By Jeff Foust on 2009 October 22 at 5:16 pm ET A statement from Reps. Bart Gordon and Gabrielle Giffords, chair of the House Science and Technology Committee and its space subcommittee, respectively. Gordon:
While I plan to review the Augustine panel’s final report, the Science and Technology Committee’s September 15th hearing to review the panel’s summary report has already provided me with important information on the state of the nation’s human space flight programs. At that hearing, Mr. Augustine reported his panel’s assessment that a meaningful exploration program can’t be carried out under the budgetary projections that accompanied the Fiscal Year 2010 NASA budget request—that more money will be needed if we are to do anything worth doing as a nation. He also reported that his panel had assessed NASA’s Constellation program and found it to be ‘well managed’ and a program that is ‘executable and would carry out its objectives’ if adequate resources are provided.
And Giffords:
While I look forward to reading the Augustine panel’s final report, Congress has already made its decisions on the issues considered by the panel. Now that both internal and external independent reviews have confirmed that the Constellation program is being well executed, we know what needs to be done. Let’s get on with it and cease contemplating our collective navels.
A statement from Rep. Pete Olson, ranking member of the space subcommittee:
It is my deep hope that the Administration responds to their panel’s work with a clear and sustainable path for the future of our human spaceflight program. We cannot at this juncture assume America’s continued leadership in space if we fail to make the commitments necessary to put us on the path to escaping low earth orbit and having a national program that yields scientific benefits, technology innovations, and a new generation of scientists and engineers. I urge President Obama to do the right thing and take this opportunity to enable America to maintain its global leadership in human spaceflight.
From Florida’s Space Coast, Rep. Suzanne Kosmas:
While I am in the process of reviewing the Augustine Committee’s final report, our earlier briefings confirm my belief that the President has both the obligation and the opportunity to reignite our nation’s passion for space exploration… Without question, NASA needs additional funding to conduct meaningful space exploration that will have long-lasting scientific, technological and economic benefits. In addition, aspects of our national security depend on our continuing pre-eminence in space exploration.
Also from the Space Coast, Rep. Bill Posey:
If the President is going to keep his promise to close the gap and keep America first in space he must revise his budget plan and put more money back into the NASA budget. I would fully support such a plan and, in fact, introduced a bill to do just this more than six months ago.
And finally, a note of dissatisfaction from Rep. Parker Griffith (D-AL):
The report released today by the Augustine Commission lacks the ambition and drive that first put our astronauts in space, beat the Russians to the moon, and is synonymous with the American space program. Time and again, the Constellation program has proven to be the best and safest option to continue America’s legacy as the leader in manned spaceflight, but the full report seems to ignore many positive conclusion that demonstrates this.
NASA has made America what it is today, and both our space program and our brave astronauts who risk their lives deserve more than the rigid deductions reached by this blue ribbon panel. We have spent 10 months studying this to only yield incomplete results at best. The arguments that should have been made and the questions that should have been asked were ignored. These findings are incompatible with our national goals to return to the moon, mars and beyond, and we in Congress will not stand for it. We can do better.
Update: I overlooked this statement from Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL):
“I’ve asked the president to use money from leftover stimulus funds,†said Nelson, in a prepared statement. “I’ve also asked him to help minimize the job losses after the space shuttle is retired, in part, by transferring other NASA-related work to Cape Canaveral.
“He’s assured me that NASA will get enough money to do what it does best: go explore the heavens,†Nelson said.
By Jeff Foust on 2009 October 22 at 1:01 pm ET
By Jeff Foust on 2009 October 22 at 11:12 am ET
- An op-ed in the Washington Examiner by three Republican House freshman, including Pete Olson of Texas and Bill Posey of Florida, stresses the importance of properly funding NASA and increasing its budget even though it might seem at odds with their philosophy of limited government. “We do not take spending $3 billion lightly, but it is our strong belief that the failure to do so will be even more costly in the long run,” they write. (Part of their argument is that NASA’s share of the federal budget has dropped by 20% since 2007, although that is primarily because of increased spending elsewhere instead of a absolute decline in NASA spending.)
- Mixed messages? NASA administrator Charles Bolden told an audience in Huntsville Wednesday that the future of the Ares program is “not tentative at all”, which would appear to be a sign of support for the current program. However, NASASpaceFlight.com reports that Bolden has directed NASA Marshall to study heavy-lift alternatives to the Ares 5, including shuttle-derived sidemount concepts and the Jupiter vehicle from the DIRECT concept. The same report also claims that work on the Altair lunar lander has been “defunded”, although that work was in its very earliest stages.
- Bolden did say he was happy with the Augustine report: “If you don’t say anything, then you have to live with what you get. I didn’t say anything, and I’m happy with what I’ve got.” Bolden also said he would meet with President Obama “before the end of the year” to present NASA’s take on the report and its suggestions. (Presumably it will be sooner than the end of the year in order to fit into the FY11 budget proposal process.)
- Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin endorses the “flexible path” option in the Augustine committee report in an essay published by The Huffington Post, complete with a call for action at the end: “America, will you urge the president to pick a bold new mission for our nation in space?… In Twitter-friendly style, ask him this simple but profound question: Mr. President, will you lead us to greatness in space?”
By Jeff Foust on 2009 October 22 at 9:18 am ET Yesterday the two representatives from Florida’s Space Coast, Suzanne Kosmas and Bill Posey, introduced HR 3853, “Commercial Space Transportation Cooperative Research and Development Centers of Excellence Act of 2009″. The bill would authorize NASA to make grants to two more universities (with at least one of which within 100 miles of “an active commercial spaceport”, a term not defined in the bill text) to create these “centers of excellence”. The centers would combine NASA, academia, and industry expertise “to enhance the development of commercial space transportation through research and development activities” in a variety of areas, from policy analysis to biomedical issues to vehicle design. No dollar value is tied to the legislation other than “such sums as may be necessary” for fiscal years 2010 through 2012.
Kosmos and Posey worked together to introduce the bill because of their concerns about the upcoming post-shuttle gap and its effects on the Space Coast. “With the looming spaceflight gap, it is clear that the commercial spaceflight industry must play a significant role in maintaining our direct access to space and in providing high-quality job opportunities in Central Florida,” Kosmas said in a statement. Added Posey: “This is yet one more [approach] among many that will be needed to keep us moving forward and will help foster the development of commercial space technology.”
By Jeff Foust on 2009 October 22 at 8:02 am ET Yesterday Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) spoke on the Senate floor about the impending release of the Augustine committee report and its discussion of safety—or, rather, the lack of it, in his view. An excerpt:
The Chairman of the Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee, Norm Augustine, announced that safety would be paramount. Yet, from reviewing the preliminary information, there is only one area where mission safety was examined in the report. The Augustine report contained no safety comparison for the various vehicles considered by the panel and no risk assessment based on each option. The only safety issue identified was an assessment of how “hard” the panel thought each overall mission would be to achieve–not the safest means to complete the mission successfully. Since safety is the most important issue, these omissions are starling to some of us.
When making comparisons on the safety and performance of the various options, fundamental design differences cannot be lumped together and considered to be equal. Without an honest and thorough examination of the safety and reliability aspects of the various designs and options, the findings of this report are worthless. I would like to know why this blue ribbon panel did not examine these safety aspects.
Constellation’s vehicles have been planned and scrutinized by multiple stakeholders, all with a single goal in mind: to provide a safe and reliable human space flight system for our Nation.
The topic of safety same up Wednesday as well in a talk by Augustine committee member Jeff Greason at the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight in New Mexico. In the Q&A session after his speech, he was asked why the committee didn’t endorse Constellation as the “most viable” option “even though from a safety and mission assurance standpoint it’s clearly the best option.” Greason said that safety and mission assurance was considered by the Augustine committee, but that goes beyond simply the choice of launch vehicles.
“Launch is a relatively small contributor to the safety and mission assurance” of human missions to the Moon and beyond. “It is not negligible, it is not something you want to forget about, but it does not dominate the loss of crew probabilities.” Therefore, he said, it was a mistake to focus on further increasing the reliability of a relatively small aspect of overall mission risk, particularly if those choices lead you to take out safety systems in other components that because of mass restrictions. “These are false economies in terms of safety and mission assurance.”
Greason was also skeptical about the probabilistic risk assessments used to estimate the safety of various proposed systems. Most launch failures are not from random types of events, he said, but instead failures of design, testing, procedure, and the like. “If it was built wrong, it doesn’t work a lot of the time, no matter what you thought the probabilistic failure was.” The only way to “buy down” those failures, he said, is though flight experience, which is why “real boosters” have lower reliabilities than estimated when they were “paper boosters” still in the design phase.
“And the truth is, Ares 1 is, right now, a paper booster,” Greason continued. “And the further truth is, its projected launch rate is extremely low, so it will never get out of ‘infant mortality,'” that initial phase of non-probabilistic failures. “Even if Ares 1 were built exactly as planned, we would never find out whether its mature probabilistic risk assessment was or was not achievable as planned, because we would never get through the phase of life where we’re supposed to work out all the teething problems.”
By Jeff Foust on 2009 October 21 at 12:40 pm ET Apologies for the short notice, but the Senate Commerce Committee’s space subcommittee is holding a hearing this afternoon titled “The Case for Space: Examining the Value”. The only details about the hearing available is the list of speakers, although that, coupled with the title, give you the gist of what the hearing will be about:
Panel 1
Dr. Stephen I. Katz
Director, National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases
National Institutes of Health
Panel 2
Dr. Scott Pace
Director, Space Policy Institute, Elliott School of International Affairs
The George Washington University
Dr. Lennard A. Fisk
Vice Chair, Committee on the Rationale and Goals of the U.S. Civil Space Program, Space Studies Board, National Research Council
Thomas M. Donahue Distinguished University Professor of Space Science at the University of Michigan
Dr. Jeanne L. Becker
Associate Director
National Space Biomedical Research Institute
Ms. Helen Greiner
CEO
The Droid Works
By Jeff Foust on 2009 October 20 at 10:02 pm ET A little-known provision in federal law provides indemnification for commercial launch providers in the unlikely event that a launch accident caused third-party damaged above the maximum probable loss that providers ave to insure against. That indemnification, though, needs to be renewed by Congress on a regular basis or it will sunset: currently, the indemnification provision would expire at the end of this year if Congress took no action.
Congress, though, is taking action. The House passed by voice vote Tuesday HR 3819, a bill introduced last week by Congressman Bart Gordon that would extend the provision for three more years, with no other changes. “The commercial space transportation liability and insurance regime has worked,” Gordon said in a statement about its passage.
The bill is a mixed bag for the commercial space launch industry. While they’re pleased to see the indemnification regime renewed, they probably would like a longer term than three years—in the past industry representatives have expressed a desire for a permanent extension. However, unlike the 2004 legislation that previously extended the regime, there’s no requirement for a study to determine if the indemnification regime is needed at all.
By Jeff Foust on 2009 October 20 at 9:38 pm ET NASA administrator Charles Bolden gave a speech Tuesday morning to the National Association of Investment Companies in which he strongly endorsed the idea of entrepreneurial space ventures as key to keeping people—students in particular—interested in space for the benefit of the nation as large. An excerpt:
What if you did not have to choose between getting rich, doing good, and going to space? What if you could do all three at the same time? Who here in this room would make that choice?
What if you were a seventh grader and you knew that if you buckled down, and studied hard at math and science, that you could go to space? Not because you would be the one of the very few who might become a NASA astronaut, as I was so privileged, but because you saw hundreds of people of all nations traveling into space each and every year, and knew in your bones that you could soon be one of them?
What if you were a college student, and you knew that you could build real hardware in a semester engineering class, and that before the end of the semester your experiment would fly in space, and that you would get the results back from space before you got your grades?
This day could come soon.
Some of the most exciting companies in America today go by the names of SpaceX, Blue Origin, Armadillo Aerospace, Virgin Galactic, Xcor, Bigelow Aerospace, Masten, Flag Suit, and Ad Astra. And today I add a new name to the list … Peter’s Robotics. What these companies, and others, are doing is nothing short of inspirational.
Today, we at NASA are devising ways to work with these companies and others who will come. I urge you, and all other investors, to take notice. Space may someday soon become the new thing in investing.
By Jeff Foust on 2009 October 20 at 9:22 pm ET At a joint WSBR-WIA luncheon Tuesday, Retired Air Force General Lester Lyles, one of the members of the Augustine committee, noted that he couldn’t go into much detail about the final report since it doesn’t come out until Thursday afternoon. “I don’t want to preempt some of the things that Norm [Augustine] and Ed [Crawley] might get into,” he explained. However, he did provide a few interesting opinions and insights about the committee’s work.
One key thing that came across was that Lyles himself was a supporter of the current Constellation architecture, while acknowledging, as the committee has, that there isn’t enough funding for it. “The current program of record, in my opinion, seems to be the right one,” he said, saying that the Air Force has concerns about human-rating EELV “not from a technical standpoint, but a program interruption standpoint for the national security space activities.”
In the Q&A session after his speech, he reiterated his preference. “I’m a big, big believer in the need for rocket technology, so I personally want to see Ares 1 going, and see the program going as it’s currently structured,” he said. “Now, we may look at some other options, and that might be the right thing to do–probably is, always, just to play it safe–but I certainly would not want to disrupt” the current program, which he called “very, very successful”.
Asked what he thought it would take for NASA to get more comfortable with buying commercial cargo and crew services, Lyles admitted he didn’t know. “I know there are concerns about how you structure commercial programs,” he said. He did say he was “blown away about the attention to detail” during a visit to SpaceX during the summer, saying that he had “naively” expected to see something “not as rigorous” as what he experienced during his career in the Air Force.
Lyles was also asked about the $3-billion-a-year NASA budget increase mentioned in the committee’s report, since there was some confusion about whether that increased would be gradually phased in over several years or added all at once. Lyles believed it to be the latter. “I will tell you going in, in our final session, we were talking about not a ramp up, we were talking about $3 billion a year” added immediately, a “step increase”.
Lyles noted that the summary report states that if the space program is to be successful, “it must have the right mission, it must have the right resources, and it must have the right organization.” “The latter,” he added, “was sort of a ‘foot stomp’ saying that we, probably, in our findings, thought that NASA today is perhaps larger than it needs to be given the mission that it currently has.” Lyles said the same issue came up five years ago on the Aldridge Commission, on which he also served, “and we punted a little bit on what we wanted to say”. The commission has wanted to recommend a NASA “BRAC”, but concluded that option would not be politically expedient.
By Jeff Foust on 2009 October 20 at 6:22 am ET One of the findings in the Augustine committee summary report was the importance of technology development efforts to support human space exploration and commercialization: “Investment in a well-designed and adequately funded space technology program is critical to enable progress in exploration.” As it turns out, just a few hours before the committee releases its final report, the House Science and Technology Committee’s space subcommittee will take up the topic of “Strengthening NASA’s Technology Development Programs”. The witnesses include two people involved in recent National Research Council studies, one on aligning the civil space program with national needs and the now-defunct NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts, as well as NASA associate administrator Chris Scolese. The hearing will take place Thursday at 10 am in Rayburn 2318.
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