By Jeff Foust on 2010 May 9 at 11:02 am ET At the Utah Republican Party convention in Salt Lake City yesterday, delegates effectively ousted Sen. Robert Bennett, failing to nominate him for a fourth term. Bennett didn’t make it past the second round of balloting, which ended with two candidates, Tim Bridgewater and Mike Lee, selected to face off in a primary next month. The convention all but ends Bennett’s political career, unless he attempts a write-in campaign, something he has not explicitly ruled out but currently appears unlikely.
Given Utah’s demographics, whomever wins that June 22 GOP primary will likely win the general election in November. So how do Bridgewater and Lee stack up on space policy compared to Bennett, who sharply criticized NASA’s plans to cancel the Ares launch vehicles—which could lead to the loss of hundreds or thousands of jobs at ATK’s Utah facilities—during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing last month? The two candidates haven’t touched on this much yet. Lee doesn’t mention space on the issues page of his web site. Bridgewater, though, does answer the question of whether he supports the president’s plan “for the privatization of NASA” in the negative. “The same rockets that send a man to the moon could send a missile across the world to defend our nation,” he claims (bringing visions of a Saturn 5 or Ares 5 being repurposed as an ICBM). “NASA plays a vital role in the security of our nation and the strength of our military.”
By Jeff Foust on 2010 May 7 at 1:10 pm ET The full Senate Commerce Committee (and not just the space subcommittee) is planning a hearing next Wednesday afternoon on “The Future of U.S. Human Space Flight”. A witness list has not been posted yet, but MSNBC’s Jay Barbree claims that Neil Armstrong and/or Eugene Cernan “may” testify. NASA administrator Charles Bolden, perhaps with other senior agency officials or presidential science advisor John Holdren, are likely witnesses as well.
If former NASA administrator Mike Griffin doesn’t make the list, don’t worry: he’s had another recent opportunity to express his thoughts on NASA’s plans in a speech earlier this week in Seattle. According to an account by Examiner.com, he complained about “considerable other drivel in the president’s proposals” and asked people to contact Congress “using actual paper letters signed in ink” to express their support Constellation and the Vision for Space Exploration. And about the Vision? He called it “the best space policy we’ve had since John Kennedy,” adding, “some things are good ideas even if President Bush thought so.”
By Jeff Foust on 2010 May 7 at 12:56 pm ET It’s always interesting how different people can look at the same situation and see things very differently. For example, yesterday the Orlando Sentinel reported that the White House’s NASA plans “appear in jeopardy” because of the lack of overt, or at least outspoken, support from members of Congress. “Few Democrats have publicly endorsed the entire plan,” the article notes, “while opponents such as Alabama Republican Sen. Richard Shelby, who looks after the interests of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, continue to blast the proposal as ‘unrealistic’ and ‘destructive.'” Later, they argue that it may not be in immediate jeopardy so much as in limbo, with a definitive outcome one way or another unlikely before the end of the year.
However. writing for MSNBC.com, Jay Barbree instead sees that a “consensus is beginning to build in support of the revised plan”. He claims that “the White House and Congress have been hammering out the details of a three-pronged plan for America’s future in space”, which apparently involve continued tests of an Ares 1 vehicle, as desired by Sen. Bill Nelson; commercial transport of crews to LEO; and robotic missions into the solar system (how the last item fits in isn’t clear; he may be thinking of robotic precursor missions highlighted in the budget proposals, but the examples he gives are all Science Mission Directorate missions that predate the new plan by years.)
By Jeff Foust on 2010 May 7 at 7:35 am ET Yesterday Alliant Techsystems (ATK) released their fourth quarter and full-year financial results (the company operates on a fiscal year that ends on March 31; the company is right now in the first quarter of their 2011 fiscal year). The press release announcing the results made only a passing reference that “NASA programs present near-term challenges”, in the words of ATK president and CEO Mark DeYoung, but didn’t go into greater details. Company officials, though, did offer more details in a conference call with analysts yesterday morning.
A Wall Street Journal article about that call would leave one to indicate that Constellation will survive the budget battle in the coming months. “Its reassurances are the strongest and most public indication from inside a board room that President Barack Obama’s controversial proposal to partially replace the manned space program with commercial rockets and spacecraft is likely to flame out in Congress,” the article claims.
A closer examination of the call, though (a replay of which is available), suggests a more complex picture. Company CFO John Shroyer said they anticipated $500 million in revenue from NASA programs in their 2011 fiscal year: $100 million from shuttle and $400 million from Constellation. Half of that Constellation funding would come from NASA’s FY10 budget, and the rest from a continuing resolution (as it is highly unlikely the FY11 budget will be completed by the end of FY10) “or other solid propulsion work for NASA”. He added that about $1 billion of ATK’s $7 billion in contract backlog is associated with Constellation, but it was right now too soon for them to determine if they would have to “debook” some of that backlog.
DeYoung sees signs of change in Congress regarding the budget proposal, but didn’t necessarily indicate that meant a restoration of Ares 1. “There is growing support, I think, in Congress for support of a program which would sustain the US industrial base capability in solid propulsion and also sustain the heavy lift vehicle by accelerating the bridge on heavy lift that is in the president’s plan for 2017,” he said. (The president’s plan actually calls for a decision on heavy lift in 2015, not 2017.) He mentioned support for heavy-lift development in Congress, such an an effort last month by Sen. Bill Nelson to add a wedge in the Senate budget resolution for FY11 to cover continued heavy-lift development at NASA.
“It’s still in a state of flux. It’s still being worked,” he said, adding that the company has spoken with “the right kind of people” in DOD and NASA on solid rocket motor industrial base issues and that “I think we’re making good traction there, and we expect a bridge.” While such a “bridge” program might feature additional tests of Ares 1-like vehicles (as Nelson has stated in the past), DeYoung didn’t explicitly state that, nor mention Ares 1 much at all in the conference call.
Elsewhere in the conference call, DeYoung hinted that the company was getting ready to reposition itself to reflect a NASA plan a lot like the one that has been proposed. “We’re working tirelessly to secure a long-term role in the future of space exploration,” he said in his opening remarks. Part of that work is associated with solid rocket motor industrial base concerns, but “at the same time we’re taking steps to position ATK for a role in commercial space activities and emerging research and development programs,” both key elements of the FY11 NASA budget proposal.
By Jeff Foust on 2010 May 6 at 7:29 am ET The chair and ranking member of the space subcommittee of the House Science and Technology Committee, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) and Rep. Pete Olson (R-TX) respectively, are often on the same page when it comes to space issues. However, in a pair of op-eds published in The Hill yesterday, they have somewhat different opinions about the future of the administration’s revised human spaceflight plan for NASA.
Olson is clearly opposed to the plan, reiterating previous concerns about the plan and its affect on US space leadership. “The president acknowledged recently his initial proposal to alter NASA’s mission was dead on arrival in Congress,” he claimed (an assessment the White House would not likely agree with). “Unfortunately, his new vision isn’t much better.” Among other things, he’s critical of the space workforce task force formally established by the president earlier this week, saying it “discounts the important mission control team at Johnson Space Center in Texas and its historic role in human space flight”. (In fact, the task force’s charter allows it to examine workforce issues elsewhere, although the $40 million the president pledged is only for Florida.)
Olson, at the end of the op-ed, was pushing for a restoration of Constellation with “adequate resources”. “Several of my colleagues have joined with me in requesting that NASA find the means within their budget to continue Constellation,” he said.
Giffords, like Olson, is also concerned with many aspects of the president’s plan, noting that “the president’s budget did not offer a serious path to realizing those dreams” of human exploration beyond LEO. However, she doesn’t call for a complete restoration of Constellation. “We cannot continue to argue between the president’s plan and the status quo. There must be a third way,” she writes. That alternative approach would provide “assured access to the International Space Station on an American spacecraft” and also transfer those flights to the commercial sector “when it is mature and ready and demonstrably safe”. She acknowledges that a plan that does that and fits into the planned budget will be “challenging”, and she is working with her staff and fellow subcommittee members on this.
There’s one other key difference between Olson’s and Gifford’s op-eds. Olson, who described himself as “a proponent of returning to the moon”, took a full paragraph to explain why a human return there is important, for science and also preparation for later missions to Mars. Giffords, by comparison, says this at the end of her essay: “I have every expectation that our astronauts will make the first human trips to an asteroid, deep into space and ultimately to Mars.” She makes no mention of future human missions to the Moon.
By Jeff Foust on 2010 May 6 at 6:58 am ET House Appropriations Committee chairman Rep. David Obey (D-WI) surprised many when he announced Wednesday that he would not run for reelection, retiring from the House after 21 terms. Obey said he was “bone tired” after a career in Congress and wanted to leave on a high note, namely, passage of health care reform earlier this year. Cynics noted that Obey was in danger of losing his chairmanship (should Republicans take control of the House in the midterm elections) or even his seat (he was facing his strongest Republican challenger in years). The relevance to NASA is that Obey has been skeptical about funding human spaceflight; in 2006 he claimed that some members of Congress suffered from a case of “Mars fever” as it debated a spending bill that included NASA.
Last week businesspeople and others from the Huntsville area came to Washington to lobby Congress about Constellation; now, it’s Colorado’s turn. A 100-person delegation from Colorado will be in Washington next week to lobby for the state’s priorities, the Denver Post reported, including preserving the Orion spacecraft.
In an editorial today, the Houston Chronicle endorses efforts by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) for “reviving NASA”. The editorial is less about the specifics of Hutchison’s plan, including study of a shuttle extension, but the low-key, bipartisan approach she’s taken. Hutchison, the editorial states, has been “working quietly and patiently with Senate colleagues on both sides of the aisle, and from all parts of the country, to get things done for Texas.”
By Jeff Foust on 2010 May 5 at 8:33 pm ET Few people are more closely linked to Constellation than former astronaut Scott “Doc” Horowitz. He was supporting what was to become Ares 1/Orion as the “safe, simple, soon” option for human access to LEO first as a NASA astronaut, then as director of space transportation and exploration at ATK, and eventually associate administrator for exploration at NASA under Mike Griffin. It’s not surprising, then, that he’s critical of the administration’s decision to cancel Ares 1, a criticism that he outlined in detail today in an essay on the Mars Society web site.
Horowitz casts his essay as an effort to refute “myths” associated with Constellation, starting with the belief that the debate about Constellation is about “technical and programmatic issues”. Nonsense, he says: it is a “completely politically motivated” to “cancel the ‘Bush’ program and punish the states (Alabama, Texas) that ‘didn’t vote for us anyway'”. (He does not cite the source of that latter quote.) In particular he names NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver and officials at OSTP and OMB; he does not mention NASA administrator (and fellow former astronaut) Charles Bolden.
He also attacks claims that Constellation was “unsustainable”, criticizing the analysis last year by the Augustine Committee, which he described as “populated with as few people that know anything about real development programs as possible, and have agendas aligned with the desired outcome”. The problem with Constellation was not that it poorly run, he claims, but that it was underfunded. Moreover, he said, the administration “immediately reduce[d] the Constellation budget by 20% in the FY 2010 budget”. It’s not immediately clear what the basis is for that 20-percent cut: the FY10 budget proposal featured $3.5 billion for “Constellation Systems”; by comparison, the FY09 budget proposal, which contained just over $3 billion for Constellation, projected $3.25 billion for Constellation in FY10.
The third myth he addresses is that commercial is a superior option for transporting cargo to LEO. He argues that, in fact, Ares 1/Orion would be safer, could deliver cargo to ISS at a lower cost per kilogram (assuming six flights per year, a similar rate to planned CRS missions), and that commercial schedules have slipped. “While it is my hope that the ‘commercial’ providers will be able to reduce costs and stimulate the market place, to date there is no data to indicate that this is the case, and as I have learned over the years ‘hope is not a management tool,'” he states.
In conclusion, he says, “it has become obvious to me (and to Congress) that the leadership team at NASA has decided that they simply do not want to do Constellation, at any cost, and are willing to cede US leadership in space.” Constellation “is safer, more affordable, timelier, and making better progress towards our nation’s exploration goals, than this faith-based initiative ‘trajectory to nowhere’ the current administration is trying to sell us.”
By Jeff Foust on 2010 May 5 at 1:17 pm ET It’s a double dose of commentary from two members of Congress in today’s Washington Post and The Hill. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) and Rep. Suzanne Kosmas (D-FL) coauthored a letter to the editor in today’s Post in response to an earlier editorial by the paper that criticized human spaceflight in general, not just the administration’s revised plans for human space exploration. “We engage in manned exploration of space because it enhances quality of life on Earth through space-based research,” Hutchison and Kosmas argue, citing both spinoffs and the potential for future research on the ISS. The latter, they claim, is jeopardized by plans to retire the shuttle and also cancel Constellation. “A healthy and viable space station is critical to the emergence of the commercial space industry that the president’s proposal relies on,” they write. “If the space station is lost, the primary reason to send humans into space in the next decade will be lost.” They stop short, though, of explicitly calling for an extension of the shuttle or restoration of Constellation.
The two are also coauthors of an op-ed in The Hill about bipartisan concerns in Congress about the future of human spaceflight. In this longer piece, they offer more details about what they want to see: stretching out the remaining shuttle flights into 2011 or even 2012 while studying the future resupply needs of the station (a provision of the legislation they introduced in the House and Senate in March). They also call for a reconsideration of Constellation, in some undefined but revised form. “Simply put, combining a limited future shuttle capability with an evolutionary heavy lift vehicle or a rigorously reformed Constellation program would shrink the gap in our human space flight capabilities from both ends while reducing the risk to the space station,” they write. They also leave open “increased investment in commercial space activities” but only as “a redundant capability” to a government system. “We are confident,” they conclude, “we can find a bipartisan common ground on alternatives that represent a comprehensive space policy if the president and our colleagues will work with us.”
By Jeff Foust on 2010 May 5 at 8:00 am ET Last Friday the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) issued a draft report titled “National Security and the Commercial Space Sector”, with an emphasis on the commercial launch sector. The release of a draft report during a 90-minute event at CSIS’s offices in Washington was a little unusual for the organization, which usually waits until a final product is ready. One reason for the draft release is to solicit input from the public (through the end of this month), but also, according to David Berteau, director of the Defense-Industrial Initiatives Group at CSIS, because of the ongoing policy reviews by the administration and a desire “to contribute where we can to those, rather than wait until they’re finished and then we come along and follow behind and critique them.”
Because the report is still in a draft stage, Berteau said that they were still at the “findings” stage, and they had yet to make specific recommendations or other conclusions. The draft report primarily notes the relatively weak standing of the commercial launch industry in the United States and the need for a more robust launch industry to meet national needs. It also includes four options for supporting the launch industry. One is to “leverage” foreign launch providers through strategic partnerships with the US government, potentially for the launch of government satellites on these vehicles, as well as export control reform. A second option would be to encourage competition among US launch providers in an effort to lower prices and improve service. A third option would go in the opposite direction, with the US government taking a bigger role in the launch market, including “picking a winner” among domestic launch providers and/or providing direct subsidies to them. The fourth option would stimulate demand for launches, perhaps by launching more but smaller, less complex satellites and expand its use of commercial satellites, thus increasing demand for them.
The report is still very much a draft. In addition to the missing conclusions, there are other areas that are still rough around the edges: for example, for some reason SpaceX is spelled in many places of the report as “Space-X” and at least once as “Space X”. Interestingly, the section about enhancing demand for launches makes virtually no mention of NASA’s current contracts to purchase cargo resupply services for the International Space Station and its proposal to purchase commercial crew services, both which stimulate demand for launches by potentially a significant degree. “We did not anticipate the president’s budget decision, and had not incorporated that into our approach at all,” Berteau said at Friday’s event when asked about that. “I think from a market-driver point of view, there’s an impact. I don’t think we can quantify that.”
Separate from the draft nature of the report, though, are concerns by some that the report may not be a fair and impartial examination of the subject. They worry it may be part of an effort to drum up support for allowing the export of commercial satellites with US components to China for launch there, a goal of a group of satellite operators called the Coalition for Competitive Launchers. The spokesman for that group, former Sen. John Warner, who is also a counselor for CSIS, was in attendance at the event. Those concerns were not eased by opening remarks by CSIS president and CEO John Hamre, who comments focused mostly on revisiting the export control regime, particularly as it applies to China. He added that “the most reliable space booster for commercial launches is in China”, a claim that was challenged during the Q&A session later (the Atlas 5, at least nominally available commercially, has a longer record of successful launches—particularly when its predecessors are included—than the rather diverse Long March family of vehicles.)
Those concerns also surfaced in the Q&A session when someone asked whether the coalition, satellite operators, or others with an interest in the report’s conclusions helped fund the study. “There are contributors and sponsors who have multiple vested outcomes in the issue here, some of which are in direct competition with one another,” Berteau responded. “We face that in almost every issue that we undertake, but I stand quite firmly on both the independence of our assessment and particularly on the independence of our recommendations when we get to the end.”
Warner also briefly addressed the issue. “To the extent I’ve had involvement in this, I can tell you this team behind me was fully independent and had I ever got in their way, they’d have stiff-armed me and I know it,” he said.
By Jeff Foust on 2010 May 5 at 6:57 am ET Late Monday the White House issued a memo formally creating the “Task Force on Space Industry WorkForce and Economic Development”. (The memo itself did not appear on the White House web site until Tuesday, or at least very late Monday night.) As Florida Today reported Sunday, the task force will be co-chaired by NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, with participation by several other Cabinet secretaries and key officials. And, if anyone thought that these people would actually spend a big chunk of their own time on this, the memo notes that task force members can designate another “senior-level official who is a part of the member’s department, agency, or office” in their place.
While the bulk of the task force’s work is focused on Florida, the scope of the committee’s work is wider than that. One element of the plan that the task force is charged with developing “explores future workforce and economic development activities that could be undertaken for affected aerospace communities in other States, as appropriate”. However, the emphasis of their work—as well as the $40 million the president pledged in his speech last month—remains devoted to “those communities within Florida affected by transitions in America’s space exploration program”. While the task force’s plan is due to the president by August 15, the committee itself will remain in place for three years.
The creation of the task force generated a reaction yesterday from one Space Coast congressman, Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL), who has his own ideas for supporting the region’s workforce and economy. “A better transition program for space workers and our nation’s continued leadership in space is to abandon the President’s proposal to cancel Constellation and for NASA to continue flying the Space Shuttle to close the space flight gap,” he said in a statement.
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