By Jeff Foust on 2009 September 17 at 9:00 am ET A day after members of the House Science and Technology Committee dug in their heels on any potential changes to NASA’s exploration program as proposed by the Augustine committee, NASA’s deputy administrator dropped a strong hint that changes of some kind would be coming to the agency soon. Speaking at the AIAA Space 2009 conference in Pasadena Wednesday, Lori Garver avoided any direct discussion of hot-button issues like the future of Constellation and NASA’s overall exploration plans. Instead, she spent much of the half-hour speech talking up interesting technologies and programs she had found at NASA since becoming deputy administrator nearly two months ago, from technologies to bring together and display various streams of Earth sciences data to a NASA Ames effort to convert algae into aviation biofuels. All this was tied into a message that NASA needs to help meet key national needs–and to better communicate what it does do to the public.
“Part of our challenge, of course, is to utilize our unique workforce, our missions, and our capabilities, to address critical national needs,” she said in the introductory portion of her speech, “and to communicate the importance of our mission to the public, making sure people know how space technology has become part of all of our lives.” A little later in the speech she added, “So our opportunity is to focus our missions to provide better value and to communicate that value in a way that shows off the relevance to everyday Americans.”
“To earn our trust from the taxpayers, we have to help create a better future, in my view, with programs that are aligned with both the short-term and the long-term national interests,” she said, “and then we have to better explain how we help those national interests with what we do and the value that we add with out missions.”
Later in the speech, after ticking off those examples of interesting programs that she felt did add value and served national interests, she noted the agency had to be willing to be evolve and be open to new ideas. “I know there are those who are skeptical that NASA can change in such a substantial way that we may be called upon to do,” she said. She noted, as a counterexample, how NASA evolved from competing against the Russians to cooperating with them on the ISS. “That was not something that was obvious,” she said, citing the “consternation” in the early 1990s within NASA about the idea of bringing Russia into the space station program. Today, “the Russian Federation is a key partner in providing transportation to and from the International Space Station.” She cited similar shifts in NASA thinking on flying astronauts on Soyuz spacecraft and even working with space tourists who visit there–something she had first-hand experience with her “AstroMom” effort to try and fly to the ISS earlier this decade.
“NASA rose to the challenge of the Cold War 40 years ago and many, many challenges since,” she concluded. “So now we will rise to meet in my view new challenges, such as those that impact our environment, energy, health, and the economy, and the future of space exploration.”
By Jeff Foust on 2009 September 15 at 8:55 am ET In the unlikely event you’ve forgotten, the House Science and Technology Committee is holding a hearing about the Augustine committee’s report today at 2 pm. The hearing will be webcast by the committee and will also be broadcast by NASA TV.
To get a hint as to the tone of the hearing, take a look at the hearing charter document. It would appear the House committee is ready to defend the current Constellation architecture, or at least sharply question why Augustine’s group reached the conclusions it published in last week’s summary report. A couple of examples:
Since the Constellation program is the program for which funds have been
authorized and appropriated over the last four years and for which design, development, and test activities have been underway over that same period, did the review committee attempt to develop an option that would maintain the Constellation program development path but that would fit into the enhanced funding envelope proposed by the committee by rephasing of milestones, initial exploration destinations, etc.? If so, why was it not included in the final set of options contained in the summary report?
The same historical cost risk factor [1.51] appears to have been applied by the review committee to all of the options regardless of their level of technical and programmatic maturity. Does it make sense to apply the same risk factor to a program that has completed design reviews and hardware testing activities that is applied to options for which no comparable milestones have yet been achieved and for which the fidelity of the original cost estimate is correspondingly low?
How high should the threshold be for a decision to scrap the existing Constellation program that has been under development for four-plus years? What circumstances would justify abandoning the program at this point in its development?
In addition, the space subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee will have its own hearing about the Augustine report Wednesday at 2:30 pm, again webcast and on NASA TV. Unlike the House hearing, currently the only witness listed for the Senate hearing is Norm Augustine.
By Jeff Foust on 2009 September 14 at 11:42 am ET Last week’s release of the Augustine committee’s sumary report got, as you might expect, some reaction from Capitol Hill, although not as much as you might have expected. While a few members issued formal statements, others, including those who normally speak out on space issues, decided not to, at least for now.
The chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee, Rep. Bart Gordon (D-TN), issued a relatively non-committal statement after the report’s release, saying that he expected the report would help the committee’s work on a planned multi-year reauthorization of NASA later this year. “I want to work with the Administration to ensure that our nation can sustain a vital exploration program,” Gordon said in the statement. “As has already been recognized by the Augustine panel, NASA has not been given resources matched to the tasks it has been asked to undertake. That has to change.”
Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), chair of the science committee’s space subcommittee, issued a press release Wednesday responding to the report. She stated that the report demonstrated that NASA needed additional funding, and included this comment:
Continued underfunding of NASA risks the good work being done by the Constellation Program, which includes vehicles capable of launching astronauts to low-Earth orbit and to the Moon. This is unfortunate, particularly because the Augustine panel found no significant technical problems with the Constellation Program.
That’s not quite what the committee said in its report. Here’s the key passage:
Most major vehicle-development programs face technical challenges as a normal part of the process, and Constellation is no exception. While significant, these are engineering problems, and the Committee expects that they can be solved. But these solutions may add to the program’s cost and/or delay its schedule.
Saying that any problems with Constellation can be solved isn’t the same as saying there are no “significant” technical problems with the current architecture.
Meanwhile, Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL) issued a statement expressing concern about the seven-year gap the committee projected for the current architecture based on its progress to date and projected funding. He used the release to advocate for his own bill, the American Space Access Act (HR 1962) that would authorize funding for additional shuttle flights beyond 2010. No action has taken place on that bill since its introduction in April.
Rep. Pete Olson (R-TX) took his concerns about the space program to the House floor–in the form of a one-minute speech early in the day September 10. Olson reiterated general concerns about the future of NASA and its need for appropriate resources.
What’s missing from this reaction are comments from appropriators: while it’s great to authorize additional funding for NASA, it’s not useful unless that authorization is backed by an appropriation, something that has been lacking in the past. While Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), who chairs the appropriations subcommittee in the Senate whose jurisdiction includes NASA, took time last week to participate in the unveiling of the some of the first Hubble images since its servicing back in May, she has remained quiet in public on the question of NASA’s budget. And her counterpart in the Senate, Rep. Alan Mollohan, has also largely remained quiet. His subcommittee took several hundred million dollars out of NASA’s FY10 exploration budget earlier this year, citing the uncertainty about the future of the exploration program. Mollohan did tell The Hill that the report confirms his belief that “the emperor has no clothes”.
By Jeff Foust on 2009 September 11 at 2:18 pm ET Next Tuesday’s scheduled hearing about the Augustine committee report by the House Science and Technology committee took an interesting turn yesterday. Originally the two scheduled witnesses were committee chairman Norm Augustine and NASA admininstrator Charlie Bolden. However, Bolden is no longer scheduled to testify; according to the Orlando Sentinel, Bolden was replaced because the White House hasn’t taken a position yet on the contents of the Augustine comittee’s summary report, published Tuesday.
Bolden has been replaced by two people. One is Joe Dyer, a retired Navy vice admiral who currently serves as the chairman of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, a group that Bolden previously served on. The other, though, is far more interesting: former NASA administrator Mike Griffin. Back in June Griffin expressed some opinions about the Augustine review, saying it wasn’t necessary, in his opinion, from a technical standpoint but “does seem to be necessary if we are going to quiet some of the criticism of what NASA is doing, and if we are going to get the new administration on board.” At the time he also thought that the review, and later decisions by the administration, wouldn’t result in major changes to Constellation. In a late-July letter to Augustine, around the time the committee held a public hearing in Griffin’s new home of Huntsville, Griffin claimed that Constellation was the target of “broad but shallow criticism” and that while the committee needed to present options (rather than recommendations), “what you conclude about the relative merits of those options will matter.”
What makes this all the more interesting is a memo emailed by Griffin to “friends and supporters” that since leaked to the media (available in Word 2007 format from the Sentinel or HTML from SpaceRef.com). The memo contains 11 items commenting and sometimes criticizing the committee’s summary report. He agrees that the US human spaceflight program “appears to be on an unsustainable trajectory”, to quote the first line of the report, but is puzzled why the committee, not finding “any evidence of substandard execution”, didn’t simply recommend restoring the funding needed to implement it. (Of course, one challenge the committee faced was its initial direction to stay within the administration’s planned budget profile; they had to “cheat” somewhat to include options that included an additional $3 billion a year.)
Elsewhere he criticizes various aspects of the report, from its use of independent but “low-fidelity” cost estimates that are considered as corrections to NASA’s estimates that “have years of effort behind them” to citing “technical problems” with the Ares 1 (which has such problems, he said, “because actual work is being accomplished, whereas other options have no problems because no work is being done”) to even the inclusion of propellant depots in the report, which Griffin calls “a solution in search of a problem.” Interestingly, despite initiating and supporting COTS, he was sharply critical of the report’s suggestion that cargo and crew transportation to LEO be turned over to the commercial sector. “What commercial sector?” he asks at one point, claiming that the only “clearly available ‘commercial'” vehicle is the Ariane 5. “With an appropriately enlightened USG policy there may one day be a domestic commercial space transportation sector, but it does not presently exist and will not exist in the near future; i.e., substantially prior to the likely completion dates for Ares-1/Orion, if they were properly funded.”
That comment alone should make next Tuesday’s hearing interesting.
By Jeff Foust on 2009 September 9 at 7:40 am ET One of the key elements of the summary report of the Review of US Human Space Flight Plans Committee (aka the Augustine committee) issued yesterday is the role that commercial providers of crew transportation services can play. “As we move from the complex, reusable Shuttle back to a simpler, smaller capsule, it is an appropriate time to consider turning this transport service over to the commercial sector,” the report reads. And in the report’s concluding summary: “Commercial services to deliver crew to low-Earth orbit are within reach. While this presents some risk, it could provide an earlier capability at lower initial and lifecycle costs than government could achieve.”
The question is, when will commercial providers be ready? Depending on who you talked to yesterday, you got very different answers.
SpaceX CEO and CTO Elon Musk said that he felt “confident” his company would be ready in two and a half to three years after a contract was let, with the long-lead item being the development of a launch escape system. His statements came during a telecon organized by the Commercial Spaceflight Federation and the Next Step in Space Coalition to provide a commercial viewpoint on the Augustine committee’s report, and are with what he said in the past.
At the other extreme is ATK vice president Charlie Precourt, who spoke at a National Space Club luncheon in Florida yesterday. Precourt, a former NASA chief astronaut, suggested it would be many years before NASA would be willing to fly its astronauts on a commercial vehicle. “I wouldn’t be if I were the chief astronaut. You have to understand what the risk is,” Precourt told Florida Today.
The committee report, meanwhile, didn’t align with either extreme. The report states that a commercial crew transportation option “creates the possibility of lower operating costs for the system and potentially accelerates the availability of U.S. access to low-Earth orbit by about a year, to 2016″: more optimistic than Precourt, but less optimistic than Musk. I talked briefly with MIT professor Ed Crawley, a member of the committee, late yesterday; he said that the details behind that conclusion would be in the full report scheduled for release in the coming weeks, and so couldn’t go into details about that estimate at this time.
By Jeff Foust on 2009 September 8 at 2:45 pm ET That’s from the first sentence of the summary report of the Augustine committtee, just posted on the OSTP web site: “The U.S. human spaceflight program appears to be on an unsustainable trajectory.” I haven’t had time yet to review the report, although at first glance it does not appear to be that surprising given the comments made by committee members at the public hearings. Your comments, as always, are welcome.
By Jeff Foust on 2009 September 5 at 2:26 pm ET On Friday afternoon the White House announced that it was publishing the waivers to its stringent ethics policy it had granted to a handful of officials since the beginning of the administration. The ten waivers released Friday include the one granted to Charles Bolden, the new NASA administrator; others include Attorney General Eric Holder and defense undersecretary Ash Carter.
The waiver, signed on July 23 by the unnamed “Designated Agency Ethics Official” (the signature is obscured), covers Bolden’s previous work as a consultant to SAIC and a member of the board of directors of GenCorp, parent of Aerojet. “Mr. Bolden’s knowledge of and expertise in current NASA programs are essential to making informed and timely decision-making about the future of NASA and its programs,” the letter reads. “His ability to engage in such decision-making as the head of NASA is in the public interest and fundamental to NASA’s ability to remain in the forefront of space exploration.”
The waiver allows Bolden to participate “only at the policy or program level” in matters that involve the two companies; it does not allow him to engage in one-on-one meetings with either company nor does it allow him to participate in any contracting matters that involve the companies.
The waiver is not a surprise, since it had previously been reported that something like that would be required to meet the administration’s policies. The waiver is also not linked to Bolden’s brief time as a registered lobbyist for ATK; as noted here back in May, he was registered for only a brief time, recorded no income, and later claimed it was a mistake in the first place.
By Jeff Foust on 2009 September 2 at 1:11 pm ET A Florida Today blog post references a video uploaded to YouTube this week about the Augustine committee and its work. The three-and-a-half-minute video is primarily clips from the various committee meetings, interspersed with other clips (Ares 1-X, Shuttle, Apollo moonwalk) and text slides, and without any voiceover:
The video itself is perhaps a bit subtle: it’s arguing for staying the course in Constellation, but doesn’t hit the viewer over the head repeatedly with that message. The closing slide asks viewers to contact the White House and Congress and “tell them you DO NOT Want to ‘Take a Chance’ with the U.S. Human Space Flight Program.” (capitalization and punctuation in original.) The information on the YouTube page, though, is rather more blunt: “Although a thorough review was conducted four years ago—and a direction chosen, contracts awarded, tests conducted, and rockets built—the Augustine committee wants to stop work and do something new,” it claims. “This will widen the gap between the retirement of the shuttle and its replacement vehicle, waste billions of dollars and threaten Americas [sic] presence in space. You can STOP this.” (Neither, though, mentioned that the Augustine committee is advisory only, and any decisions on the future of NASA’s human spaceflight program will be handed by the White House and Congress.)
So who produced the video? The video is posted to the account of “Rounderb”, and is his/her only video uploaded despite joining in January 2007. No other information is available on the site or in the video.
By Jeff Foust on 2009 September 1 at 7:25 am ET Or former astronauts, at least. Sunday’s Houston Chronicle included an op-ed by 16 former astronauts with their opinions for the Augustine committee and others on what direction national space policy should take. Their summarized conclusions:
We urge this panel, along with the president, Congress and the American people to consider that: Exploration must be recognized as a national imperative that sustains U.S. leadership in space; a significant increase in human space-flight safety should be accomplished under government leadership; we must leave low Earth orbit and explore destinations beyond; and sustaining robust funding and staying the course are imperative to implementing a safe, reliable and meaningful space exploration program worthy of our nation.
The second point—crew safety—might get the most attention, in that the writers endorse the current Constellation architecture—one that appears in jeopardy given the Augustine committee’s proposed options and agency budget pressures—as one “infused with generational lessons learned, well planned and scrutinized by multiple stakeholders to provide a safe and reliable system for our nation.” (It should be noted that some of the authors now work for companies involved in Constellation.) They also appear to endorse alternative, commercial crew and cargo transportation options, but in a more lukewarm fashion, saying that these “new entrants to the aerospace community” (hello, SpaceX) could “possibly” move from cargo to crew if they demonstrate performance and ability to meet NASA crew safety requirements. “This is a sensible, milestone-driven approach that ensures appropriate measures are being taken to protect our assets while allowing NASA to focus on its current program.”
By Jeff Foust on 2009 September 1 at 6:54 am ET Several outlets reported yesterday that the Augustine committee was delaying the completion of its final report, originally planned for the end of August. That’s not surprising if you have been following the updates posted by the committee (officially the Review of US Human Space Flight Plans committee) on its web site: early last week it noted that the committee was performing some additional “parametric performance calculations” that would delay the final release. However, the conclusions, including its suggested options, remain unchanged from what the committee discussed in its final public hearing on August 12th and briefed to the White House two days later. Moreover, the White House will also be getting within the next or so a draft executive summary of the final report.
The fact that commercial options for cargo and/or crew transportation to low Earth orbit factored heavily in many of those options got some attention in the days and weeks since that final public hearing, from The Wall Street Journal to Florida Today. Today the Washington Post endorsed greater commercialization as part of an editorial on NASA’s human spaceflight program. The editorial is somewhat critical of NASA’s current plans, saying that now’s the time “to take a step back to assess the right role for a manned space program that requires billions of dollars annually — and for what?” Concerned that “truly ground-breaking” (and robotic) programs might be threatened by the needs to maintain the ISS and move beyond LEO, it argues that one solution is for NASA to turn over cargo and crew transportation to the ISS to the private sector, which presumably can do this for less than what NASA would spend itself. Its conclusion:
It’s time to boldly go where no man has gone before. That means opening space to the kind of private-sector competition that revolutionized cyberspace and making sure the next human exploratory efforts are based on real scientific need.
|
|
