By Jeff Foust on 2014 April 29 at 11:40 am ET In advance of Wednesday morning’s markup, the House Appropriations Committee released its draft of a Commerce, Justice, and Science (CJS) appropriations bill Tuesday morning. The bill is rather generous to NASA, providing the agency with nearly $17.9 billion for fiscal year 2015, an increase of $435 million over the president’s budget request (PBR) and $250 million above the agency’s fiscal year 2014 budget. The bill itself provides funding amounts primarily at the account level, not breaking it down into the various divisions and programs (data usually in the accompanying report yet to be released):
| Account |
FY15 PBR |
House CJS Draft |
House-PBR Diff |
| SCIENCE |
$4,972.0 |
$5,193.0 |
$221.0 |
| AERONAUTICS |
$551.1 |
$666.0 |
$114.9 |
| SPACE TECHNOLOGY |
$705.5 |
$620.0 |
-$85.5 |
| EXPLORATION SYSTEMS |
$3,976.0 |
$4,167.0 |
$191.0 |
| SPACE OPERATIONS |
$3,905.4 |
$3,885.0 |
-$20.4 |
| EDUCATION |
$88.9 |
$106.0 |
$17.1 |
| CROSS AGENCY SUPPORT |
$2,778.6 |
$2,779.0 |
$0.4 |
| CONSTRUCTION |
$446.1 |
$446.0 |
-$0.1 |
| INSPECTOR GENERAL |
$37.0 |
$34.0 |
-$3.0 |
| TOTAL |
$17,460.6 |
$17,896.0 |
$435.4 |
(Amounts in table above in millions of dollars.)
The bill does allocate $1.14 billion for Orion and $1.915 billion for SLS, a combined total $270 million higher than the administration’s request, although exploration overall gets $191 million than the administration’s request. The other two programs under exploration, commercial crew and exploration R&D, don’t have their funding levels specified in the draft bill.
In science, the bill sets aside $100 million for Europa mission pre-formulation studies, much higher than the $15 million the administration requested and somewhat higher than the $80 million provided for such work by Congress for FY14. A fact sheet accompanying the bill notes that the bill “includes funding above the President’s request for planetary science to ensure the continuation of critical research and development programs.”
The bill also renames the Cross-Agency Support account the “Safety, Security and Mission Services” account, which appears to reflect the strong interest in NASA security by outgoing CJS subcommittee chairman Rep. Frank Wolf.
By Jeff Foust on 2014 April 29 at 7:42 am ET On Monday, the State Department announced a new round of sanctions against Russia to protest its actions in the ongoing Ukraine crisis. Specifically, the State Department’s Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC) “will deny pending applications for export or re-export of any high technology defense articles or services regulated under the U.S. Munitions List to Russia or occupied Crimea that contribute to Russia’s military capabilities.” In addition, it will revoke any existing license applications that meet that guideline. All other existing or pending applications “will receive a case-by-case evaluation to determine their contribution to Russia’s military capabilities.”
At first glance, this would appear to pose an issue for the commercial satellite industry, particularly US-built satellites or satellites with US-built components, slated for export to Russia for launch. Commercial satellites and related components remain on the US Munitions List, and while pending reforms would remove most of those satellites and components from the list, those reforms won’t take effect until late this year (180 days after publication of the final revised export rule, expected in May.) Since late March, the State Department has put a hold on license applications for the export of “defense articles and defense services” to Russia, according to the DDTC website, a decision that is holding up the export of several commercial satellites, Space News reported late last week.
Yet, the State Department’s decision on Monday, as severe as it may sound, could actually clear the way for those satellites’ export for launch. If the satellites are not deemed to “contribute to Russia’s military capabilities,” then the State Department could then go ahead and approve them for launch, freeing them from their current legal limbo. The announcement provided no additional details on what licenses would be denied.
In a conference call with reporters Monday, an unidentified “senior administration official” said those applications involving technology needed by the Russian “defense industrial complex” would be denied. “We are now in the process of going through them,” the official said of the current licenses and applications, “and really scrutinizing them to see which ones involve technology that the Russian defense industrial complex is in need of, and those are the ones that will be denied.” Since the satellites being exported to Russia are effectively just “passing through” the country for launch, and not being used directly by the Russian military, it would appear to provide a loophole to allow those satellites to be exported—provided the State Department chooses to interpret it in this manner.
Outside the US, one country has already cancelled plans to launch a satellite on a Russian vehicle because of the crisis. Late last week, the Canadian government said it would not launch its M3MSat on a Soyuz rocket this summer, citing “the current events in the Ukraine.” M3MSat is a small satellite that was one of several payloads on the Soyuz. Two other Canadian-built smallsats that were also slated to launch on that rocket have also been removed from that mission. The Canadian government said it would seek alternative launch arrangement for those satellites, but may forfeit the funds paid to Russia for the now-canceled launch.
By Jeff Foust on 2014 April 28 at 10:12 pm ET Late Friday evening, SpaceX issued a press release confirming what the company’s CEO, Elon Musk, announced earlier in the day: that the company was filing suit to protest the Air Force’s block buy EELV contract with United Launch Alliance (ULA). Besides going over the rationale for their protest, the company also used the release to announce the creation of a new website, “Freedom to Launch,” and said that it would post the official protest document on the site on Monday.
Initially, the site showed a countdown clock set to hit zero at noon Eastern time on Monday. However, by early Monday morning, the countdown had been replaced with a “Launching Soon” notice; by late Monday afternoon, there was no sign of the protest document. A spokesperson representing SpaceX said that the company was still planning to file the protest document Monday, but would not be posting it to the website. Instead, the protest document will be available through the Court of Federal Claims’ computer system within 48 hours. (The spokesperson confirmed early Monday evening that the complaint had, in fact, been formally filed with the court.)
ULA, meanwhile, issued its own statement about the suit late Monday, emphasizing both the cost savings that it argues the block buy will create, as well as ULA’s position as the sole EELV-class launch provider certified by the Air Force. “EELV continues to be the most successful DOD acquisition program of the past few decades,” the release stated. “Launches have been delivered on schedule, meeting or exceeding all performance requirements, and exceeding cost reduction goals.”
The release, though, also intended to shore up one area of concern about ULA’s EELV contract: its use of Russian-manufactured RD-180 engines for the Atlas V. The release stated, as ULA officials have in the recent past, that it maintains a stockpile of engines that would cover two years’ worth of launches “and would be able to transition other mission commitments to our Delta rockets if an emergent need develops.” Also, as The Hill reported a few days ago, ULA has changed the way it received RD-180 engines from NPO Energomash, replacing a single large annual shipment with two smaller shipments later this year.
While the Air Force awaits SpaceX’s formal complaint, it’s also facing complaints of a different kind from a senator. Late Friday, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) published on his website a letter he sent to Secretary of the Air Force Deborah Lee James regarding EELV competition. In the letter, he asked for clarification from James about testimony she gave before the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier in the month, expressing doubts about her explanation for the reasons behind the 36-core block buy contract. Without explicitly naming SpaceX, McCain suggested that James’s comments from that hearing that “that no new entrant is qualified to perform ‘heavier’ launches is misleading and possibly false.”
McCain’s office also included in the release a letter from the senator to Defense Department Inspector General Jon Rymer, asking him to “independently review recent developments in the EELV program,” such as the reduction in the number of launches set aside for competition, and whether the block buy award “put at risk competitive launches to satisfy the Air Force’s obligation to perform contractually as to the 36 sole-source launches.”
By Jeff Foust on 2014 April 27 at 10:09 am ET Congress is back from spring break, and that means a busy week in both the House and Senate as three different committees hold hearings and markup legislation involving both NASA policy and its fiscal year 2015 appropriations.
On Tuesday afternoon, the full House Science Committee will mark up HR 4412, the updated NASA authorization bill. The committee’s space subcommittee approved an amended version of the bill on April 9, authorizing only the already-approved fiscal year 2014 appropriations,but also including a number of policy provisions, including a requirement for NASA to provide a detailed exploration roadmap for sending humans to Mars. The markup, ironically, coincides with an “Exploration Forum” NASA is holding Tuesday afternoon at NASA Headquarters to “showcase NASA’s human exploration path to Mars.”
Wednesday morning, the House Appropriations Committee’s Commerce, Justice, and Science (CJS) subcommittee will mark up its proposed fiscal year 2015 appropriations bill, which funds NASA among other agencies. The draft bill hasn’t been released yet, but when it does it will provide some insights into Congressional thinking on issues like NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission, commercial crew, and SOFIA and planetary science mission funding, all topics that came up in the subcommittee’s April 8 hearing on the NASA budget.
A day later, the Senate Appropriations Committee’s CJS subcommittee will hold a hearing on the NASA budget, with NASA administrator Charles Bolden the sole scheduled witness. Earlier this month, Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), who chairs both the CJS subcommittee as well as the full committee, said she would seek to increase NASA’s proposed FY15 budget of $17.46 billion to at least the $17.65 billion finally appropriated for FY14.
By Jeff Foust on 2014 April 25 at 2:35 pm ET In a sharp escalation of the ongoing debate over military launch contracts, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced Friday afternoon that the company was filing suit against the Air Force to formally protest a “block buy” contract the service made with United Launch Alliance.
In a hastily-arranged press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, Musk announced that the company was filing suit in the Court of Federal Claims over a 36-core block buy contract the Air Force recently signed with ULA. The contract has been in the works for months, but Musk said the company didn’t formally learn of it until March, and exhausted all approaches other than a formal protest to deal with it.
“This is not right,” Musk said. “The national security launches should be put up for competition and they should not be awarded on a sole-source, uncompeted basis.”
He said it “seemed odd” that if SpaceX’s vehicles are suitable for NASA and commercial customers, that they would not also be able to launch something “quite simple” like a GPS satellite. SpaceX is currently working through the certification process with the Air Force to become eligible for national security payloads, but Musk questioned the timing of making the block buy award to ULA while the certification process is ongoing. “Since this is a large, multi-year contract, why not wait a few months for the certification process to complete, and then do a competition?” he asked. “That seems very reasonable to me.”
Musk, at the press conference, played up both cost and national security issues as reasons for not relying solely on ULA for EELV-class launches. A handout provided to the media attending the press conference argued that allowing SpaceX to perform such launches would create cost savings to the government of at least $1 billion per year “even under the most conservative estimates,” it stated.
“I don’t know why their rockets are so expensive. They’re insanely expensive,” Musk said of ULA’s Atlas V and Delta IV. He then went on to provide some reasons why he thought they were: SpaceX’s vehicles were simpler, and of a more modern design, than the Atlas and Delta, he argued.
He also mentioned the use of the Russian-built RD-180 engine on the Atlas V first stage, going so far as to suggest that use of the engine might violate current sanctions on Russia. Musk said the Russian official with oversight of the industry, deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin, is on the list of officials sanctioned by the US government in response to the Ukraine crisis. “How is it that we’re sending hundreds of millions of US taxpayers’ money at a time when Russia is in the process of invading Ukraine?” he asked. “It would be hard to imagine that Dmitry Rogozin is not benefiting personally from the dollars that are being sent there. On the surface of it, it appears that there’s a good probability of some kind of sanctions violation.”
“This is not SpaceX protesting and saying that these launches should be awarded to us,” he said at one point in the half-hour press conference, which also covered SpaceX’s progress in developing a reusable version of the Falcon 9’s first stage. “We’re just protesting and saying that these launches should be competed. If we compete and lose, that’s fine.”
By Jeff Foust on 2014 April 24 at 6:37 am ET The governor of Arizona has signed into law a bill that provides commercial spaceflight companies in the state with liability protections similar to those in several other states. Gov. Jan Brewer signed HB2163 on Wednesday, a days after both the Arizona Senate approved an amended version of the bill and the state House then concurred with the Senate’s version. The bill attracted little opposition in either legislative chamber, with a final House vote of 58-1 in favor of the bill.
The bill, similar to existing laws in states such as Colorado, Florida, New Mexico, and Texas, allows spaceflight companies to have their customers sign liability release forms prior to their flights, and affirms that such liability releases are valid. The state Senate stripped some of the details in the House bill, which originally specified the language and format of the liability waiver. The final bill also does not include exceptions for gross negligence and intentional harm contained in the House bill.
The legislation was sought primarily by WorldView Enterprises, an Arizona company that plans to perform high-altitude balloon flights. Last year, the company received a determination by the FAA that such flights, to altitudes of about 30 kilometers, could be licensed as launches by the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation. The company is proposing to perform those flights from the town of Page in northern Arizona.
By Jeff Foust on 2014 April 23 at 6:39 am ET In a conference speech Tuesday, NASA administrator Charles Bolden warned against trying to redirect NASA’s exploration plans, while also cautioning that those plans have to fit in an environment where Apollo-era budgets aren’t realistic.
“We made a decision. Some people in this room don’t like it. But we’re on our way, and you can either go with us, or figure out how to start all over again, and everybody in this room, I think, knows what happens when you start all over again,” Bolden said during a question-and-answer session after his keynote speech at the Humans To Mars Summit in Washington Tuesday morning.
What would happen, Bolden argued, is that the progress that NASA has made on its current path over the last several years would be lost, such as the successful development of commercial cargo systems for supporting the ISS and ongoing development of commercial crew transportation systems, which he said freed up NASA to focus more on exploration systems that would eventually allow humans to go to Mars. “We are farther down this road than we have been in a long, long, long, long time. If you don’t want to admit that, I can’t help you.”
“So, get over it, to be blunt,” he said. “This is the path we have chosen. Help us get it right.” That path can be “tweaked,” he acknowledged, but constant changes would result in no progress. “We can do this, but I need your help.”
In the same talk, though, he cautioned that any long-term goal of sending humans to Mars would have to fit into budgets not much larger than those today, and nothing like the Apollo era, when NASA received several percent of the federal budget. “We are not going to get four percent of the federal budget,” he said. “If you are serious about wanting to go to Mars, start thinking about reality, and reality is the budget. We are not going to get four percent of the federal budget to go to Mars or any other place.”
NASA’s plans, he said, required only “modest” increases in budgets but, as in past presentations, Bolden and other NASA officials didn’t quantify how much “modest” was, other than it was less than those much larger Apollo-era budgets. “If you feel we’ve got to have the Apollo-era funding levels, then forget it right now. Don’t spend your time at this conference, because you—we—are not going to get there.”
The rest of the Q&A session, as well as Bolden’s prepared remarks, covered familiar ground about NASA’s exploration plans and related issues. He reiterated, as he has since the beginning of the Ukraine crisis, that NASA’s partnership with Russia was still in good shape. “I am cautious, but I am cautiously optimistic,” he said, noting ISS operations were unaffected in the Georgia crisis in 2008.
He also put in another plug for full funding for NASA’s commercial crew program, revisiting a contentious hearing with a subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee earlier this month, when Bolden and members argued about whether Congress fully funded the commercial crew program. He said that, in fiscal year 2011, NASA asked for $500 million for commercial crew but received only $312 million in the final appropriations bill. “I don’t care what Congress says or what staffers say or anything, $312 million is not $500 million,” he said. “We have never gotten what the President has asked for for commercial crew.”
“We really need the support of Congress,” he added, “and it’s my intent to get down on my hands and knees, and beg and plead, and help them understand that this nation needs our own capability to get humans into space.”
By Jeff Foust on 2014 April 22 at 6:25 am ET Earlier this month, the California Senate approved AB 777, legislation that would exempt space companies from paying taxes on certain property related to spaceflight, including an “orbital space facility, space propulsion system, space vehicle, launch vehicle, satellite, or space station of any kind,” as well as components of such systems.
The bill is slightly different from what the California Assembly passed in January. The Senate version deleted a provision that extended the tax break to equipment that would be placed in those spaceflight systems, and also added a provision stating that an “inference shall not be drawn from this act” regarding whether such property qualifies as “business inventories” in the state tax code. Those amendments mean the bill is back in the Assembly to be passed again as amended.
One would normally think that a bill that provides a tax break to companies would be warmly received by the Wall Street Journal, but AB 777 is an exception. In an editorial published in Monday’s paper, the Journal criticized the bill; the company that reportedly instigated the bill, SpaceX; and its founder, Elon Musk. “Upon his request, Democrats who dominate the legislature are moving to exempt SpaceX and other space-travel companies from California’s personal property tax,” the editorial states. SpaceX could have sought an appeal of a property tax bill it received last year for engines it built, but instead “jumped the queue and petitioned the legislature for a tax reprieve.”
The Journal’s argument is that the legislature is providing special treatment to SpaceX because of the wealth and influence of Musk. “The current legislation would specifically benefit SpaceX and a handful of smaller space firms like Aerojet Rocketdyne,” the editorial states. Of course, Aerojet Rocketdyne, with more than 5,000 employees prior to laying off about 250 earlier this year, still has more employees company-wide than SpaceX, which has close to 4,000 employees. In addition, companies like Boeing and Space Systems/Loral, who build satellites in the state, may also qualify for the tax break.
The editorial notes that other exceptions to state property taxes have been made, such as household furnishings and pets. “But, ahem, taxing a rocket and Fido aren’t equivalent,” it argues. “For one, it’s hard to put a price on a dog.” (Clip that editorial out and take it with you the next time you go to a pet store.) The Journal would rather see the state repeal the entire personal property tax rather than grant individual exceptions, something that the California Legislature seems unlikely to take up soon.
The lead sponsor of the bill, Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi (D-Torrance), hasn’t hid the fact that AB 777 will benefit SpaceX. “Private companies like Space X [sic] are building rocket ships and creating thousands of good paying manufacturing jobs right here in Southern California. We want these companies to invest and grow in our state,” he wrote in an op-ed published last week in his local newspaper, the Daily Breeze. “Passage of AB 777 will be one giant leap forward for this exciting new industry and for California.”
By Jeff Foust on 2014 April 18 at 7:34 am ET The head of NASA and the President’s science advisor told the NASA Advisory Council (NAC) this week that the agency’s Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) remained the next logical step of a long-term strategy to eventually send people to Mars, despite the protestations of some in Congress as well as “outside fan clubs.”
“The FY15 budget request keeps NASA on a steady path we’ve been following, a stepping-stone approach to meet the President’s challenge of sending humans to Mars in the 2030s,” NASA administrator Charles Bolden said. Bolden was referring to the speech made by President Obama four years ago this week at the Kennedy Space Center that called for a human mission to a near Earth asteroid by 2025 and human missions to Mars orbit in the mid-2030s. That speech, Bolden suggested, has been forgotten by a lot of people who question NASA’s exploration plan today.
“Some of you may say the same thing that some of the committee members ask me when I go to the Hill: ‘When did you guys decide you were going to do all this new stuff?’ We’ve been on this path since 2010,” Bolden said, recounting the goals laid out in Obama’s speech. “For a variety of reasons, it just kind of went over people’s heads. But it didn’t go over our heads.”
After the back-to-back presentations Wednesday morning by Bolden and Office of Science and Technology Policy director John Holdren, NAC chairman Steve Sqyures asked if the ARM was, in fact, consistent with the goals of that 2010 speech. “With respect to the goals outlined in the President’s speech, does that mission answer the mail?” he asked of the ARM.
“I think the current version of the NASA plan is consistent with the President’s vision,” Holdren responded. “The President’s vision was laid out with very broad brushstrokes.” The ARM, he said, fulfills several objectives in preparing for future exploration as well as science and commercialization. “I think it is an incredibly valuable mission in terms of the number of purposes it serves, largely using technologies and components that are being developed with current budgets.”
At the NAC meeting, as well as several previous appearances, Bolden laid out a broad exploration strategy that took NASA from Earth orbit operations on the ISS to the “proving ground” of cislunar space, including both the ARM and future potential missions in lunar orbit or the Earth-Moon Lagrange points, and then eventually to Mars. NASA’s current programs, including commercial crew, the Space Launch System (SLS), Orion, and ARM, are all “interlocking pieces” of the broader strategy, he said.
Bolden specifically defended development of the SLS, citing criticism that NASA’s exploration goals could alternatively be achieved with existing smaller launch vehicles and the use of on-orbit propellant depots. “When you start talking about the kinds of missions we’re talking about, numbers of launches required adds to the complexity and the risk incurred,” Bolden said. He added, though, if cryogenic propellant depots already existed, it would have been the “optimal” approach over SLS. “But when we looked at how much money it would take to do that, and how much time, we assumed we wanted to take the path of least resistance and the path of least risk, so we ended up where we are.”
Others, meanwhile, have agitated for different uses of SLS and other capabilities than the ARM, including a return to the Moon. “I think many of your outside fan clubs and cheerleading sections are not convinced” NASA has an exploration strategy, said NAC member Tom Young, citing the lack of details and funding profiles in NASA’s current plan. “It’s more of a passion and a dream than a strategy.”
“There are, of course, a lot of different voices out there in what you call our ‘fan club,'” Holdren said, “and some of them are people who say we absolutely have to go back to the Moon and establish a presence on the surface and it’s a terrible tragedy we haven’t done that. Those folks may never be persuaded that spending $60 to 80 billion to do that is not the best use of $60 to 80 billion in the environment that we now find ourselves. People are just not realistic about the costs of these things.”
Bolden and Holdren also argued for increased spending on technology development, which has been funded at levels well below the administration’s request in recent appropriations bills. “Technology development is not a high priority in the Congress right now, unfortunately,” Bolden said. “It’s a slow, painful process, but we continue to work to whittle away at the opposition.”
“I think we have an education problem in conveying the connection between advanced technology and the ability to do the missions that most in Congress think we need to do,” Holdren added. “They think we can just go to Mars tomorrow by pouring some more money in.” That last comment appeared to be a subtle dig at interest by some in Congress for a 2021 Mars flyby mission.
“Every member of Congress will stand up and say, ‘Of course NASA has to go to Mars. Of course we have to lead the world in planetary exploration,'” Holdren continued. “But they don’t get that we won’t get there without investments in advanced technology.”
By Jeff Foust on 2014 April 17 at 8:38 am ET For the last few years, commercial satellite remote sensing company DigitalGlobe (and, before its merger with DigitalGlobe, GeoEye) has been lobbying the government to allow it to sell sharper satellite imagery that it’s currently allowed. DigitalGlobe is currently restricted to selling imagery with resolution no sharper than 0.5 meters per pixel, but has been pushing to change that limit to 0.25 meters. The company argued that companies in other nations, not subject to US regulations, are providing imagery that is starting to approach DigitalGlobe’s sharpness, and thus the company needs the ability to sell sharper images to compete.
This week, government officials have the strongest indication to date that they’re willing to change the resolution limits. Speaking at the Geoint conference in Tampa on Tuesday, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said that the intelligence community had reached “consensus” on supporting DigitalGlobe’s call for revised resolution regulations. “The intelligence community supports a measure that would allow industry to provider higher-resolution commercial satellite imagery,” he told Aviation Week.
Those comments were confirmed later at the conference by Letitia Long, director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). However, the process to change those resolution limits requires consultation with several other agencies outside of the intelligence community as well as the White House. She didn’t know when a final decision would come, Space News reported, but the company is hoping for a decision before the August launch of its WorldView-3 satellite, which is designed to produce imagery with resolutions as sharp as 0.31 meters.
It’s unclear if the change in resolution limits would be tied to a review of the overall national commercial remote sensing policy, which does not explicitly include any resolution limits. That policy was last updated 11 years ago, in April 2003; the administration has been gradually performing reviews and updates of “sectoral” space policies, like the national space transportation policy updated last November.
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