By Jeff Foust on 2010 January 20 at 5:31 am ET The chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee confirmed Tuesday that his committee will prepare a new NASA authorization bill this year, although its contents aren’t clear. “Congress believes that a strong and balanced civil space and aeronautics program of science, aeronautics, and human spaceflight and exploration is important and worthy of the nation’s support, and an important part of the nation’s innovation agenda,” committee chairman Bart Gordon said in a release announcing the committee’s agenda for this year. The release indicated the committee would move the legislation through the committee “this spring”; Nextgov reported that Gordon aims to have the committee approve the bill by May.
The committee’s ranking Republican, Ralph Hall, agreed that a NASA authorization bill is a priority in a separate release. “Our nation’s space agency is at a critical juncture and Congress must prioritize the funding necessary to achieve its missions. Keeping NASA on track for great achievements will be vital to maintaining America’s leadership role in space, as well as our competitive edge in innovation.:
That the committee plans to work on a bill isn’t a surprise: the legislation has been anticipated for months. Back in November Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords said that the committee would wait until at least January to draft an authorization bill as it waited on the White House to make a decision on space exploration policy. Yesterday’s announcements didn’t include any specifics on the bill’s provisions, perhaps in part since the White House hasn’t announced its decision on NASA’s future yet.
By Jeff Foust on 2010 January 19 at 6:59 am ET A few brief items of interest:
A planned review of the nation’s military space programs and policy could be delayed by several months. Defense News reports that the 2010 Space Posture Review may be delayed by several months and possibly up to a year. The review was scheduled for release next month, along with the Quadrennial Defense Review and the FY11 budget proposal. The Congressionally-mandated review is designed to examine “the definition, policy, requirements, and objectives” for a variety of military space issues.
A Republican challenger to Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), chair of the space subcommittee of the House Science and Technology Committee, hinted that he would make an issue of her position during the campaign. Arizona state senator Jonathan Paton told the Arizona Daily Star that becoming chair was an example of “political missteps” made by Giffords. “She has raised her profile, and some eyebrows, as chairwoman of the House space subcommittee, even though her husband is an astronaut,” according to the article. “Giffords’ camp notes her role was approved by the ethics committee, in part because her husband actually works for the Navy, assigned to NASA’s space shuttle program.”
Despite a budget shortfall of $4.2 billion over the next two years, new Virginia governor Bob McDonnell reiterated his support for the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) on Wallops Island. “Governor Kaine committed to invest $1.3 million in the Virginia Spaceport,” McDonnell said in a speech before the General Assembly Monday, referring to his predecessor, Tim Kaine. “We can make Wallops Island the top commercial Spaceport in America, and I ask you to keep that money in place so that we can aggressively recruit aerospace companies and promote space tourism initiatives.” McDonnell supported continued development of MARS during last year’s campaign.
Virginia might be facing some spaceport competition though, from… Indiana? Legislation introduced in the state’s House of Representatives last week would designate two municipal airports as the state’s “primary” and “secondary” airports, and also provide some tax incentives for space transportation research and development, including “a deduction from the adjusted gross income tax equal to the amount of casualty loss deducted from the taxpayer’s federal adjusted gross income with respect to the loss of a space vehicle owned by the taxpayer.” Nothing like thinking positive…
By Jeff Foust on 2010 January 18 at 12:37 pm ET Last fall Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) introduced S. 1808, legislation titled the “Control Spending Now Act” designed to, as its name suggests, reduce federal spending through a series of budget cuts and related reforms. No action has taken place on the bill since its introduction in October (understandably, as the Senate was a little busy with health care reform, among other issues), but his office has been sending out a series of “Spotlight on Spending” releases designed to draw attention to various provisions of the bill.
On Friday Feingold’s office sent out the latest version: “Save $24.7 Billion by Delaying a Trip to the Moon”. Feingold proposes delaying a human return to the Moon by five years to create that cost savings. From the statement:
“I understand the appeal of sending astronauts back to the moon, but given our current fiscal situation, we need to prioritize how we spend taxpayer dollars,” Feingold said. “Not only would a trip to the moon in the current time frame not make financial sense, rushing it through as planned could subject our astronauts to unnecessary risk. With the White House-appointed Augustine Commission [sic] saying that the mission simply isn’t fiscally viable as planned, we should delay it. The president needs to modify NASA’s plan to preserve key missions while controlling spending.”
The bill would allow NASA to spend up to $600 million a year “solely for purposes in connection with research and technology development and maintenance of the manufacturing and technology base” for human lunar exploration. (Elsewhere in the bill another non-NASA space program is targeted for cancellation: the Defense Department’s Space Tracking and Surveillance System satellite constellation.)
A few comments about the bill: First, it assumes that NASA is still on track for a human return to the Moon in 2020, something that various analyses, most recently that of the Augustine committee, indicated it was highly unlikely. The bill’s language does not explicitly call for a five-year delay, only a prohibition on spending “to support a human lunar mission under the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Constellation Program scheduled to occur before the year 2025″. Getting to the Moon by 2025 under the current “program of record” and funding profile looks to be a challenge anyway.
Second, it’s not clear exactly how Feingold calculates the cost savings that such a delay would realize. Feingold’s release states that a five-year delay would save $24.7 billion over ten years, citing data from the CBO. The CGO did issue a report last April titled “The Budgetary Implications of NASA’s Current Plans for Space Exploration”, but it didn’t include the scenario Feingold mentioned.
Finally, this proposal may sound a little familiar: it’s something the Obama campaign floated in November 2007 as almost an afterthought to an education policy white paper; the five-year Constellation delay would help pay for an early education initiative. The Obama campaign, of course, eventually abandoned that plan, but it appears Sen. Feingold isn’t averse to recycling the idea.
By Jeff Foust on 2010 January 16 at 7:45 am ET Late Friday NASA released the 2009 report of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel. What attention the report has received has largely focused on its findings, including that no commercial vehicle developers are certified to meet NASA human safety standards (“despite some claims and beliefs to the contrary”), that it is “unwise and probably not cost-effective” to replace Ares 1 with any alternative vehicle “without demonstrated capability nor proven superiority (or even equivalence)”, and that extending the shuttle “significantly” is unwise without a thorough recertification of the vehicle.
These findings, though, are unsurprising, since they are similar to its 2008 report, which found that commercial vehicles “are not proven to be appropriate to transport NASA personnel” and that extending the shuttle not only posed an increased risk to crews, it “could jeopardize the future U.S. Exploration program by squeezing available resources (and, in the worst case, support) for the Constellation program.” If anything, ASAP’s criticism of commercial crew is a bit milder in the 2009 report, which is focused more on NASA for not moving fast enough to “develop and communicate the standards necessary for any COTS manufacturer if astronauts are to be transported on non-NASA vehicles.” On the other hand, ASAP’s support for Ares 1 is stronger in the 2009 report than in the 2008 one, which cautioned that Ares 1/Orion could not be accelerated significantly with additional funding because the agency needs “sufficient time to identify and resolve problems” during development.
There are a couple of interesting aspects of the ASAP report that have been less widely discussed. One is the timing of the report’s release. While the 2009 report came out Friday, the 2008 report was not published until mid-April of 2008; the 2007 report wasn’t released until August 2008. The acceleration from the 2007 to 2008 report can be explained by a switch in formats to a “brief, to-the-point letter report” ASAP said was warranted because the agency was at a “critical crossroads”. The further acceleration of report production between 2008 and 2009 isn’t explained in the report or accompanying media release, and it could be the result of further streamlined production processes. However, given the report’s effective endorsement of the so-called “program of record”, it’s likely supporters of that architecture will use this report to defend it should the White House and NASA decide to go in a different direction in the coming weeks.
The other interesting aspect of the report is that ASAP’s membership included, for half of 2009, Charles Bolden, who left ASAP after becoming NASA administrator. Bolden only attended the first of ASAP’s quarterly meetings; he apparently did not attend the second quarter meeting in April, and he left ASAP before the other two. The report includes the minutes from the four quarterly meetings, including this interesting passage from the first quarter meeting where then-ASAP-member Bolden is talking about risk, safety, and communicating those issues to the public:
General Bolden digressed to talk briefly about four overriding themes, specifically (1) foremost, a determination of how safe is safe enough; (2) the timing of NASA involvement in the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) Program and in specification of human-rating requirements for COTS vendors, which has not yet been answered (good people are agreeing to disagree); (3) the level of ambiguity in the Constellation risk matrix and the granting of approval authority for hazard reports and risk acceptance to the project level rather than the program level (see recommendation ASAP-2009-01-03a) for one of the largest programs that NASA has ever developed and the first one that the Agency is integrating in decades, an approach that makes the Panel uncomfortable because reason demands that a higher level of approval in the design phase of an integrated project is essential for program oversight and accountability; and (4) the central issue of transparency and clarity when sharing information with the public, particularly the capability to comprehensibly describe the significant risk associated with space exploration.
Acknowledging that General Bolden raised an important point, [ASAP chairman] Admiral [Joseph] Dyer commented that the ASAP would recommend almost a new communications genesis. The ASAP suggested that the new Administration and the in-bound Administrator take time to consider a new approach that would explain not only the level and range of risk associated with space exploration, but also the importance of the work, the reward that justifies the risk, and the acceptance of that risk by willing and knowledgeable astronauts. The public discourse thus would be more direct and clearer, with less interpretation required. General Bolden agreed, contending that American citizens can handle difficult issues, so NASA should quit treating them as if they are children who do not understand, instead bringing them in as partners.
Will whatever new exploration policy chosen by the White House and NASA take that advice to better explain the risks and rewards of human spaceflight and bring in the public as “partners”?
By Jeff Foust on 2010 January 15 at 6:14 am ET House legislation to extend the space shuttle program beyond its planned retirement this year may be joined by more a comprehensive Senate bill in the near future. At the symposium “Human Spaceflight and the Future of Space Science”, held yesterday in Washington by USRA and GWU’s Space Policy Institute, Jeff Bingham of the Senate Commerce Committee held up a working draft of a proposed bill titled the “Human Spaceflight Capability Assurance and Enhancement Act”. Because the bill hasn’t been introduced yet, he could not reveal its exact contents, but did say he what believed “should” be in the bill.
At the core of the bill is ensuring the utilization and success of the International Space Station. Part of that means extending operations of the ISS to “at least” 2020, he said; the bill should include provisions instructing NASA to study what’s needed in terms of new or replacement equipment, and the requirements for transporting cargo up to and down from the station. That alone is hardly controversial: there’s a growing consensus that NASA will plan to continue operations of the ISS beyond 2015 in any new human spaceflight plan.
How to continue to support the station, though, particularly during the gap between the shuttle’s retirement and the introduction of Ares/Orion or commercial vehicles? “There is only one answer,” he said. “It will not surprise you to know that we believe that answer is to keep flying the shuttle.” No other US vehicle, government or commercial, would be ready to service the station before 2015 (at least for crews; commercial cargo vehicles are forecast to be flying well before then.) Any legislation should authorize funding for continuing shuttle flights until a suitable US-built replacement vehicle enters service, he said.
The bill should not stop at extending the shuttle, though. “We believe very strongly that commercial industry, the space launch industry, is vitally important, and it’s time, we’re at the point, where we should be moving in that direction,” he said. Such legislation should authorize additional funding to accelerate development of commercial crew vehicles. It would also endorse use of Ares 1/Orion to support the station, although he didn’t provide specifics about any language on that system the bill should contain. Other aspects of the bill should focus on ensuring utilization of the US components of the station as a national laboratory (a designation made in a prior NASA authorization bill) and getting more users of the facility from outside of NASA.
A major challenge for the bill—outside of the technical and programmatic issues of whether it’s possible at this late stage to keep flying the shuttle beyond 2010—is turning any authorized funding into real appropriations. Bingham said some leadership on this has to come from the White House by requesting funding that’s in line with authorized levels, something that has not happened in the past. “The reason appropriators have not been able to increase funding levels to the kind of levels we had in our authorization bills is because they were never requested by the White House,” he said.
“The Bush Administration, I think, completely neglected space after the event on January 14th,” he said, referring to President Bush’s speech six years ago yesterday unveiling the Vision for Space Exploration. “That was it; it was turned over to OMB and mismanaged.” He sad he’s concerned that the same will be true in the current administration since the same people “at the mid-level of the bureaucracy” within OMB are still there. “I’m not optimistic that what we’re going to see with the budget is going to be very inspiring.”
By Jeff Foust on 2010 January 14 at 7:47 am ET As the shuttle programs ends and NASA’s future direction remains uncertain, it’s clear that there will be changes in how NASA and the nation approach human spaceflight. In an essay in this week’s issue of The Space Review, Roger Handberg argues that the US will have to take a different approach to international cooperation. In the past, the US was clearly the lead partner, dictating the direction of projects like the ISS and the roles of partners, but also paying the bulk of the costs of projects. “The historical pattern is simple: the US is willing to join international space projects as long as it remains the project leader and is relatively, if not completely, unconstrained by the international partners when the US decides significant changes are required,” he writes.
That approach is unlikely to continue given the apparent unwillingness of the US to spend the money sufficient to take such a dominant role, he argues, requiring more equitable international partnerships. “What this means is that the US must become comfortable with such close cooperation, as unilateral decisions with no prior consultation with partners will end,” he writes. “The advantage is that true cooperation translates into greater equality in terms of budget share—the US will no longer operate as the funder of last resort with the unpleasantness that situation generates. One downside is that projects will move more slowly (although in truth no one may notice, given the delays common presently) due to the need for effective consultation among the partners before programs are initiated and necessary changes are made.”
Meanwhile, the current situation offers an opportunity to ask the question of why do human spaceflight at all. “Is there a future for humans in space?” asked Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, in a talk last month at the Applied Physics Lab in Maryland. The answer to that question depends, he said, on two other questions: whether humans can live off the land in space, and if they can do anything useful economically. “Spending a small amount of money to answer those questions is a legitimate activity of a great power, and in the course of doing so there are geopolitical and technical benefits that accrue to us,” he said.
How, though, do you structure a human spaceflight program that can answer those questions? Pace suggested taking a page from the astronomy community, which performs decadal surveys to identify the missions they believe are most important in terms of the science they can generate—an approach that has since been adopted by planetary and earth scientists. “I can imagine a decadal-like group getting together” to examine what missions or concepts, like research into in situ resource utilization, would best answer those questions, he said. “We seem to have commissions on human spaceflight ever ten years anyway, why not make them routine?”
By Jeff Foust on 2010 January 14 at 6:58 am ET As the shuttle program winds down, Florida politicians appear to be increasingly turning to commercial space as a way to mitigate the feared economic dislocation the state, and the Space Coast specifically, will experience once the shuttle retires.
The Orlando Sentinel reports that Sen. Bill Nelson will promote the job-creating potential of commercial space in a speech later today at the Kennedy Space Center. Nelson, the Sentinel states, will state that commercial space companies could create 1,700 jobs in the state if NASA funds development of systems to provide commercial crew transportation for the ISS. The number is based on a press release issued in September by the Commercial Spaceflight Federation (CSF), which included the 1,700 jobs among over 5,000 nationwide that commercial crew development could create, based on a survey of CSF member comapnies. The Sentinel argue warns, though, that unnamed “observers and industry experts” caution that the CSF estimate could be inflated.
Meanwhile, Governor Charlie Crist (who is also running for the US Senate) paid a visit to Cecil Field during a trip to Jacksonville, just two days after the former naval air station received a commercial spaceport license from the FAA. “It’s a wonderful accomplishment to have an opportunity to get into the commercial space industry,” he said, as quoted by the Florida Times-Union, adding that he thinks the newly-minted spaceport has advantages over places like Spaceport America or Mojave Air and Space Port. “Where would you rather be? In the middle of a desert, or here on the First Coast?” However, as I noted earlier this week, the license sharply restricts the types of vehicles that can use it (no vertically-launched vehicles, for example), and those companies that are developing vehicles either have agreed to use other spaceports (like Virgin Galactic and Spaceport America) or have run into financial problems that has slowed or stopped development (like Rocketplane Global). So Gov. Crist and the Jacksonville area shouldn’t count on spaceflights, and their attendant jobs, just yet.
By Jeff Foust on 2010 January 13 at 1:17 pm ET In his speech at the American Astronomical Society’s meeting in Washington last week, NASA administrator Charles Bolden noted that the agency is at a recent high in terms of the number of operating astronomy missions: 15 as of the beginning of 2010, compared to 5 in 1990. (That number includes not just NASA spacecraft but also ESA and JAXA spacecraft that NASA is a partner on, such as ESA’s recently launched Herschel and Planck observatories.) He also made clear that science programs would not be raided to pay for human spaceflight. However, later in his talk he dropped a hint that these good times may be difficult to sustain in the years ahead. “One of our biggest challenges is balancing resources between older facilities and enabling new missions and technologies,” he said.
At a NASA town hall meeting at the AAS conference the next day, Jon Morse, head of the astrophysics division within NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, confirmed that the agency will be facing some tough decisions in the near future about some of its ongoing missions. “We can’t afford to keep doing everything the same way we have been in the past and continue to develop our new missions and new technologies,” he said. “So we’ll be looking for ways to try and keep as many facilities going as possible, but there might be some changes in the ways they’re supported” without specifying what those changes might be.
What that means is that the number of active NASA astronomy missions is likely at its peak and will drop, perhaps precipitously, over the next several years. A chart of the number of active missions projected over the next decade, based on planned new missions and the projected lifetime of existing missions, provided a stark visual: it showed the number of active missions falling to three or four by the middle of the decade, as many current missions are retired and only a handful (including one giant mission, the James Webb Space Telescope) replace them. Morse said the actual number may be higher as they find ways to extend the life of current missions and squeeze them into the budget, but it won’t be anywhere near the current peak. “I would imagine that, especially if we have more international collaborations, that we would probably be up in this range” of six to eight active missions by mid-decade, he said. “So it won’t be quite this bad, but it won’t stay in double figures, I think, for all that long.”
Later this year NASA will hold a “senior review” of a number of ongoing missions to evaluate whether NASA should include funding to continue their operations into FY2012. “It’s been a principle of the astrophysics division for many, many years to absolutely try to make sure that if a satellite is returning scientifically productive data, that we continue to do so,” he said. That might not be sustainable in future budgets, he warned. “This is going to be a difficult senior review,” he said. “You should prepare for those reasons—budget reasons and efficiency reasons—to maybe see some changes in the way we’re supporting these missions.”
By Jeff Foust on 2010 January 13 at 7:08 am ET Florida Today published today its interpretation of the new space stategy that the White House will unveil in the coming weeks. Here’s what the newspaper thinks the new strategy will contain:
- An increase in NASA’s budget of at least $1 billion;
- Extending the ISS through 2020;
- No extension of the shuttle program (sorry, Congressman Posey)
- Accelerated development of a “Saturn V-class rocket”
- NASA-led “international expeditions into interplanetary space”
None of these are terribly surprising, but even if these are all correct there are many details left unanswered. How big of a budget increase will NASA get in 2011 and will is be sustained or grown, as the Augustine committee report suggested? What heavy-lift rocket will be developed? What’s the future of Ares 1? What support will there be for commercial options for crew transportation to low Earth orbit? What missions “beyond Earth orbit” are contemplated, and on what schedule?
By Jeff Foust on 2010 January 13 at 6:57 am ET Former NASA chief of staff Courtney Stadd is facing another legal battle. Stadd pleaded not guilty Monday in federal court in Mississippi to nine charges, including fraud and conspiracy. The government alleges that Stadd conspired with a NASA official starting in 2004 to award contracts to Mississippi State, one of his consulting clients, who then subcontracted some of the work to him. This is separate from the case last year when Stadd was convicted on ethics charges for steering contracts to the university during a stint at the agency in 2005; he received three years of probation and a $2,500 fine in that case.
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