Romney, Jotkoff said in the statement, “has provided unwavering support for the Republican budget plans that would undermine America’s space program and our country’s future as the leader in a new industry. He is seeking advice on space policy from the strongest advocates of a Bush Administration plan that tried to recreate the glories of the past with the technology of the past.” That’s a reference to a January open letter issued by the Romney campaign on space policy, whose signatories include former NASA administrator Mike Griffin.

The Obama campaign statement sought in particular to link Romney to the CJS appropriations bill passed by the House last week that, among other measures, includes report language calling for an immediate downselect to one or two companies for NASA’s commercial crew development program. “Now his allies in Congress are trying to eliminate competition in a nascent private space industry which is driving innovation, moving space exploration forward and creating hundreds of jobs on Florida’s Space Coast. Mitt Romney has said he supports the House Budget,” Jotkoff stated.

The Romney campaign has largely been quiet on space since the candidate’s January 27 speech on Florida’s Space Coast, where Romney declined to take a particular stand on space policy (in marked contrast to Newt Gingrich’s call for a lunar base by 2020, made just two days earlier). Instead, he talked about how he would bring in experts from throughout the space community to develop a mission for NASA. In that speech he was critical of President Obama’s approach to space, calling out “his failure to define a mission for the space program for this nation.” One month later Romney said he was in no hurry to go back to the Moon, which actually would put him more in line with the current administration, which abandoned plans by the Bush Administration for a human return to the Moon by 2020, than fellow Republican Gingrich.

The latest person to raise questions about this arrangement is a senior member of Congress. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) released yesterday a letter to NASA administrator Charles Bolden about this deal. “My office recently received troubling allegations regarding the Google fleet of aircraft housed at Moffett Airfield,” Grassley wrote, citing the NBC report as well as “allegations that Google has purchased jet fuel from the government at a discounted price” well below the going market price. The letter then includes nearly a page of questions that Grassley asked Bolden for answers by May 25.

This is not the first time Grassley has raised issues about NASA Ames activities. Last month he sent another letter to Bolden about alleged ITAR violations at the center. Grassley, citing unidentified “whistleblowers”, said he understood Ames director Pete Worden was under investigation for ITAR violations along with another Ames official and unnamed foreign nationals. “These allegations came to my office from individuals who are concerned about the direction of the ARC under Mr. Worden’s leadership,” Grassley wrote. He asked for a briefing by late April, but has not received it “despite repeated follow-up inquiries,” according to a statement from his office.

“The allegations are substantive,” Grassley said in a statement Tuesday. “NASA should address the allegations in the interest of public accountability.” So why is Grassley speaking out? He said in the statement that whistleblowers contacted the senator, who is the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, “because of his reputation of receptiveness to whistleblowers.”

During the debate of the bill in the House on Wednesday, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) raised his own concerns about the program and the report language regarding it accompanying the bill. “I believe it makes a flawed comparison between commercial crew program partners and the energy firm of Solyndra,” he said, referring to the report, in a colloquy with Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), the chairman of the appropriations CJS subcommittee, during the debate on the bill Wednesday afternoon. “In addition, it requires an immediate downselect to a single program partner, which I do not believe is the best path to move forward.”

Rohrabacher went on to say he did share some concerns Wolf has with the program. “NASA has not shared a clear, comprehensive management plan for the program, despite repeated requests,” he said. “Instead, they have made inconsistent and confusing statements abut the program’s purpose, timeline, design, cost, and procurement methods.” He said he hoped there would be the opportunity to discuss “some alternative approaches” that address those concerns while achieving the program’s goals. “With that in mind, I am willing to work with NASA to help come up with a new plan that will do just that.”

Wolf offered a sympathetic response. “I believe that despite our differences—and there may not really be that much of a difference—we share a common goal of providing reliable domestic access to the space station in the fastest, most cost-effective manner,” he said, adding that if Rohrabacher believes that he can work with NASA to come up with a improved plan, “we want to work with him.”

In a statement issued after the colloquy, Rohrabacher expressed his frustration with both NASA and Congress about the state of the program. “NASA and this Administration have not been able to sell this basic idea” of the benefits of commercial crew, he said. “Congress has embraced a measured approach to this idea; too slowly and timidly from my point of view. It seems NASA is itself confused, or maybe suffers from internal conflicts over the specific goals and approaches. The agency has not told a clear and convincing story to win this initiative the funding and freedom of action it requires.”

“As a champion of Commercial Crew, I am no longer willing to give NASA the benefit of every doubt on this program. NASA must do better,” Rohrabacher said later in the statement. “NASA must get behind a more effective and transparent commercial crew strategy and program plan. We’ve made a lot of progress in recent years, but we cannot move forward simply on momentum.”

The next day, NASA administrator Charles Bolden spoke out against any effort to limit competition in the commercial crew program. “Despite a bi-partisan agreement to ensure American astronauts are traveling into space on U.S. built spacecraft as soon as possible, some want to short-change this job-creating initiative and limit competition in the commercial space arena,” he said in remarks prepared for a meeting Thursday of the FAA’s Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC) in Washington. (Emphasis in original.)

“Ending competition by down-selecting to a sole commercial space company could double the cost of developing a privately built human spaceflight system and it will leave us in the same position we find ourselves today — having only one option for getting our astronauts to the space station,” Bolden said. “We are hopeful we can work to resolve these issues and keep this important initiative on track.”

Florida Today, meanwhile, has taken an aggressive stance on the issue, with two of its columnists criticizing the Space Coast’s two members of Congress, Reps. Sandy Adams (R) and Bill Posey (R), for voting in favor of the overall appropriations bill despite the commercial crew funding levels and language. Posey told the newspaper’s John Kelly that limited funds force NASA to make an earlier downselect: “In a perfect world, with unlimited funds, you wouldn’t have to do that, but that is not the world we live in today.”

“What I can’t understand is why House members” like Adams and Posey “would vote to halt the only bargain NASA has going,” Florida Today’s Matt Reed said in his own column. “Today, NASA’s budget represents .48 percent of federal spending. The commercial crew competition accounts for 1/18th of that. And Congress is concerned… why?”

Recall that the Senate moved funding for weather satellite development from NOAA to NASA out of concerns about the progress of those programs within NOAA, hence the “Operational Satelite Acquisition” account that’s only in the Senate version.

If you’re interested in funding levels beyond the top-level accounts listed above, SpacePolicyOnline.com has a detailed fact sheet about the NASA budget that includes breakouts within the major accounts.

The report, named after the section of the 2010 defense authorization bill that called for it, was due two years ago; administration officials said at a briefing about the report at the National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs that the effort got caught up in broader export control reform efforts, although an interim report was provided by the Pentagon to Congress a year ago. The final report, officials hope, will help efforts in Congress to move the identified space-related items off the USML, something that can only be done through legislation since those items were added to the USML by law in the late 1990s.

The prospect for such reform is the subject of a couple of events this week in Washington. On Wednesday the AIAA and the American Bar Association are cohosting a “Conversation on Export Controls” on Capitol Hill, featuring a number of executives and government officials to discuss the Section 1248 report and its implications for export control reform. Thursday afternoon the Export Control Working Group of the FAA’s Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC) will meet to discuss the Section 1248 report and related issues. That event features Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-MD), ranking member of the Select Committee on Intelligence.

The amendment was one of several debated on the House floor during the day and evening Tuesday that sought to transfer money from NASA, particularly the Cross-Agency Support account, to other programs in the Commerce, Justice, and Science (CJS) appropriations bill. It was, though, the only one to pass. Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), chairman of the CJS appropriations subcommittee, was clearly exasperated by those proposed amendments, noting the Cross-Agency Support account supports many critical NASA activities and is not, as it might appear, to be some kind of slush fund. “I think they need to change the name” of that account, he said at one point in the debate Tuesday evening.

The only concern that the SAP raised about the portion of the bill funding NASA is with the language in the bill and accompanying report about NASA’s commercial crew program. “The Administration strongly opposes the level of funding provided for the commercial crew program,” it states, noting that the House funds the program at $500 million, $330 million below the administration’s request, “as well as restrictive report language that would eliminate competition in the program.” That is a reference to report language that calls on NASA to downselecting to one or, at most, two companies, and using conventional contracts versus Space Act Agreements. “This would increase the time the United States will be required to rely solely on foreign providers to transport American astronauts to and from the space station,” it warns.

The SAP goes on to state that while the administration “appreciates” the funding appropriated to NASA overall in the bill—a little under $17.6 billion, compared to the $17.71 billion requested—unspecified programs received “unnecessary increases at the expense of other important initiatives.”

The NASA language in the House bill did get an endorsement yesterday from three famous retired astronauts: Neil Armstrong, Gene Cernan, and Jim Lovell. In a letter to Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), who chairs the appropriations subcommittee that developed the bill, they said a commercial crew downselect now would be “prudent” in an era of limited budgets in order to accelerate vehicle development.

While not explicitly stated in the announcement, a key factor driving the proposed deal are cuts in the Defense Department’s budget to acquire commercial satellite imagery. Both companies have “EnhancedView” contracts with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). The contracts, awarded in August 2010, are valued at a combined $7.3 billion over 10 years. However, the proposed fiscal year 2013 budget would cut spending on those contracts significantly: from $540 million to $250 million, according to a recent Reuters report. (The details of the NGA budget request are classified.)

“Given this uncertain political and fiscal climate, we believe it is in our mutual interest to provide our customers with creative solutions to problems rather than passively speculate on one or another outcome,” GeoEye president CEO Matt O’Connell wrote to his counterpart at DigitalGlobe, Jeffrey Tarr, in a letter proposing the acquisition.

A week before the proposed merger, executives in the commercial remote sensing industry, along with some of its commercial customers and even government officials, raised concerns about the proposed EnhancedView cuts during a forum on Capitol Hill organized by the Space Enterprise Council. Their concern was that the proposed cuts were putting industry in a corner, since they were already making large investments in developing new satellites to meet the demand of the EnhancedView contracts, only to have that major source of revenue threatened.

“You can’t tell industry that we need you to bring these novel approaches forward, we need you to invest along with us, we need you to share the risk with us, and then, six months into a ten-year program, propose cuts,” said Kyle Schmackpfeffer of ITT Exelis, a company that has developed imaging systems for both DigitalGlobe and GeoEye. (The “six months” he cited referred to an earlier, smaller budget cut in EnhancedView proposed for fiscal year 2012.)

Others warned that the proposed cuts could sour the financial community on this industry, jeopardizing future private investment at a time when other countries are closing the gap in the capabilities currently offered by US commercial satellites. “EnhancedView was a really good idea at the time by having a public private partnership. Wall Street was involved, and there was a lot of support,” said Eve Douglas of the Department of Commerce’s Office of Space Commercialization. If the proposed cuts go through, she warned, Wall Street was unlikely to invest in this industry again.

What wasn’t discussed during that earlier forum was the possibility that the two companies might merge, combining their resources and consolidating their contracts. That, though, may be the solution the companies have to adopt in response to reduced spending from their biggest customer.