By Jeff Foust on 2009 April 24 at 9:08 am ET It’s become increasingly clear in recent weeks—indeed, even in recent days—that NASA and the White House will need to make some major decisions in the very near future about the agency’s future direction. At the end of the month NASA will be free to resume preparations to retire the shuttle as a provision in the NASA authorization act passed last year expires, and it appears current agency leadership will do so, despite efforts (or at least pleas) from shuttle supporters in Congress to at least allow the flyout of the remaining missions slip into 2011.
Then there are the problems with Constellation. AviationWeek.com reported Wednesday that Orion may only be able to carry four astronauts, not six, to the ISS because of weight issues. The same day the Orlando Sentinel reported that NASA had pushed back its internal date for the first ares 5 lunar flight from 2018 to 2020, putting in greater doubt the ability of NASA under the current architecture to return humans to the Moon by 2020. Meanwhile, an Aerospace Corporation study reportedly argues that an EELV-based system could launch Orion.
All this is taking place, of course, with only an acting administrator at NASA. And that has some people perturbed. “Yet the apparent indecision from Obama, which if nothing else suggests to NASA employees that they rate lower on the President’s priorities than choosing a dog, is now causing some significant programmatic problems,” writes Eric “SciGuy” Berger in the Houston Chronicle. (Nevermind that the administration reportedly had several candidates for the job only to have them opposed by key Senators. Or that, last I checked, the president’s dog is not a position that requires Senate confirmation.) Moreover, the NASA administrator rumor mill has been quiet of late: the latest report, in a NASASpaceFlight.com article published overnight, claimed that former NASA associate administrator Lori Garver “was expected to named [sic] the new NASA Administrator earlier in the week according to sources”. (The language makes it uncertain if Garver herself, previously considered a likely candidate for deputy administrator, was going to be nominated, or if she was going to be recommending someone.)
However, while we can agree that it’s better to have a NASA administrator than to not have one, it’s not at all certain that having one right now would ameliorate much of the uncertainty surrounding the agency’s future. A lot of big decisions NASA is currently facing, including whether to extend the shuttle and what to do about Constellation, have implications that would likely require at least coordination with, if not approval from, the White House. (And then there’s Congress, a whole other story.) And the administration is, apparently, examining those issues: the NASASpaceFlight.com report cited above also states that Garver will be leading a “major content review” of Constellation, with a separate review being led by NASA Ames director Pete Worden (the link between the two panels isn’t made explicit in the article.)
Another thing to keep in mind is that even if the White House nominated someone for the job today (hey, anything’s possible…) it would still be several weeks, if not a couple of months, before he or she would take office: besides a confirmation hearing and full Senate vote there’s always the possibility any Senator could put a hold on the nomination for any reason, even completely unrelated to the job, as what happened to John Holdren and Jane Lubchenco, OSTP director and NOAA administrator nominees, earlier this year. That suggests that it might be early summer at the earliest before a new administrator will be in office, by which time a decision may have already been made on the future of the shuttle and another all teed up regarding the future of Constellation.
By Jeff Foust on 2009 April 23 at 6:57 am ET A couple of upcoming hearings by the House Science and Technology Committee:
Today at 10 am the energy and environment subcommittee is holding a hearing on “Continued Oversight of NOAA’s Geostationary Weather Satellite System”. The hearing will discuss a new GAO report on the progress of the next-generation GOES-R satellite program, and feature witnesses from the GAO, NOAA, and NASA.
Next Tuesday the 28th at 2pm the space subcommittee will hold a hearing on “Keeping the Space Environment Safe for Civil and Commercial Users”, with presumably a focus on space debris and space situational awareness issues. Scheduled witnesses include USAF Lt. Gen. Larry D. James, NASA orbital debris chief scientist Nicholas Johnson, Richard DalBello of Intelsat General, and Scott Pace of George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute.
By Jeff Foust on 2009 April 22 at 8:12 am ET Often export control seems like the weather: everyone talks about, but no one seems to be able to do anything about it. ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations), the export control rules that govern the US space industry, are a frequent target of complaints, criticism, and calls for reform, such as recent efforts by Congressman Brad Sherman, chair of the trade subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. To date those efforts to reform ITAR has not resulted in success, but today there’s word of a small victory working within the current ITAR framework.
The Economist reports this morning that regulators have agreed that prospective spaceflight participants will not need any export control agreements to fly on US suborbital or orbital vehicles. There had been concern that non-US customers might need a technical assistance agreement (TAA) in order to legally obtain technical data about the vehicles they’re flying on, including basic information that would be neccesary for safety. Bigelow Aerospace asked for an exemption, arguing that, in the article’s words, “taking a passenger flight does not mean you can build an aeroplane”. The State Department apparently agrees, as Bigelow’s Mike Gold said they got “everything we could want” from the ruling, although citizens of some countries (China, Iran, North Korea, and Sudan) would be still not be allowed to fly.
In a related note, the AIAA is holding a half-day meeting titled “Entrepreneurial Space and Export Control: Red Tape in the Final Frontier” next Wednesday the 29th in Washington. Congressman C.A. “Dutch” Ruppersberger will be the keynote speaker, followed by panels providing the views of industry and government. Presumably this recent ruling will be one topic of discussion…
By Jeff Foust on 2009 April 21 at 7:44 am ET I wasn’t at the Goddard Memorial Dinner last Friday night (a black-tie affair well above my pay grade). However, by Monday I had received a few copies of the speech that former NASA administrator Mike Griffin gave in acceptance of the Goddard Trophy awarded to him at the event. Griffin, who had been keeping a relatively low public profile in the last three months (beyond the news last week that he had been hired as a professor and “eminent scholar” at the Univ. of Alabama in Huntsville) used the speech in part to criticize the role of the Office of Management and Budget in carrying out (or interfering with) national space policy.
Griffin noted that the OMB’s recent “passback” of the proposed budget to the agency took $3.5 billion out of the exploration systems line over the next four years. “When combined with earlier reductions of almost $12 billion during the Bush Administration, well over $15 billion has been extracted from the Exploration Systems budget in the five short years since the new space policy was announced,” Griffin said, according to the prepared text of his remarks. He added that meant only $500 million was available to work on Ares 5 and Altair prior to 2015.
A little later in the speech Griffin took sharper aim at OMB:
Let me be clear. In a democracy, the proper purpose of the OMB is not to find a way to create a Potemkin Village at NASA. It is not to create the appearance of having a real space program without having to pay for it. It is not to specify to NASA how much money shall be allocated for human lunar return by 2020. The proper purpose of the OMB is to work with NASA, as a partner in good government, to craft carefully vetted estimates of what is required to achieve national policy goals. The judgment as to whether the stated goals are too costly, or not, is one to be made by the nation’s elected leadership, not career civil service staff.
As for whether the US could afford NASA’s plans, he had this to say:
We’re “investingâ€, if that is the word, hundreds of billions of dollars in entities whose claim to the money rests on the premise that they have failed to manage their enterprises properly, but are too important to be allowed to founder. This nation’s space program, both civil and military, has been one of the most successful endeavors in human history. On the platform of that success we ended the Cold War and built two generations of world technical and political leadership. Maybe we should consider funding more such success.
And he also came to the defense of the current exploration architecture that is, to large degree, his legacy at NASA:
I’ve grown impatient with the argument that Orion and Ares 1 are not perfect, and should be supplanted with other designs. I don’t agree that there is a better approach for the money, but if there were, so what? Any proposed approach would need to be enormously better to justify wiping out four years worth of solid progress. Engineers do not deal with “perfectâ€. Your viewgraphs will always be better than my hardware. A fictional space program will always be faster, better, and cheaper than a real space program.
Griffin’s comments did generate a rather mild reaction from the White House. “The president is very committed to human space exploration and believes that NASA has a critical role to play in pushing the bounds of human understanding and achievement,” OMB spokesman Kenneth Baer told the Houston Chronicle.
By Jeff Foust on 2009 April 16 at 7:46 am ET The Congressional Budget Office this week released a report analyzing various budget scenarios for carrying out the Vision for Space Exploration. This report was prepared as directed by the NASA Authorization Act of 2008 (section 410), which required the CBO to update its 2004 analysis of the projected costs of implementing the VSE.
The CBO report takes as a baseline NASA’s current plans, which project an average annual MASA budget of $19.1 billion between 2010 and 2025. This baseline includes retiring the shuttle next September, putting Ares 1 and Orion into service in March 2015, ending support for the ISS in December 2015, and landing humans on the Moon in 2020. It also calls for 79 science missions to take place through 2025. The CBO report then looks at four alternative scenarios:
Schedule Slips: Using estimates of historic cost growth in NASA programs, the first scenario kept funding fixed and allowed schedules to slip as a result. The shuttle is still retired in September 2010 and ISS work terminated by 2016, but in this case Ares 1 and Orion slip to late 2016 and the human return to the Moon is delayed to 2023. The number of science missions performed in the period also goes down, to 64.
Paying to Keep on Schedule and Close the Gap: A second scenario examined what it would take to keep Ares 1/Orion and the human return to the Moon on schedule, as well as address concerns about the Shuttle-Constellation gap by keeping the shuttle flying until 2015 and maintain ISS operations through 2020. It would also maintain the full suite of planned science missions. In this case NASA’s average annual budget increases to $23.8 billion, almost a 25% increase. Moreover, much of that additional spending is in the near term: the report projects an average annual budget of $23 billion in 2010-2013, compared to $18.2 billion for the same period in the baseline.
Paying for Constellation Only: A third scenario looked at keeping Ares 1/Orion and the human return to the Moon on schedule, but maintaining plans to retire the shuttle and station and allowing science missions to slip as in the first scenario. In that case the average annual NASA budget increases to $21.1 billion in 2010-2025, a 10% increase.
Using Science to Pay for Constellation: The fourth and final option considered by the CBO is to keep Constellation on schedule, but instead of providing additional overall funding for NASA taking the money from science and aeronautics programs. In that scenario the number of science missions performed in the 2010-2025 period drops by nearly half, to 44.
By Jeff Foust on 2009 April 14 at 7:19 am ET While members of Florida’s Congressional delegation push to keep the space shuttle flying after 2010, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) remains on the side of Constellation, particularly the Ares 1. He told the Huntsville Times that NASA couldn’t afford flying the shuttle after 2010 while also supporting Ares and the ISS. “With only so much resources out there, I think we ought to move forward,” Shelby said. “You always have to be looking to the future. What is the next step? Ares plays a big role in that.” He added in the video below that he’ll do “everything that I can to move forward and not just sit on the status quo.”
| Sen. Richard Shelby on the Ares Rocket |
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Also note in the video the comments about the relationship he had with former NASA administrator Mike Griffin. In a tangentially-related piece, the Times reports that the Univ. of Alabama Huntsville is considering hiring Griffin as an “eminent scholar” and tenured engineering professor.
By Jeff Foust on 2009 April 10 at 7:19 pm ET While the White House may not have settled on its pick to be NASA administrator, a libertarian group is prepared if, by some freakish turn of events, it came to power. The group announced today that its pick to “run” NASA would be Jim Davidson. Read on for why “run” is in quotes:
Davidson has been a space enthusiast since 1968, active in the private space migration movement since 1977, and involved in many start-up space ventures since 1986. He has worked with NASA contractors, astronauts, and Russia’s space industry. He has long held the view that NASA should be eliminated and its assets returned to the private sector.
NASA delenda est, indeed.
[Note: the original post indicated this was a Libertarian Party initiative. It is not, as Mr. Knapp notes in the comments. We regret the error.]
By Jeff Foust on 2009 April 10 at 6:58 am ET The journal Science wasn’t the only publication new presidential science advisor John Holdren talked with this week when he discussed issues like the future of the shuttle and cooperation with China. In an interview with Nature, Holdren addresses that comment by President Obama regarding the “sense of drift” at NASA:
The president said recently that there is a “sense of drift” at NASA, and yet the 2010 budget outline broadly supports the status-quo by retiring the shuttle to make room for manned spaceflight. Does NASA’s mission need to be re-evaluated or not?
What the president said is our space programme has been drifting. What we had in the last administration was the articulation of a grand vision for going back to the moon and going back to Mars, but no budget to go with it. The consequences of that for NASA have been quite devastating, in terms of decimating the Earth sciences programme at NASA, decimating the aeronautics programme at NASA and putting at risk the constellation of Earth observation satellites.
Clearly we need to reconcile NASA’s missions and budgets. We need to think about how we manage the right balance between manned space exploration and robotic space exploration. We need to manage the balance between looking up and looking down, the Earth observation part versus the space exploration part. We need to balance the aeronautics and the astronautics. That’s going to have to involve a new NASA administrator.
Do we know when that is going to happen?
I certainly hope we have a new administrator in place in the next month — that is a hope, and not a prediction.
Well, we can only hope, if for nothing else to put an end to all the administrator guessing games.
Those comments are also summarized by the AP at the end of its article on the interview.
By Jeff Foust on 2009 April 9 at 1:05 pm ET Yesterday the Houston Chronicle wrote the obituary for Nick Lampson’s prospects to become NASA administrator, after Lampson himself appeared to tell the paper that the White House had not offered the job to him and that he was “moving on with my life”. Wait, not so fast, says the Orlando Sentinel in a mid-day blog post. A source “extremely close” to Lampson said that Lampson’s comments about “moving on” were misinterpreted and that the former congressman was “still in the running” despite that report, and still interested in the job.
Perhaps Lampson could clear up all the confusion with a Twitter post.
By Jeff Foust on 2009 April 8 at 9:11 pm ET We don’t have a NASA administrator yet, but we do have a presidential science advisor, in the form of John Holdren, who formally started work last month after a nomination hearing in February. In an interview today with the journal Science, Holdren addressed (among many other things) space policy issues.
He started with playing down and talk of additional shuttle missions after 2010, although not ruling out having the remaining missions on the manifest, as well as an additional mission (presumably for the AMS) slip beyond 2010:
ScienceInsider: Will we need additional shuttle missions to complete the space station?
Holdren: The current plan is to get an additional shuttle mission to the space station within the 2010 framework, and during the campaign the president said that he was open to the possibility of at least one more mission. The current thinking is that that can be done within 2010. If that can’t be done and things slip, then consideration will be given to going beyond that date. And that would be the last shuttle mission. There will be a gap in our capacity to put people in space with U.S. vehicles, because we will not have a follow-on to the shuttle ready before 2015.
Holden also suggested that Constellation (not mentioned by name) may not be ready in 2015, as many have speculated:
ScienceInsider: Will it [the gap] be only 4 years?
Holdren: I wouldn’t want to speculate. It’s going to be at least that long. I don’t see any way we can do it before 2015, and if things go as they often do, it might be a little later than 2015. And what we’ll have to do in that interim period is rely on our international partners, which means the Russians. It might also be the Chinese, depending on how our relationship develops.
Wait, did he suggest flying NASA astronauts on Shenzhou spacecraft?
ScienceInsider: Do you have confidence in China’s ability to launch our astronauts?
Holdren: I think it’s possible in principle to develop the required degree of confidence in the Chinese. I put it out there only as speculation, but I don’t think it should be ruled out.
Later in the interview, he indicates plans for reviving the National Space Council in some form have yet to be finalized, although he said some type of space council would be created:
ScienceInsider: What’s the relationship between NSTC [National Science and Technology Council] and the new space council?
Holdren: The space council is not yet fully articulated. One model is that it would be co-chaired by NSC and OSTP because of civil and military aspects of space. But it might sit as a committee within PCAST [President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology] or be freestanding. In a previous time, it reported to the office of the vice president. There are different options that are being considered. But there will be a space council. And again, it will be meaningful because, where ever it sits, its conclusions will propagate to the president. We’ve got a president who cares about these issues and who has a huge capacity to absorb complex issues, and we’re going to use that capacity.
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