Space Politics

Late Monday the House Science and Technology Committee announced that it has completed its draft of a NASA authorization bill and plays a markup session Thursday morning (10 am, Rayburn 2318). The press release states that the committee “is releasing the legislative text of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Act of 2010″, although the text of the legislation itself is not included with the release. However, the release does provide some details about the legislation, summarized below in bulleted form:

• The overall funding for NASA in the legislation is at the president’s requested level for each of the fiscal years 2011-15.
• It provides for a balanced set of NASA activities in science, aeronautics, and human space flight and exploration.
• It funds science and aeronautics above the president’s proposed levels;
• It authorizes a new Space Technology program to develop innovative and transformational technologies and funds it at the president’s requested level;
• It provides more than $4.9 billion in funding for commercial crew- and commercial cargo-related initiatives
• It extends the International Space Station program to at least 2020 and adds funding for ISS research and for a ground- and space-based life and physical sciences microgravity research program;
• It funds the Space Shuttle program at the president’s requested level and adds funds to aid the Shuttle workforce and affected communities with the post-Shuttle transition;
• It funds NASA’s education programs at the president’s requested level and seeks to enhance the contribution of NASA’s existing programs to STEM goals;
• It restructures NASA’s exploration program to allow it to continue to make meaningful progress under a constrained budget, directing NASA to develop a crew transportation system that will both minimize the post-Shuttle human space flight “gap” and directly support the expeditious development of a heavy lift launch vehicle and capsule to enable challenging crewed missions beyond low Earth orbit.

A couple notes from the summary above: the $4.9 billion for commercial crew development is about $1.1 billion less than what was in the president’s proposal over the same period (2011-2015). [As the text of the legislation and the comments below note, the $4.9 billion is for both commercial crew and cargo, with very little clearly identified specifically for commercial crew development.] (This also suggests this is a five-year authorization bill, unlike the Senate’s three-year legislation.) Also, there’s no mention above of authorizing an additional shuttle flight, only that shuttle will be funded at the same level as in the administration’s proposal.

Update: The text of the legislation is now available. A quick read shows one major difference between the Senate and House authorization bills, namely, the priorities for developing a government launch vehicle and crewed spacecraft. The Senate version focused on the development of a heavy-lift vehicle (70-100 tons to LEO) that could carry a Orion-derived crew capsule. The House version, instead, focuses on the development of a crew transportation system that leverages previous work on Orion and Ares 1, but sets no specific performance target for the launch system. “[T]he Administrator shall pursue the expeditious and cost-efficient development of a heavy lift launch system that utilizes the systems and flight and ground test activities of the crew transportation system developed under this section to the maximum extent practicable,” it states. While the legislation sets a goal of having the crew transportation system in service by the end of 2015, “the Administrator shall strive to meet the goal of having the heavy lift launch vehicle authorized in this paragraph available for operational missions by the end of the current decade.” Whether either of those goals is reasonable with the projected funding levels is another matter.

With the Senate moving ahead with an authorization bill, what will the House do? “As the ranking member of the House authorizing committee, I’m eager to reauthorize NASA and get the train back on track,” Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX), ranking member of the House Science and Technology Committee, said earlier this week at a Space Transportation Association breakfast on Capitol Hill. “I think it’s possible… It’s something we absolutely have to do.”

That committee is drafting its version of an authorization bill, but Hall said the Democratic leadership of the committee has not shared any details about the legislation with him. “The chairman has not shared a bill with us,” Hall said, referring to committee chairman Rep. Bart Gordon (D-TN). “But I’m hopeful we’re going to get some of these things in there by the end of September” because if the process extends beyond that, he said, it would be hard to get anything done. “Some of these things” referred to his priorities for NASA: human spaceflight, a “balanced” science program (expressing concern about an outsized increase in Earth sciences funding), and aeronautics research. For human spaceflight Hall indicated his support for Constellation, which he said “would have provide a logical job transition path for workers coming off the Space Shuttle contracts, and kept the faith with international partners.”

Hall didn’t indicate in his remarks his opinion of the Senate bill, but one key House member endorsed the bill on Thursday. “I applaud the Senate Commerce Committee for reporting out a NASA authorization bill that embraces our compromise proposal on exploration,” said Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), ranking member of the Commerce, Justice, and Science subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, in a post on The Hill’s Congress Blog. The “compromise proposal” he refers to is a letter he and about 60 other members of the House signed last month, asking President Obama to begin the immediate development of a heavy-lift launch vehicle.

Wolf’s subcommittee, when it took an up an appropriations bill late last month, elected not to take a stand and defer to authorizers on the future direction of NASA’s human spaceflight plans. “I hope the House Science Committee will similarly adopt this compromise and consider its authorization bill,” Wolf wrote yesterday. “As ranking member on the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice and Science, I believe it’s important for the authorizers to signal their support so that we can enshrine this new policy in the fiscal year 2011 appropriations bill.”

In the end, this morning’s markup was short and sweet, full on self-congratulation and lacking any debate or tension. The Senate Commerce Committee approved unanimously a NASA authorization bill that will “refocus and reinvigorate the agency in a smart, fiscally responsible way”, in the words of committee chairman Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV).

The committee did approve a number of amendments to the bill, although the contents of most of them were not discussed during the session. One amendment that the committee did approve was from Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM) that would authorize NASA’s Commercial Reusable Suborbital Research (CRuSR) program at the administration’s requested level of $15 million a year. It also approved an amendment from Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) that increased funding levels for technology programs. However, left off the list of amendments was one from Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) that would have restored funds to the commercial crew program to the level requested by the administration, as well as make other changes to the program. The full, amended text of the legislation hasn’t been released yet, but presumably should be in THOMAS in the next couple of days.

Members of the committee from both sides of the aisle praised the bill. “This legislation approved today represents a strong balance between the need for investment in new technology and the continued evolution of the commercial market to take an increasing role in supporting our efforts in low Earth orbit,” Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), ranking member of the committee, said. “The goal was to preserve U.S. leadership in space exploration and keep as much of the rocket-industry talent as possible employed,” Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL), chairman of the committee’s space subcommittee, said in a statement. The subcommittee’s ranking member, Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), played up the local benefits of the legislation, in particular the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans: “With this bipartisan bill, we’re not only going to start making the changes we need to save Michoud, we’re going to ensure these jobs stay in Louisiana and bring NASA back in line with its original mission as the world’s leader in manned space flight.”

Vitter was not the only one making a local connection in comments on the legislation. “In February, the President announced a plan which would have resulted in the end of our nation’s manned space flight program and Utah’s solid rocket motor industrial base,” said Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT). “Today, after six months of work, we have taken an important first step away from the abyss.” Sen. George LeMieux (R-FL) also sees the bill as a step away from death and despair: “What this bill does is take NASA off life support so it can prepare the shuttle for ‘launch on need’ and move ahead with the heavy lift rocket program and the next generation space vehicle by 2016, which is a big improvement compared to the Administration’s plan.”

The authorization bill goes to the full Senate, although it’s not clear when they will be willing to take it up. However, in the near term it appears that the legislation will serve as a model for appropriators: next week a subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee will mark up the FY11 Commerce, Justice, and Science appropriations bill. The chair of that subcommittee, Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), “I think likes what we’re doing,” Rockefeller said near the end of the markup. Afterwards Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), ranking member of that subcommittee, indicated his support, at least in general, to the authorization bill, calling it “a good first step in the legislative process” but noting that appropriators like him “will determine the ultimate outcome”.

However, commercial space supporters in the Commerce committee hinted that they may make another effort to restore funding for commercial crew when the authorization bill is taken up by the full Senate. “As we move to the floor, I’m going to be teaming up with some colleagues who would like to see a little more done on the commercial side, so we’ll all work together and maybe we can get that done,” Sen. Boxer said during the markup. “I know it’s been a challenging process, I know the Administration has been working with us and others as well who are advocates of commercial space, and I think there may be even more room to go,” said Sen. Warner.

There are at least two proposed amendments to the NASA authorization bill that the Senate Commerce Committee will take up that would address some commercial space issues. One, submitted by Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), would restore funding for the commercial crew program to the levels in the administration’s proposal. The funds would come from the crew capsule and the “Space Launch System” in the bill; the legislation would also make some other tweaks to the language in the bill, primarily about the commercial crew program as well as explicitly putting the crew capsule out for competition (instead of merely “pursue” development of it).

Commercial space advocates like the Space Frontier Foundation are sounding the alarm about the bill and endorsing the Warner amendment. “Does the US Senate want to preserve a few thousand politically important, government funded jobs for a few more years, or would it rather stimulate the creation of millions of new private sector jobs that will last into the 22nd century?” the organization asks.

A separate amendment, by Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM), is more narrowly focused on suborbital programs. It would explicitly authorize full funding—$15 million a year—for the Commercial Reusable Suborbital Research (CRuSR) program. The bill actually does have supportive language for suborbital research, including the use of “suborbital reusable vehicles, and commercial launch vehicles” among other platforms for conducting such research, but only authorizes “such sums as may be necessary” to carry out the overall suborbital research program.

In late May NASA reassigned Constellation program manager Jeff Hanley, a decision most people first heard about during a House Science and Technology Committee hearing featuring administrator Charles Bolden. That decision triggered a strong reaction among some members of Congress who considered the move a form of retribution against a manager who opposed the agency’s plans to end Constellation. Two key senators, Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), the chair and ranking member respectively of the Senate Commerce Committee, went so far as to request an investigation by the NASA Office of the Inspector General (OIG) regarding “whether his removal as program manager was related to Mr. Hanley’s well-publicized efforts to preserve the Constellation Program.”

The OIG did conduct an investigation and, in a letter to Sens. Rockefeller and Hutchison on Tuesday, Inspector General Paul Martin reported no evidence of wrongdoing by the agency in its decision to reassign Hanley to a newly-created position at the Johnson Space Center. The reassignment, Martin said, was “a management decision” after Hanley “sent a series of e-mails to senior NASA officials that caused them to conclude that he could not effectively lead Constellation” during the program’s current political turmoil. In addition, Hanley himself “does not claim he was retaliated against”, and the OIG “uncovered no evidence of unlawful reprisal.” The reassignment, the letter added, did not “foreclose Congress’s ability to consider meaningful alternatives” to the FY11 budget proposal, echoing language in the original letter by the senators.

The seven-page letter provides a detailed chronology of events that led up to Hanley’s May 26th reassignment. In particular, we learn that Bolden considered removing Hanley from his position as Constellation manager almost a month earlier, in response to an email Hanley sent Bolden after the administrator spoke at JSC. In the email Hanley was sharply critical of the decision to cancel Constellation: “…to hear NASA leadership and administration officials further spread the spin and accusations of others without giving us a chance to rebutt [sic] or respond, does not align with the core values you recited to us today.” Bolden told the OIG that in “normal circumstances” he would have reassigned Hanley, but instead chose at the time to keep him in place, chalking up the email to frustration. Hanley was warned, but on May 18 wrote another email, this one to Doug Cooke, the associate administrator for exploration, criticizing the agency’s position on termination liability as “untenable”. A day later, according to the OIG, Cooke met with Bolden and both agreed that Hanley needed to be reassigned.