By Jeff Foust on 2009 October 19 at 4:33 pm ET NASA announced this afternoon that the Review of US Human Space Flight Plans Committee (aka the Augustine committee) will release its final report Thursday at 1 pm at a press conference in Washington. Committee chairman Norm Augustine will be present, along with Ed Crawley. For those unable to attend the event in person (like myself; I’ll be at the ISPCS conference in New Mexico) the press conference will be broadcast on NASA TV’s media channel and electronic copies of the report will be on the committee’s web site.
By Jeff Foust on 2009 October 17 at 11:07 am ET The Houston Chronicle reported Thursday that NASA was looking to cut its employee costs by as much as 20 percent to create a “down payment” on the additional money the agency would need to perform human exploration beyond LEO. According to the report, deputy administrator Lori Garver told NASA contractors those cuts, involving NASA personnel overseeing work at contractor sites and contractor personnel themselves, were under consideration.
However, in a letter to the editor published Saturday, Robert Jacobs, NASA assistant administrator for public affairs, says the Chronicle story got it wrong. “Garver has not initiated any discussions with NASA contractors in an effort to reduce jobs,” he wrote. “In fact, it was the contractor community that first approached NASA with ideas on how it could restructure existing work to reduce costs.” Jacobs adds that “No specific actions will be considered until the White House makes a final decision regarding the future of human spaceflight.”
By Jeff Foust on 2009 October 17 at 10:57 am ET The Augustine committee’s final report is now expected out next week (something the committee confirmed in a Twitter posting Friday morning) but a draft version of that report is already at NASA and the White House, Space News reported. The article, citing “sources both within the administration and close to it”, states that the administration is considering proposing a budget increase along the lines of what the Augustine committee considers necessary to enable human exploration beyond LEO: a gradual increase that leads to the $3-billion increase by 2014 widely reported. That’s different from efforts in Congress to give NASA an immediate, but one-time, $3-billion increase by taking money from unspent stimulus funds.
As for what option the agency and White House are considering, the Space News article indicates that the so-called “flexible path” option, which defers lunar landings for lunar flybys, NEO missions, and other destinations, is “an attractive option” within the space agency. The White House, an unnamed administration official states, considered a human return to the Moon “not sellable to the public or to the president”.
By Jeff Foust on 2009 October 17 at 10:44 am ET Just over a year ago astronomers discovered a tiny asteroid headed for the Earth. The asteroid, thought to be no more than a few meters across, entered the Earth’s atmosphere over northern Sudan and burned up, causing no damage but creating a shower of tony fragments, some of which have been recovered by scientists.
However, there was just enough concern about the meteorite that NASA emailed the White House asking them to alert the Sudanese government. That’s what former White House press secretary Dana Perino said in a speech to public relations professionals in Colorado, according to the Denver Business Journal:
It [the email] arrived 9:30 one night, from NASA, with “HEADS UP” in the subject line. It warned that an asteroid was headed toward Sudan. “Asteroids usually break up,” Perino said. “But the email asked us to call the Sudanese and let them know it’s coming.”
The unusual request surprised Perino. Fortunately, the asteroid did break up before hitting Earth, and she was spared the problem.
Perino said the request was “perhaps the most unusual email she received” during her time as press secretary for President George W. Bush. Who at NASA sent the email, and why it was sent to the press secretary instead of (or at least in addition to) other White House officials wasn’t mentioned.
By Jeff Foust on 2009 October 16 at 9:34 pm ET Last week the Orlando Sentinel reported that Florida’s Congressional delegation was considering a call for reallocation of stimulus funds to NASA much like the Texas delegation has requested. On Friday the office of Congresswoman Suzanne Kosmas announced that Florida’s delegation has done just that, requesting in a letter to President Obama that he shift “at least $3 billion” to NASA’s human spaceflight program. “Given the ARRA’s goals of stimulating our economy, supporting science, and maintaining and creating high-tech jobs,” the letter reads, referring to the stimulus bill’s official name, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), “we believe there is no better place to dedicate these funds than to our human space flight program.”
The letter is signed by both of the state’s senators (Bill Nelson and George LeMieux, recently appointed to serve out the remainder of Mel Martinez’s term) and 13 of the state’s 25 representatives, a lower turnout than Texas, which got 26 of its 32 representatives to sign on. The 13 are 8 Democrats (including Kosmas) and 5 Republicans (including Bill Posey, whose district also includes part of the state’s Space Coast.) All five Republicans who signed the bill voted against the stimulus bill when the House approved it earlier this year.
So with a majority of two states’ delegations asking for the redirection of funding, is this a sure deal? Not necessarily. As Fox News reported today, some members of Congress see unspent stimulus funds as “untapped resources” for a variety of proposals, from a source for a one-time $250 Social Security payment to $245 billion for Medicare. The article states that it’s “unclear” if the administration would support any reallocation of stimulus money, and that it would be up to Congress to make any decision.
By Jeff Foust on 2009 October 16 at 7:15 am ET An editorial in Friday’s Florida Today offers a warning—or maybe a threat—to President Obama: increase NASA’s budget or “it will come back to haunt him at Florida’s ballot box”. The editorial claims that “among the reasons Obama won Florida last year was his NASA promise gained him votes in the critical Central Florida corridor.” Yet Obama lost Brevard County, the heart of the Space Coast, by 11 percentage points, and it seems unlikely space played a role in his much larger victories elsewhere in central Florida, like nearby Orange County, home to Orlando. The editorial also fails to point out that while Obama can propose a budget increase, there’s no guarantee that Congress will follow through, and most of the Congressional supporters cited in the editorial haven’t demonstrated much influence among appropriators on this topic.
Compare that to an op-ed in Thursday’s Washington Examiner by Douglas MacKinnon, who’s worried that once the shuttle is retired the US won’t be able to launch humans “for quite possibly a decade or more to come” because, as he puts it, “President Obama and most Members of Congress don’t consider our human spaceflight program to be a tangible vote-getter. As simple and as destructive as that.” MacKinnon goes on to complain that the White House and Congress don’t appreciate spaceflight in the same way John F. Kennedy did nearly a half-century ago, and then criticizes the Augustine committee (for concluding that a human return to the Moon by 2020 is unaffordable) and new NASA administrator Charles Bolden (for “weakly” offering rationales like lowering the cost of spaceflight and using the Moon as a testbed for new technologies, rather than channeling JFK.)
David Hill, a Republican pollster, offers a solution in a column this week in The Hill: Republicans and Democrats should work together to endorse “the continuation of the manned spaceflight program”. A great idea, except that space is already largely a bipartisan issue, with supporters on both sides of the aisle whose talking points are often identical (such as the request to divert $3 billion in stimulus money to NASA, something back by members of both parties.) That hasn’t been very successful—at least, not yet.
By Jeff Foust on 2009 October 15 at 9:33 pm ET Back in late August a group of former astronauts published an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle in support of human space exploration in general and Constellation in particular. (The link to the original op-ed is now broken, as the Chronicle has apparently moved it to its archives, never to be read again.) The piece was somewhat supportive of commercial options for human space transportation to low Earth orbit, saying such ventures could “possibly” transport cargo and crew if they’re able to meet NASA crew safety requirements.
The Wall Street Journal published online late Thursday another op-ed by another group of former astronauts, led by Buzz Aldrin, that takes a stronger stance in favor of commercial crew transportation. “While it’s completely appropriate for NASA to continue developing systems and the new technologies necessary to take crews farther out into our solar system, we believe that the commercial sector is fully capable of safely handling the critical task of low-Earth-orbit human transportation,” the op-ed states. Not surprisingly, they support the emphasis on commercial options in the Augustine committee summary report. “NASA should put its unique resources into pushing back the final frontier and not in repaving the earth-to-orbit road it cleared a half century ago. Commercial human spaceflight is not competitive with NASA. It is complementary.”
By Jeff Foust on 2009 October 15 at 9:17 pm ET The Washington Times reported today that the Obama Administration has quietly moved to shift authority for approval of missile and space technology to China. Under a presidential determination issued on September 29, the president delegated authority to the Secretary of Commerce “the functions of the President under section 1512 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1999 (NDAA).” That section of law, part of the Strom Thurmond National Defense Authorization Act for FY1999, requires that the president certify to Congress at least 15 days before any export of “missile equipment or technology” to China that the export does not hurt the US space launch industry and that the technology “will not measurably improve” China’s missiles and space launch capabilities.
The Times article, by Bill Gertz, gets plenty of quotes from conservative experts convinced that the decision is a “step backward”, “foolish”, “dangerous”, and even “shocking”, while Commerce Department officials say the move won’t cause the controls on such exports to become looser. What isn’t answered by the article, though, is why the administration made the move. Gertz speculates that the move “appears aimed at increasing U.S.-China space cooperation” but leaves it at that.
This moves comes while export control reform for space issues is being debated and discussed (and working its way through Congress). Is this move by the White House a step towards greater reform, or is an unrelated move with other intentions?
By Jeff Foust on 2009 October 15 at 1:10 pm ET Any day now, either later this week or early next week, the Augustine committee is set to release its final report. Around that time a couple members of the committee will be making public appearances inside and outside the Beltway, hopefully providing a little more background and detail about their work now that the report is complete.
Greason and Lyles have already been speaking about the committee’s work, Lyles at a forum at GWU’s Space Policy Institute and Greason at the Space Investment Summit 7 in Boston at the end of September. Depending on the timing of the final report’s release, they may be free to talk in additional detail about the report’s findings at these later events.
[Disclosure: I had a cameo role in organizing the WSBR-WIA luncheon with Lyles by suggesting that the two organizations work together to plan a joint event rather than do separate events.]
By Jeff Foust on 2009 October 13 at 7:29 am ET While the Augustine committee wraps up its final report, NASA hasn’t been standing still waiting for it. In an article in Monday’s issue of The Space Review, I wrote about Bolden’s statements in his Space Transportation Association speech on Thursday about what NASA’s internal planning:
While the Augustine committee did its work this summer, Bolden said that a NASA “leadership team” has also been studying exploration, focusing initially more on “why” rather than “how”. That team, including associate administrators and center directors, has been meeting by telecon for the last couple of months, three days a week for up to three hours at a time. “We started with asking the question ‘why': why do we do this?” he said. “Why do we risk human life in the exploration of space?”
Bolden didn’t say what answers the team came up with during the meetings, but did state that the team has moved on to the question of how to carry out human space exploration. That, he said, was a different approach from the Augustine committee, which he felt focused more on technical architectures than on the reasons why (although the committee did take up the question internally, as Jeff Greason, a committee member, recently noted.) “When you get stuck with architecture, you can do bad things,” Bolden said. “You really want to find out why you want to do something, and then ask yourself if this is what we want to do, how do we best accomplish it?”
Bolden said the team has been “migrating to a position that we want to recommend to the president,” without offering any specifics about what that might be.
While Bolden didn’t mention any specifics in Washington, he did let slip a few details about what might be included on Monday at the IAC in Daejon, South Korea, Flightglobal.com reports. Bolden was clearly interested in developing a heavy-lift vehicle, saying that NASA was “costing” such a launcher, which the report believes is the Ares 5 “Lite” vehicle mentioned in the Augustine committee report instead of a shuttle-derived alternative or even simply re-estimating the development cost of the Ares 5 itself. He was also cool to using EELV-derived vehicles, saying that they “are not man-rated [and] they are middle class”, according to the Flightglobal.com report.
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