By Jeff Foust on 2014 April 16 at 7:10 am ET The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released on Tuesday its annual assessment of “large-scale” NASA projects. The good news of the report was that NASA, by and large, is doing well in terms of cost and schedule performance of its major programs: an average cost growth of 3% and launch delay of 2.8 months for 14 selected programs in their implementation phase, compared to average cost growth of 3.9% and launch delay of 4.0 months in 2013. Those figures exclude the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST); when included, the average cost growth in the 2014 report rises to 37.8% and the average launch delay to 6.6 months given that large program’s major overruns. However, the averages with JWST included are still an improvement over 2013.
Prior to the report’s release, NASA officials had been emphasizing the good performance they were seeing on most of their missions. “More and more the last few years, our missions are coming in on schedule and on budget,” said Craig Tupper, director of the resources management division of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD), in a briefing to the NASA Advisory Council (NAC) science committee last week. “That certainly helps us to maintain stability in the program.”
There are, though, a few problems with the portfolio of NASA programs. The GAO report flagged the Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) mission, whose cost has increased by at least 15 percent. That’s triggered a review and replan of the mission, which will likely miss its planned May 2017 launch date. “That 556 number is going to go up a lot,” Tupper warned at the NAC meeting, referring to the original estimated development cost of the spacecraft of $556 million.
The problem with ICESat-2 is due to a “very challenging instrument development,” said Peg Luce, deputy director of the earth science division of NASA SMD, later at the same meeting. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, which is developing the spacecraft’s sole instrument is putting the “cream of the crop in in-house instrument development” on the program to get the laser altimeter instrument on track. The revised plan for the mission will be presented to NASA’s Program Management Council at the end of May, she said.
Potentially bigger issues than the overrun on ICESat-2, through, are uncertainties about much larger programs. The GAO report notes that nearly three quarters of the overall budget for major programs currently belongs to only four programs: JWST, the Space Launch System (SLS), Orion, and Commercial Crew. “Any cost or schedule overrun on NASA’s largest, most complex projects could have a ripple effect on the portfolio and has the potential to postpone or even cancel altogether projects in earlier development stages,” the report warns.
The GAO is particularly concerned that, based on where these largest programs currently are, the risk for overruns is high. “JWST will soon enter integration and testing—the point at which cost growth and schedule delays are most likely,” the report states. “Additionally, there are questions about the realism of the SLS and Orion cost estimates.” SLS and Orion aren’t included in the cost and schedule figures above because the programs are still in their formulation phase, although NASA officials have stated that—at least for now—those programs remain on track.
By Jeff Foust on 2014 April 15 at 8:06 am ET Largely overlooked last week in the hubbub about hearings on the NASA budget proposal, a new NASA authorization bill, and relations with Russia was a move by a Senate committee on Wednesday to approve legislation to adjust the commercial launch licensing system for reusable suborbital vehicles.
S. 2140, introduced last month by Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) with several bipartisan co-sponsors, would allow suborbital RLVs to hold both an experimental permit and a launch license. Under current law, vehicles that hold an experimental permit—which allows for test, but not revenue-generating, flights—have to surrender that permit when receiving a full-fledged launch license.
Some in the industry sought the ability to retain less-restrictive permits so they could be used for test flights, while using the license for commercial flights. “I think anybody who is building multiple vehicles over time will want to have, at different times, those vehicles on a permit and operating under a license,” Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides said in a luncheon talk at the Goddard Memorial Symposium outside Washington, DC, last month.
What the Senate Commerce Committee approved without discussion, as part of a basket of other bills, was an amended version of S.2140 offered by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), one of the bill’s original co-sponsors, that achieves the same aim, with minor changes to the language of the section.
“Innovative industries like commercial spaceflight are advancing rapidly, and we can’t allow outdated laws to stifle progress. Unfortunately that’s exactly what’s happening,” Rubio said in a statement. “These laws did not anticipate what commercial companies are now doing with vehicle testing and commercial spaceflights, and therefore have caused progress to slow.” (It’s worth noting that the “outdated” law amended by this bill is less than ten years old: the ability of the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation to issue experimental permits was established with the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act, passed in late 2004.)
Rubio’s statement also included a word of thanks from Whitesides. “This legislation addresses a technical issue that will help the commercial spaceflight industry develop and deploy reusable space vehicles quickly and safely,” he said.
By Jeff Foust on 2014 April 11 at 6:47 pm ET The news last week that NASA was cutting off cooperation with the Russian government—with the very large exception of International Space Station (ISS) operations—attracted a lot of attention in the space industry and the general public, which continues to the present. “NASA is cutting ties with Russia. But it’s not that simple,” reads the headline of a Washington Post article today. That headline is partially correct: it’s not that simple because NASA isn’t cutting ties with Russia. In fact, the ban on cooperation is now so riddled with holes that it actually bans very little.
In testimony before the House Appropriations Committee’s Commerce, Justice, and Science subcommittee on Tuesday, NASA administrator Charles Bolden said there were exemptions in addition to the one for ISS operations. “On a case-by-case basis, we get an activity exempted from any prohibition” through an interagency review process, he said. Exemptions at time of the hearing, he said, cover the COSPAR meeting in Moscow in August, a Russian instrument on the Mars Curiosity rover, and three different, unnamed activities for which exemptions had been requested.
At a meeting Wednesday afternoon of the NASA Advisory Council’s space committee, NASA officials said additional activities done in cooperation with the Russians had been exempted form the ban. Paul Hertz, director of NASA’s astrophysics division, said that a joint activity to make mirrors for the Spektr-RG (or Spectrum-X-Gamma) mission has been exempted. NASA associate administrator of science John Grunsfeld said that the only joint activity between NASA and the Russian government in science that had not been exempted was a joint science definition team for Russia’s Venera-D mission. “We’re still asking the question,” he said of efforts to get it exempted.
So what’s left? A NASA spokesperson told Space News that a few other activities were affected by the ban, including a meeting about a Siberian earth sciences project and testing of an aircraft model in a Russian wind tunnel.
That lack of substance to the policy didn’t stop one individual from criticizing in at a Senate hearing Wednesday. “I support well targeted sanctions on Russia that will have a direct impact on President Putin’s thinking,” said Susan Eisenhower, chairman emeritus of the Eisenhower Institute and granddaughter of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. However, she added, “I believe that rolling back space cooperation could be counterproductive and damaging to our national security and our long-term space agenda.”
Those reasons, she said, include the argument that national security is enhanced by cooperation, that the ban could backfire by alienating those in Russia who are friendly to the US while strengthening hardliners, and that the safety of human spaceflight depends on trust. “It is already easier to terminate space cooperation than it is to get it started again,” she said. “We will not be able to meet our long-term goals in space without it.”
By Jeff Foust on 2014 April 9 at 10:10 am ET The House Science Committee’s space subcommittee quickly approved an amended version of HR 4412 during a markup session this morning that lasted less than half an hour. Instead of the bill text as filed, the subcommittee adopted an amendment in the nature of a substitute with several changes to the bill introduced earlier this week.
The revised bill amends the provision in the new bill requiring NASA to develop an exploration roadmap, requiring such a report 180 days after the bill’s enactment (instead of one year as previously.) The bill includes a new section on the Commercial Crew program, specifying that “safety is the highest priority” in the selection of new contracts for the program, as well as an independent cost and schedule estimate due to Congress 30 days after the new contracts are awarded.
The amended bill no longer bars NASA from spending money on its Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM). It does, though, require a report within 180 days of enactment on budget and schedule for the mission, as well as what technologies the ARM will use that can also be used for Mars “which could not be gained by lunar missions.” Added to the amended bill is a provision requiring a report within 60 days on the Mars 2021 flyby mission concept proposed by Inspiration Mars, to be followed by an assessment “of whether the proposal for a Mars Flyby Mission to be launched in 2021 is in the strategic interests of the United States in space exploration.”
On termination liability, the amended bill prohibits reserving funds for termination liability for covered programs (SLS, Orion, JWST, and ISS) and requires NASA to give 12 months notice before NASA could terminate those programs either for cause or for convenience [corrected to reflect language in the bill].
Unlike last year’s contentious, partisan debate, subcommittee and full committee leadership of both parties praised the bipartisan nature of this revised bill. “The bill and amendment for subcommittee this morning reflect a true bipartisan agreement,” Rep. Steven Palazzo (R-MS), chairman of the space subcommittee. “The ranking member and I don’t always see eye-to-eye, but the provisions contained in this agreement are a testament that Republicans and Democrats can work together in an effective manner for the good of the nation.”
The only sour note to the bipartisan harmony was from full committee vice-chairman Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), who said that while he supported the bill overall, he disagreed with the long-term goal of the exploration roadmap of sending humans to Mars. “I believe it is an expensive folly to tie the American government’s space program so closely to the goal of putting human beings on Mars,” he said. “The odds are too great that this will result in a huge waste of very limited resources that could be spent on goals that are much more certain and much more beneficial to our people today. When one tried to cross a bridge too far, somebody’s going to get soaked.”
By Jeff Foust on 2014 April 9 at 7:33 am ET At 9 am today, the space subcommittee of the House Science Committee will mark up a new version of a NASA authorization bill, formally introduced earlier this week. The new bill, HR 4412, is very similar to the bill the Science Committee marked up last summer, HR 2687, a bill that generated unusually strong partisan divisions. There are some differences, though, between the two bills, and some of the major ones are summarized below:
- Unlike last year’s bill, which authorized spending for two years (fiscal years 2014 and 2015), the new bill covers only one year—fiscal year 2014. Yes, this bill authorizes spending that was already appropriated three months ago. Needless to say, the authorization and appropriated funding levels match up.
- As in the case with last year’s bill, the new bill blocks NASA from spending money on its “Asteroid Retrieval Mission” (which NASA has been calling the “Asteroid Redirect Mission” since last summer) until it completes a number of reports. The new bill requires that those reports also assess the technologies that ARM provides to support planetary defense applications.
- The bill includes language addressing the reservations of funds for termination liability, as in the previous bill, but with some changes. The old bill stated that NASA “shall direct prime contractors not to reserve funds,” while the new bill states that NASA will not “require the reservation of funds by the prime contractor.” The new bill also directs that funds already reserved for termination liability “be promptly used to make maximum progress” for those programs (SLS, Orion, ISS, and JWST) and notify Congress 120 days before initiating the termination of a contract for convenience of cause. The older bill expressly prohibited NASA from terminating contracts for convenience for covered programs.
- Section 215, which in the original bill required the next phase of NASA’s commercial crew program to be “under a cost-type contract”, now deals with Aerospace Safety Advisory Council (ASAP) advice, requiring NASA to report on advice provided by ASAP that it plans to follow or not, and why. That matches an amendment to the bill made during the markup to the earlier bill last July.
- Section 711 of the original bill, which established a fixed six-year term for the NASA administrator, is not in the new bill.
- The new bill contains two new sections, 305 and 502, that require NASA to use the ISS and related commercial services for science and technology demonstration missions “wherever it is practical and cost effective to do so.”
- The section of the bill covering Space Act Agreements, which originally specified that any such agreement be used when standard contracts or other instruments are “not feasible or appropriate”, now refers only to funded Space Act Agreements.
- A provision in the original bill that provided a five-year extension of commercial launch indemnification has been removed, as Congress already passed a three-year extension.
- Language in several places in the earlier bill about cooperation with international partners is expanded in the new bill to include commercial partners and other not-for-profit partners.
- The new bill includes, in section 203, a requirement for NASA to conduct a naming competition for the SLS and the overall “deep space human exploration program.”
By Jeff Foust on 2014 April 8 at 7:30 pm ET NASA administrator Charles Bolden appeared before the Commerce, Justice, and Science (CJS) subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee in a hearing about NASA’s fiscal year 2015 budget request Tuesday morning—and into the afternoon as well, as the hearing, which started at 9:30 am, didn’t wrap up until about 1 pm. The first part of the hearing, lasting more than an hour, went into a report on NASA security issues, but that still left more than two hours to go into various budgetary and other policy issues, with the debate between committee members and Bolden getting heated at times. Some of the key issues discussed:
Commercial Crew: As in past hearings and other appearances, Bolden emphasized the need for the commercial crew program to be fully funded—$848 million—in the administration’s 2015 budget request in order to keep the program on schedule to begin flights in 2017. “If we don’t get the finding that we requested, we’re going to slip again,” he said, referring to earlier slips in the program that Bolden blamed on Congress not fully funding the program.
On that last point, subcommittee chairman Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) took issue. “I think you’ve misled people,” Wolf said. “Congress has provided a lot of funding for commercial crew, particularly once you take into account the larger fiscal situation. There’s never been a year that it was zero,” he said. “The appropriation has been at or above the authorized level in all the years but one.”
“I’m not sure where the [committee] staff says that you’ve given us more than we’ve asked. That’s just inaccurate.” Bolden responded, who appeared to take Wolf’s criticism personally. “Every time I come here, my integrity is impugned,” he said. “I am tired of having my integrity impugned by members of the committee and the staff.”
The squabble between Wolf and Bolden appeared to be based on a misunderstanding: Wolf was referring to figures in the NASA authorization act of 2010, which authorized $312 million for commercial crew in 2011 and $500 million in 2012 and 2013; Bolden was referring to the figures in the administration’s budget request, which have been much higher in recent years and not fully funded by Congress, but were on or close to the authorized amounts in 2011 and 2013 (pre-sequester), but fell about $100 million short in 2012.
A little later in the hearing, Bolden expressed his regrets for the outburst. “Mr. Chairman, I apologize for losing my temper,” he said. “I get hot sometimes and I think I misunderstood you.”
Later in the hearing, Bolden said he couldn’t go into details about the ongoing competition for commercial crew because of the procurement “blackout” that will last under contracts are awarded in August. While three companies currently have funded commercial crew awards—Boeing, Sierra Nevada, and SpaceX—he professed ignorance as to who would be competing.
“I don’t know who the providers are, I don’t know what platform they’re planning to use,” he said. “Sierra Nevada, I hope, is one. Sierra Nevada, to my knowledge, is not using Russian engines.” When Rep. John Culberson said that both Sierra Nevada and Boeing are using the Atlas V, powered by a Russian-built RD-180 engine, Bolden responded, “I didn’t know that.”
Relations with Russia: The current state of Russian relations, particularly in light of a memo last week breaking off cooperation between NASA and the Russian government with the exception of ISS, also came up in the hearing. Bolden said that, despite the new policy, relations with Roscosmos are doing well. Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD) asked about contingency plans for the ISS in the event relations worsen. “The contingency for what you’re addressing is maintaining the relationship,” Bolden responded, blaming the “alarmist” media in both the US and Russia for misreporting that the ban covered all NASA cooperation with Russia. “When [Roscosmos director Oleg] Ostapenko and I talked [last week], he was very comforted that our relationship had not been broken, had not changed.”
Indeed, later in the hearing, Bolden suggested that there was a growing number of exceptions to the policy suspending cooperation NASA cooperation with the Russian government. “On a case-by-case basis, we get an activity excepted from any prohibition of cooperation,” he said, through the use of an interagency review process. In addition to the original exception for ISS operations, Bolden said there are now exceptions covering NASA participating in the COSPAR conference being held in Moscow in August, as well as a Russian-provided instrument on NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover, with exceptions for three other activities currently under consideration. “They are lesser types of projects, or projects in the making, that haven’t started yet,” he said of the unnamed projects. It wasn’t clear, from those comments, exactly what was blocked from cooperation now.
SOFIA: Rep. Mike Honda (D-CA), whose district is adjacent to includes part of NASA’s Ames Research Center, questioned Bolden about the decision to cut funding for the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) airborne observatory, a program run out of Ames. [A spokesman for Rep. Honda noted Wednesday that part of Ames/Moffett Federal Airfield is just inside the boundaries of his district.] “What specific scientific and technical review and analysis was performed during the FY15 budget formulation process to support the proposal to cancel SOFIA?”
Bolden said the plans to mothball SOFIA are still a “proposal,” and that a joint task force of NASA and the German space agency DLR were still reviewing options, with a report from them due by the end of this month. “We have not made the final determination that SOFIA will be put into mothballs,” he said. “We are still looking for ways to save SOFIA.”
“Your response is appreciated, but not sufficient in my mind,” Honda responded. Bolden said later that, if science from SOFIA was sufficiently compelling, “my guess is that there will be people standing in line to add their funds to maintaining SOFIA.”
Planetary Science: As in recent years, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), whose district includes JPL, questioned the level of funding for planetary science in NASA’s budget, including extended mission funding as well as the Mars 2020 flagship mission. “I’m concerned about the profile for this mission,” he said of Mars 2020, “which is backloaded, as well as repeated disquieting rumors I’ve been hearing regarding slipping the launch date to 2022.”
Bolden said Mars 2020 was on schedule. “Hopefully everyone will tell you that the 2015 budget does support Mars 2020 in 2020,” he said. As for extended mission funding, in particular missions like Opportunity and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, Bolden offered partial support for such funding. “I think extended missions are great until they start to jeopardize the ability to fly new missions,” he said. “The totality of our extended missions today is keeping us from being able to do some of the exciting things that we would really like to do.”
Asteroid Redirect Mission: Rep. Wolf raised questions about the support there was for NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM). “The mission does not seem to have captured the imaginations among Congress or the American public,” he said, adding that he understood House authorizers, in their new draft bill, would prohibit spending on the mission.
Later in the hearing, Culberson brought up criticism of ARM brought up last year by Steve Squyres, the planetary scientist who chairs the NASA Advisory Council. “The asteroid retrieval mission, as Chairman Wolf has said, is just not generating–”
Bolden interrupted. “Mr. Culberson, quite the contrary,” he said, saying that Squyres’s comments are from last year. “I think if you brought Steve Squyres in here today, he would say something different to you.”
SLS/Orion: Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-AL) pressed Bolden on funding for the Space Launch System (SLS) heavy-lift rocket and Orion spacecraft, which in the FY15 budget request is below the levels in the FY14 final appropriations bill. “There is some concern that OMB and OSTP may be out of step with most Americans about the fact that Americans want the United States to lead the world in human exploration of space beyond low Earth orbit,” he said. He asked Bolden if it would make sense downselect to a single commercial crew provider, thus requiring less money, and using that funds instead for SLS and Orion to keep them on schedule.
Bolden’s answer was succinct: “No, sir.” He again emphasized that commercial crew required full funding to be on schedule for 2017, while SLS and Orion are being managed to be ready together in 2017. “My advice to this committee, and all committees, has been to allow me the flexibility to spend as necessary such that SLS and Orion get to the finish line together. If I had finished SLS in 2013, I would have parked it in a barn somewhere because I have no crew vehicle to put on it.”
Before asking for that flexibility, he had another, more general plea for appropriators. “We’ve got to start talking to each other and understanding why you pay me to do what you pay me to do.” At the end of today’s hearing, there was plenty of talking, but perhaps not as much understanding.
By Jeff Foust on 2014 April 8 at 6:24 am ET While the White House proposed a fiscal year 2015 budget that cut NASA by about one percent over 2014, the chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee said Monday she will try to change that.
“My goal for NASA is to make sure we’re at least at the 2014 level,” said Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) in a speech Monday at the Maryland Space Business Roundtable at the University of Maryland, Space News reported. She added that she would try to even increase NASA’s budget above the $17.65 billion it received in fiscal year 2014, if the funding could be found.
Mikulski, in reports about the speech, wasn’t specific about what programs she thought needed that additional funding she promised. She spoke about the James Webb Space Telescope, but that program was fully funded in the request. She also, SpacePolicyOnline reported, supported the administration’s decision to seek an extension of International Space Station operations to at least 2024, and noted the cargo missions to the station launched by Orbital Sciences Corporation from Wallops Island, Virginia. She was “noncommittal” about the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), the airborne observatory whose funding was cut in the budget proposal, telling Space News that “we’re doing our diligence” on the project.
Mikulski’s committee is not scheduled to hold a hearing on NASA’s budget request until May 1, when NASA administrator Charles Bolden is slated to testify before the committee’s Commerce, Justice, and Science (CJS) subcommittee, also chaired by Mikulski. However, later this morning, Bolden will appear before the House Appropriations Committee’s CJS subcommittee at 9:30 am, testifying about NASA’s FY15 budget proposal as well as “oversight of NASA security”, a hot topic for CJS subcommittee chairman Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA).
By Jeff Foust on 2014 April 5 at 11:53 am ET The week of April 7 is shaping up to be an unusually busy one for space policy, with no fewer than four hearings on various aspects of civil and commercial space, including markups of two bills.
On Tuesday, April 8, the House Appropriations Committee’s Commerce, Justice, and Science (CJS) subcommittee is holding a hearing on NASA’s fiscal year 2015 budget proposal at 9:30 am. The hearing also includes a mention of “oversight of NASA security” with former attorney general Richard Thornburgh joining NASA administrator Charles Bolden as witnesses. That’s a reference to an independent report chaired by Thornburgh that Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), chairman of the CJS subcommittee, used to criticize NASA for a poor “persistent organizational culture.”
On Wednesday, April 9, at 9 am, the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee will hold a markup session on a new draft of a NASA authorization act. Details about the bill, and how it might differ from an authorization bill the committee approved last July, aren’t yet available. The markup session will likely be brief: another Science Committee subcommittee has a hearing scheduled for the same room at 10 am.
On the other side of Capitol Hill, the Senate Commerce Committee’s space subcommittee will hold a hearing Wednesday at 10 am on “From Here to Mars”. The hearing features a mix of witnesses broadly discussing NASA’s exploration plans and issues with international and commercial cooperation. NASA associate administrator Bill Gerstenmaier will testify, along with Susan Eisenhower, chairman emeritus of the Eisenhower Institute; former astronaut Leroy Chiao; and NanoRacks managing director Jeffrey Manber.
That afternoon, the full Senate Commerce Committee will convene to consider a batch of bills and nominations. Among the legislation up for consideration is S. 2140, a bill introduced in March by Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) that would allow commercial suborbital launch providers to simultaneously hold both a launch license and an experimental permit. Currently, a company that receives a launch license has to surrender any experimental permit it holds for that vehicles, but companies like Virgin Galactic have argued that they should be able to retain their permits for use on test flights. Sens. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Tom Udall (D-NM) are original cosponsors of the bill, and Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Roger Wicker (R-MS) have signed on since then.
By Jeff Foust on 2014 April 4 at 9:32 am ET More than a day after NASA announced its suspension of “the majority” of its cooperative activities with Russia, excluding the ISS, many in the space community were still not clear exactly what that ban covered, and also how it originated. Comments by NASA and other administration officials Thursday didn’t necessarily make things clearer.
“What’s the status with [the space] station? It’s the same as it was when I testified before Congress,” NASA administrator Charles Bolden said at a joint meeting of the Space Studies Board (SSB) and Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board (ASEB) in Washington Thursday morning. He was referring to his appearance before the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee last week, when he said the relationship with the Russian space agency Roscosmos was good. “The relationship between NASA and Roscosmos is good, it is healthy,” Bolden said at the SSB/ASEB meeting.
Bolden added that he had spoken to his counterpart, Roscosmos head Oleg Ostapenko, just an hour earlier; Ostapenko was in Kourou, French Guiana, for the Soyuz launch of a European earth sciences satellite. “Right now, Mr. Ostapenko is just as concerned as I am that the politicians don’t take things and spin them out of control,” Bolden said. “There are as many people over in Moscow as we have here in Washington, DC, who would see nothing better than to bring the International Space Station into the discussion on what’s going on in Ukraine, and it should not be.”
NASA’s suspension of non-ISS Russian cooperation, which includes NASA travel to Russia, raised the question about whether NASA would be able to participate in the annual meeting of the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR), taking place this August in Moscow. “I don’t know” if COSPAR will be affected by the new policy, Bolden said, but suggested that because it is an international meeting, it might be possible for NASA to still participate. “My advice is, if you’re planning to go to COSPAR, plan to go to COSPAR,” he said. “My instructions to my team is, unless I tell you otherwise, don’t stop doing anything that you’re doing.”
Later at the SSB/ASEB, board members asked Richard DalBello of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) about the ban and its implications. DalBello deferred to the official administration answer that was given by White House Press Secretary Jay Carney a little earlier in the afternoon, but offered his own “draft” insights. “Agencies have been asked to look, on a case-by-case basis, at their interactions with Russia,” he said, emphasizing that the ISS was exempted from the suspension in NASA-Russia space cooperation. “This is very much an evolving situation, and we’re trying to be prudent about that.” He added that press reports that NASA had “severed all ties with Russia” are “simply not correct.”
At that White House press conference, Carney did not provide much additional detail. “We’ve talked about this previously, and as we’ve already said, we have suspended bilateral discussions with Russia on trade and investment; we have suspended other bilateral meetings on a case-by-case basis and put on hold U.S.-Russia military-to-military engagement, including exercises, bilateral meetings, port visits and planning conferences,” he said when asked specifically about NASA.
“And in terms of the specific case-by-case decisions that are made in response to this broader directive,” Carney continued, “I would have to refer you to each agency. In the case of NASA, there are some actions being taken, but obviously with the space station, in particular, that program and the engagement with Russia on that program continues.”
Meanwhile, a State Department spokesperson made it clear that they did not direct NASA to stop cooperation with Russia. “I know there were some erroneous reports yesterday that the State Department had told them to do so,” said deputy spokesperson Marie Harf. “As much as I would love to give direction to NASA, we don’t do that.” She, too, deferred to NASA for more details about the suspension in non-ISS cooperation.
By Jeff Foust on 2014 April 3 at 11:23 pm ET The crisis in US-Russian space relations may be the current top story in space policy, but it’s not preventing debates about over topics, notably, where humans should go beyond Earth orbit.
That debate flared up Thursday when NASA administrator Charles Bolden appeared before a joint meeting of the Space Studies Board (SSB) and Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board (ASEB) in Washington. Bolden discussed a wide variety of topics in a discussion lasting more than an hour, including plans for human space exploration. He likened the free-return trajectory that helped save the crew of Apollo 13 to Inspiration Mars, whose 2021 mission architecture includes flybys of Venus and Mars by a crewed spacecraft.
“That doesn’t demonstrate anything,” Bolden said, “and I don’t think that’s an inspirational mission, if you to ask me, because it doesn’t help us to get humans to Mars.” In that context, Bolden was referring to sending humans to the surface of Mars, something he said he believed was possible by 2035. (Later in the meeting, NASA associate administrator for human exploration and operations Bill Gerstenmaier said it would be “really tough” to meet a 2035 goal of landing humans on Mars.)
“It is a one-time feat,” Bolden added about Inspiration Mars, “and where are we in terms of putting humans on Mars? No closer.”
Late Thursday, the House Science Committee issued a statement from committee chairman Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), who has been the most outspoken member of Congress in support of the Mars 2021 mission concept. Bolden’s comments at the SSB/ASEB meeting, Smith said, were “factually incorrect” regarding Mars 2021. “Experts have testified that a Mars Flyby mission would utilize the Space Launch System, architecture that will be central to a Mars landing,” Smith stated.
Smith went on to criticize the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM), which Bolden has said at the meeting was a better near-term approach to human spaceflight. “The ARM mission lacks support from the stakeholder community and NASA’s own advisory bodies. It is a mission without a realistic budget, without a destination and without a certain launch date,” Smith said, echoing comments he made at two hearings last week. “I urge the Administrator to get his facts straight when comparing the value of potential NASA missions.”
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