report concluded that while the DOD was gathering data to support its decision on an EELV procurement strategy, it still had “critical gaps” in its knowledge, including limited data on the health of the industrial base. It also noted that the planned buy might be too large, creating an oversupply of booster cores that would have to be stored, incurring additional costs if those cores are stored for a year or more.

The report also addressed the potential for competition, with the DOD sounding conflicted about whether to encourage competition. “Some DOD officials acknowledge competition offers potential benefits, but others believe that competing for EELV launches will endanger the program’s stability and threaten its long history of launch successes,” the report stated. The Program Executive Office (PEO) for Space Launch in the Air force, Roger Correll, told the GAO that “he believes competition will benefit the program, and intends to work with ULA and potential competitors to incentivize cost efficiencies while maintaining mission success.”

Because of the potential for competition and other uncertainties, the GAO report recommended, among other items, that the DOD “reassess” the length of the planned block buy in order to incorporate the additional data it’s collecting about its procurement strategy. That recommendation was the only one of seven that the DOD did not fully endorse in its response, included in the GAO report. “The decision on specific contractual quantity and period of commitment will be balanced among price, operational requirements, budget realities and the potential for new entrant competition,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Ronald Jost wrote in a letter to the GAO.

SpaceX played up that the GAO report’s conclusions in a press release Tuesday, saying it “raises troubling questions for taxpayers” about the proposed block buy. On the other hand, the Lexington Institute’s Loren Thompson, no fan of SpaceX, argued that ULA’s rockets might be a better deal even at higher prices, given their track record of successful launches versus SpaceX’s limited history. “Once risk is factored into the comparisons, it’s hard to see how federal officials could justify placing a billion-dollar spy satellite, or for that matter astronauts, on Falcon 9 or any other SpaceX launch vehicle until there was much more evidence of their reliability,” he wrote.

Musk, in his National Press Club speech, played up SpaceX as an underdog to the much larger aerospace primes, who, he said, devote far more resources on lobbying than his company. “If this decision is made as a function of lobbying power,” he said of a proposed block buy, “we are screwed.”

The United States Air Force (USAF) has played a central role in the development of space capabilities that are vital to national security, economic growth, public safety and welfare. As a historic reminder of the USAF contributions in space the USAF has requested an interagency transfer of the Space Shuttle Atlantis to the National Museum of the United States Air Force to be displayed for viewing. One-time funding is provided to pay (NASA) for preparation and delivery of Space Shuttle Atlantis to the National Museum of the Air Force.

That line item in the Air Force budget “suggests that the White House and the Air Force favor the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force as a final destination for Atlantis,” the Dayton Daily News reports. The article adds that NASA administrator Charles Bolden was not aware of the request, though, and that no decision on the disposition of the shuttle orbiters would be made until at least April.

Yesterday, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), ranking member of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, issued a statement on the administration’s 2012 budget request. Only one sentence of the statement is partially devoted to NASA and NOAA: “The President’s budget request also provides needed funding for NOAA, NASA, and FAA.” The leadership of the committee has not issued a statement on the budget request, but the committee is holding a hearing on the overall federal R&D budget request Thursday at 10 am, with OSTP director John Holdren the sole scheduled witness.

NOAA is also requesting $47.3 million to refurbish the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite for a 2013 launch. DSCOVR started life in the late 1990s as Triana, a spacecraft that would provide full-disk images of the Earth from the Earth-Sun L-1 point; it was dubbed “GoreSat” by critics because the program was instigated by then Vice President Al Gore. DSCOVR would now primarily focus on solar observations, providing data to “support timely and accurate forecasts and warnings of geomagnetic storms.”

The budget request also, as expected, includes more money for the EELV program, Space News reports. The $1.76 billion EELV budget for 2012, $450 million more than what the Defense Department previously projected for 2012, would allow the purchase of four more vehicles. That increase, Air Force officials said, is linked to a move to block buying to reduce per-unit costs.

Few details about what will be in the budget proposal have leaked out in advance of today’s official release. The Wall Street Journal does report in today’s edition that the agency is “scaling back” funding for commercial crew development. However, the article doesn’t say what that cutback in commercial crew funding is in respect to. If it’s compared to the 2012 projection in the administration’s FY11 budget request, which called for $1.4 billion, that is almost certainly correct, especially since the NASA authorization act passed last year included only $500 million for commercial crew development in 2012. It would be more newsworthy if the administration’s commercial crew request was less than that $500-million figure, especially since the article also indicates that the budget proposal “would be broadly consistent” with the act. (The article also deadpans that “Commercial-space projects are years behind schedule”; that is correct in some cases, such as when one looks Orbital’s and SpaceX’s progress compared to their original COTS schedules, but then again, government space programs are hardly paragons of punctuality.)

Separately, the Journal reported last week that some military space programs may get budget increases in the 2012 proposal, including the EELV program, as the Defense Department seeks to make more bulk buys to get long-term savings—which could trickle down to other EELV users, such as NASA and commercial providers. However, some in Congress may be skeptical of increased spending on EELV in particular: a Defense News article last week quoted Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-MD), ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, as suggesting the Defense Department should seek alternatives to United Launch Alliance. “The U.S. is spending more per rocket launch and battling more delays than anywhere else,” he said in the February 10th hearing. “That is because the United States has committed to a two-company alliance to handle all launches, despite the fact that other U.S. companies are showing promise.”

The Senate will take up today an amendment to an FAA authorization bill that affects NASA, The Hill reports. The amendment would eliminate a provision in the bill that would create “an advisory committee to examine whether or not NASA should continue research and development on civilian aircraft.” The amendment was introduced by Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) with bipartisan support.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and his French counterpart, Alain Juppe, will sign an agreement to share information on tracking satellites and debris in a meeting today at the Pentagon. The ceremony comes just days after the release of the National Security Space Strategy, which states that the Defense Department will work with other nations and companies “to maintain and improve space object databases, pursue common international data standards and data integrity measures, and provide services and disseminate orbital tracking information, including predictions of space object conjunction, to enhance spaceflight safety for all parties.”

Ohio’s congressional delegation, meanwhile, is stepping up efforts to secure a shuttle orbiter once the fleet is retired, reports the Dayton Daily News. The letter, by Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH) and Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) to NASA administrator Charles Bolden, states that the National Museum of the Air Force in Dayton is “a premier venue” for an orbiter. The letter, to be sent today, is also signed by nearly every member of the state’s delegation, with the exception of Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), who may sign it today, and House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH). Boehner’s omission is apparently due to plans to minimize participation in such “delegation letters” while serving as speaker, but a spokesman tells the paper that Boehner supports the effort and “has made clear to NASA the benefits of locating an orbiter” at the Dayton museum.

An initial read through the document doesn’t turn up much in the way of major new initiatives or other surprises. If you’ve been following some of the discussion and debate about national security space issues, or even read the National Space Policy released by the Obama Administration last June, much of the language here will look familiar. For example, the report emphasizes three trends often called the “Three C’s” of the modern space environment: congested (orbital debris), contested (ASATs and other activities to disrupt space systems), and competitive (the growing number of countries with space systems, and their increasing capabilities.)

A few highlights from the report:

Although there’s been reports the US is willing to sign on to the EU’s draft code of conduct for outer space activities, the strategy does not explicitly support it. It does, though, identify the need for “responsible, peaceful, and safe use of space”, including support for measures such as “best practices, transparency and confidence-building measures, and norms of behavior for responsible space operations”, similar to language in the national space policy.

The report highlights the need for a space industrial base in the US that is “robust, competitive, flexible, healthy, and delivers reliable space capabilities on time and on budget.” To achieve that, the strategy highlights a number of measures, including increased emphasis on technology development, shorter development cycles, and export control reform. “Reforming export controls will facilitate U.S. firms’ ability to compete to become providers-of-choice in the international marketplace for capabilities that are, or will soon become, widely available globally, while strengthening our ability to protect the most significant U.S. technology advantages,” the document states.

The strategy also indicates a willingness to partner with or purchase services from commercial providers. “We will rely on proven commercial capabilities to the maximum extent practicable, and we will modify commercial capabilities to meet government requirements when doing so is more cost-effective and timely for the government,” the report states. “We will develop space systems only when there is no suitable, cost-effective commercial alternative or when national security needs dictate.”

Cooperation with other countries and companies on the area of space situational awareness (SSA) is also highlighted in the report, saying that while the US is the leader in SSA, it seeks to “establish agreements with other nations and commercial firms to maintain and improve space object databases, pursue common international data standards and data integrity measures, and provide services and disseminate orbital tracking information, including predictions of space object conjunction, to enhance spaceflight safety for all parties.”

Former NASA chief of staff Courtney Stadd is scheduled to report to prison today to begin serving a 41-month federal sentence for conspiracy to steer NASA funds to his consulting company. In an email to friends and family earlier this week, obtained by Space News, Stadd said he had expected a lighter sentence, of about 24 months, based on a plea bargain with prosecutors. However, in the sentencing phase of the case, prosecutors “remained completely silent and poker-faced regarding their agreement to a lesser punishment and tacitly acquiesced to the harsh sentence terms: 41 months and restitution and fines of well over a quarter of a million dollars.”

In an op-ed in the Orlando Sentinel Friday, Douglas MacKinnon claims the real “Sputnik moment” the president should have mentioned in his State of the Union speech is China’s space program. Claiming that President Obama “has basically ended our human spaceflight program”, MacKinnon claims that “one nation above all is celebrating the demise of our human-spaceflight program: the People’s Republic of China” because it means “their military-controlled space program could soon have a free hand from the Earth to the moon.” Those claims, and the logic backing them, are tenuous at best in the op-ed, as among other things, he ignores the US national security space efforts that are largely unaffected by end of the shuttle program.

Surprise, surprise: the various agencies involved in the NPOESS weather satellite program “failed time and again in their management and oversight” of the program, according to an Aerospace Corporation study of the program, DoD Buzz reports. Combining formerly-separate civil and military satellite programs, with a “hydra-headed management system”, and loading the spacecraft with a large number of sensors, contributed to the problems that led the administration a year ago to split NPOESS into separate NOAA/NASA and DoD programs. “What happened was a series of unfortunate events. If only one of them had happened it could have been recoverable, but mistake after mistake was made,” former congressional staffer and Pentagon official Josh Hartman told DoD Buzz.

The White House official who coordinated development of the new national space policy is now working for Orbital Sciences Corporation, the company announced Monday. Peter Marquez has taken a job as the company’s vice president of strategy and planning, responsible for “helping to develop the company’s strategic approach to opportunities in civil and military space programs”. Marquez, as space policy director on the National Security Council, led development of the new policy released this summer.

Increasing costs and budgetary pressures mean that military space programs need to become “more competitive”, Aviation Week reports from a recent military space symposium. How exactly to make such programs more competitive, though, remain unclear: aerospace company officials complained that scope creep plus “unnecessarily invasive oversight” by government agencies have caused costs to go up, but warned that recent interest in fixed-price contracts by the Pentagon is not always a solution. On the other hand, SpaceX’s Elon Musk endorsed the use of fixed-price contracts, saying that traditional cost-plus awards “make good people do bad things”, encouraging companies to run up costs on contracts “up until the program gets canceled.”

Another aspect of the memo and review is the uncertain, but not particularly promising, future of the National Security Space Office (NSSO), originally a joint office between the Defense Department and NRO but now solely staffed by the DOD. While Air Force staff currently assigned to NSSO will now fall under the Deputy Under Secretary of the Air Force for Space, Donley’s memo states that decisions about NSSO staff associated with the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) will be deferred “until ongoing discussions about the role of the EA [Executive Agent] for Space and roles and reporting relationships for any successor organization to the NSSO are complete and agreement has been reached for the roles and responsibilities of the successor organization(s).” The memo adds that discussions with OSD on the future of functions assigned to NSSO are ongoing, with Donley stating he is “very encouraged by the collaborative approach demonstrated during these meetings.”