By Jeff Foust on 2014 February 20 at 7:00 am ET When Congress completed the fiscal year 2014 omnibus spending bill last month, the report accompanying the bill included some specific language regarding NASA’s Discovery program of relatively small planetary science missions. That report directed NASA to issue an announcement of opportunity (AO) for the Discovery program’s next round “no later than May 1, 2014,” and select one or more missions by September 2015. That language was an effort by Congress to encourage NASA to increase the tempo of Discovery-class missions, a topic of concern among planetary scientists.
On Wednesday, NASA issued a synopsis of that planned Discovery solicitation, indicating that it will miss the deadline in the omnibus report by several months. Under NASA’s current plan, it will release a draft version of the AO in May and seek comments from the community. NASA will release the final AO in September, with proposals due 90 days later. NASA will award “Phase A” studies of potential missions—in effect, a selection of finalists—in May 2015, with the final selection to come by October 2016. That will be more than a year after the language in the Congressional report, and more than four years after NASA selected the previous Discovery mission, the InSight Mars lander.
The delay in releasing the AO, though, is not surprising. Shortly after the omnibus spending bill passed last month, Jim Green, director of NASA’s planetary sciences division, told a meeting of the Planetary Science Subcommittee of the NASA Advisory Council that the schedule in the congressional report wasn’t realistic. He said that releasing the AO so quickly “would catch everyone by surprise.” Instead, he said his office was working on a revised schedule that would release the AO before the end of the fiscal year, which the schedule released Wednesday maintains.
The synopsis contained few surprises about the content and scope of the upcoming solicitation. The missions proposed must fit within a cost cap of $450 million (in 2015 dollars), including a 25% cost reserve; launch vehicle costs, though, are not included in that cap. NASA is also willing to provide some advanced technologies for proposed missions, such as an ion propulsion system and heat shield, and may require the missions to include a laser communications system.
However, proposals cannot include the use of radioisotope power systems, since the fueling of such systems “cannot be met in time for the expected launch window” of these missions, which is no later than the end of 2021. NASA has previously offered an Advanced Stirling Radioisotope Generator (ASRG), a more efficient version of the radiosiotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) used on other NASA missions, and two of the three finalists for the previous Discovery round planned to use ASRGs. But InSight, the winning mission, is solar powered, and last November NASA stopped plans to procure ASRGs in a money-saving move, since there were no missions on the books to use them.
By Jeff Foust on 2014 February 20 at 6:33 am ET Last year’s government shutdown, which ended more than four months ago, now seems like a distant memory, particularly now that Congress has found ways to work more cooperatively on issues like the fiscal year 2014 omnibus appropriations bill and debt limit increase. But while the shutdown might now seem like a bizarre fever dream to many, it could be a lasting nightmare for one NASA mission.
NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission, a set of four identical spacecraft designed to study plasma phenomena in the Earth’s magnetosphere, has a “launch readiness date” of this October, and an “agency baseline commitment” to launch next March. However, NASA Goddard director Chris Scolese said Tuesday that the actual launch date for the mission is now uncertain, Space News reported. Work on the mission at Goddard stopped during the shutdown that lasted for more than half of October, and, as a result, the mission lost its place in the launch queue with United Launch Alliance.
Scolese said he was sure the spacecraft would not launch this year, and, in a worst-case scenario, would have to wait until 2016. However, he said it may be possible to find a launch window for MMS during 2015 if another mission planned during that time experiences delays, opening up room on ULA’s launch manifest.
That delay is more serious than what NASA reported shortly after the shutdown ended. In a briefing to the Space Studies Board in early November, Marc Allen of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate said that the shutdown had delayed MMS by about a month, but that the spacecraft were “still within the launch window” despite that delay.
However, a delay is hardly the worst thing the MMS mission has had to worry about recently. In November, one of the four spacecraft was being trucked from Goddard to the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington for testing when an environmental control unit on the truck caught fire. The spacecraft was not damaged in the fire, although the truck sustained $50,000 in damage.
By Jeff Foust on 2014 February 16 at 8:01 pm ET In April 2007, voters in Doña Ana County, New Mexico, which includes Las Cruces, voted for a quarter-percent gross receipts tax that would be used primarily help fund construction of Spaceport America, with a portion going towards educational programs. A year later, voters in Sierra County, where the spaceport is located, approved the same tax. Now, however, both uses of the tax are under fire in the New Mexico Legislature, with bills pending to alter the use of those tax funds that must pass before the legislature adjourns on Thursday or die.
In the state Senate, Sen. Lee Cotter (R-Las Cruces) introduced SB 172, a bill that would require funds collected by the tax for the spaceport (three quarters of the tax revenue) be used solely for debt service on the bonds sold for spaceport construction or to begin paying off those bonds early. Currently, any excess if funds after interest is paid—currently about $600,000 per year—is used to support spaceport operations. The bill has made it through one Senate committee and is pending approval of another.
In an op-ed in the Las Cruces Sun-News a week ago, Cotter argued that the use of tax funds to support spaceport operations constituted a “bait and switch” for taxpayers. “Every dollar spent on daily operations extends the increase in taxes for years to come, injuring our local taxpayers,” he wrote.
Rick Holdridge, chairman of the board of the New Mexico Spaceport Authority, countered in an op-ed Sunday in the same newspaper that using the funds for spaceport operations is crucial right now, as the spaceport transitions to operations. “Now is not the time to withdraw support, just when the spaceport is poised to start paying dividends,” he wrote, adding that the decision to use the tax revenue in this way has been approved by local officials several times in public meetings.
The other one quarter of the spaceport tax revenue that is earmarked to support educational programs is also under scrutiny in Santa Fe. HB 13 would count that revenue when making calculations of what state aid the districts receive; in essence, the bill would reduce the aid districts in the two counties receive by the amount of funding they get from the spaceport tax—a cut from what they’re getting now. That bill has already passed the New Mexico House and is in committee in the state Senate. That is causing concern in Las Cruces, the Sun-News reported Sunday, although the impact of the bill, even if it does pass and is signed into law by Gov. Susana Martinez, remains unclear.
By Jeff Foust on 2014 February 14 at 7:34 am ET Late Wednesday, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) issued a statement about a recently-completed independent study of NASA’s “Foreign National Access Management”, or FNAM, efforts, including security and export control issues, a hot issue for Wolf in recent years. And Wolf made clear he was not happy with what he saw. “Frankly, I was taken aback at the breadth and depth of security challenges identified across NASA,” he said in the statement, adding that the report “confirms not only the serious security challenges that need to be addressed, but a persistent organizational culture that fails to hold center leadership, employees and contractors accountable for security violations. This must change.”
The report itself is not publicly available, as NASA considers it “Sensitive But Unclassified,” which Wolf also criticized. “I am deeply disappointed the agency has restricted access to the report. The report should be made public as soon as possible, with any necessary redactions in the interest of national security.”
The executive summary of the report is available, though, and it doesn’t sound nearly as dire as Wolf’s statements. “NASA staff members are dedicated, knowledgeable, committed to the mission, and genuinely happy to be working for NASA,” the summary states. “NASA interviewees for this study were candid, cooperative, and eager to both offer suggestions and be involved in problem solving. Most NASA employees understood the challenge to share with, as well as to protect information from foreign nationals.”
The summary also stated that “NASA leaders have already taken a number of positive steps to correct some of the weaknesses” it its FNAM processes, which were outlined in a letter by NASA administrator Charles Bolden to the study’s chairman, former US Attorney General Richard Thornburgh. Bolden, in the letter, largely accepted the report’s recommendations and discussed how the agency will, or already was, implementing them.
As for the “persistent organizational culture” issue that Wolf raised, the closest that the publicly available document comes to addressing this are recommendations to “improve accountability” and to “guard against the tendency to revert back to prior lax habits.” The report also suggests that NASA should “decrease the competitiveness, and correspondingly, increase cooperation between Centers,” a recommendation that would have implications—and challenges—that go far beyond the issues of the report itself. (In his letter, Bolden wrote that “NASA’s culture combines the richness of diversity and appropriately healthy competition among our Centers, while fostering an overall NASA team environment.”)
NASA commissioned the report at the behest of Wolf, after he criticized the agency for “security violations at NASA’s Ames and Langley research centers.” That included the arrest of Langley researcher and Chinese national Bo Jiang last March on allegations of espionage. Jiang, though, was later found to have no sensitive or controlled documents on his computer, only “sexually explicit images,” and was deported. The incident, and the moratorium on foreign national visits to NASA centers that followed, also caused hassles for NASA when it nearly derailed a science conference at NASA Ames last fall.
By Jeff Foust on 2014 February 12 at 6:07 am ET A provision of the fiscal year 2014 omnibus appropriation bill approved last month requires NASA to conduct “an independent benefit-cost analysis” of its commercial crew program “that takes into consideration the total Federal investment in the commercial crew program and the expected operational life of the International Space Station.” The bill withholds $171 million of the $696 million provided for commercial crew until NASA certifies to Congress that the analysis has bee completed.
At last week’s FAA Commercial Space Transportation Conference in Washington, Phil McAlister, director of commercial spaceflight at NASA, said that study was underway, but didn’t say when he expected the study to be complete. “We are actively working that,” he said. “We hope to be able to clear that hurdle and satisfy that Congressional language and get those funds released as soon as possible.”
Last August, Reps. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Bill Posey (R-FL) introduced the Suborbital and Orbital Advancement and Regulatory Streamlining (SOARS) Act, legislation that they say would “streamline” commercial spaceflight regulations. There’s been little action on the bill, though, since its introduction, other that brief testimony about the bill that McCarthy—the House Majority Whip—gave to the House Science Committee in November.
At the FAA conference last week, Congressional staffers were noncommittal about the fate of the legislation as either a standalone bill or incorporation into something like a planned update of the Commercial Space Launch Act (CSLA). Tom Hammond of the House Science Committee staff noted that some of the provisions of the SOARS Act, such as allowing a vehicle that obtains a launch license to retain its experimental permit, have also been discussed for inclusion in the proposed CSLA update. Ann Zulkosky of the Senate Commerce Committee staff said she was unaware of any member of the committee interested in a Senate companion bill to the SOARS Act, with plans instead to address those issues in a CSLA update.
By Jeff Foust on 2014 February 11 at 6:54 am ET On Friday, Canadian Industry Minister James Moore released a new space policy document, “Canada’s Space Policy Framework,” at an event in Ottawa. The document outlined, in broad terms, Canadian space policy in the form of a set of five core principles:
- Canadian Interests First
- Positioning the Private Sector at the Forefront of Space Activities
- Progress Through Partnerships
- Excellence in Key Capabilities
- Inspiring Canadians
The document also includes some basic implementation details, although without a great degree of specifics. The policy calls on Canada to use private sector capabilities “wherever feasible” to provide space products and services, rather than develop them within government agencies. It also supports continued investments in key space technologies where Canada has traditionally excelled, such as robotics and space-based radar. It also endorses continued use of the International Space Station and maintaining the nation’s astronaut corps “so as to have Canadians aboard current and future space laboratories and research facilities.” It also calls for the creation of a Canadian Space Advisory Council, composed of representatives of “the full range of stakeholders in the public and private space domain,” to support the development of future policies and strategies.
What the framework doesn’t do, though, is offer much in the way of specifics regarding programs and funding. There’s no mention in the framework of funding for the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) or other government agencies involved in space activities. There’s also no mention of specific programs beyond the ISS and the James Webb Space Telescope; the report endorses continued a continued Canadian role in the NASA-led project.
The head of the Aerospace Industries Association of Canada endorsed the framework. “We are very pleased that the government has released the Space Policy Framework, and we applaud Minister Moore and his colleagues for recognizing the importance of Canadian innovation and industry as we continue to build on our nation’s proud heritage in space,” Jim Quick, CEO of AIAC, said in a statement.
But the leading opposition party, the New Democratic Party (NDP), used the report’s release to criticize the Conservative government for cuts in Canadian space spending. “The Conservatives have slashed the Canadian Space Agency’s budget, crippling important programs like those that help industry demonstrate that new technologies are space-ready and stimulate youth interest in space-based careers,” said NDP deputy Industry critic Anne Minh-Thu Quach in a statement.
Marc Garneau, Canada’s first astronaut and a former CSA president who is now a member of Parliament for the opposition Liberal party, was more supportive of the framework, but wondered if the government would back up its plans with sufficient funding. “I will wait to see whether the grand words of this framework are going to turn into something positive for Canada’s space program,” he told the CBC. “Fine words have to be backed up by actions and that involves money as well.”
Some more details on Canadian space plans—and funding—may come later today when the Canadian government releases its 2014 budget proposal. The CSA’s core budget had been about C$300 million (US$270 million) per year but is expected to drop to as low as C$260 million (US$235 million) by 2015.
By Jeff Foust on 2014 February 8 at 4:40 pm ET Rep. Mo Brooks, the Alabama Republican whose district includes NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and who sits on the House Science Committee, may be facing a different kind of competition in November. Mark Bray, an engineer for Jacobs Engineering in Huntsville currently working on the Space Launch System (SLS), announced Friday that he plans to run for Brooks’s seat, but as an independent. “I want to serve this district as an independent with no party affiliation so that I can truly serve the people with no strings attached,” he told local TV station WHNT.
Bray tells the Huntsville Times that it was space policy, specifically, the decision by the Obama Administration in 2010 to cancel the Constellation Program and the debate that ensued, that got him interested in a Congressional run. “I saw NASA and the space program — which used to be a bipartisan, everybody-loved-it kind of thing — become a political football,” he told the newspaper. He said he tried to work with Republicans on space policy issues, without success. “I took some stuff behind the scenes, tried to see if I could work something in policy and it didn’t fit with the mantra they wanted to sell, which was anti-Democrat.”
Bray, who works on on materials development and qualification of new propulsion systems for SLS, according to the bio on his campaign web site, is running as an independent, but is looking for Democrats for support in signing petitions to get on the ballot for November. No Democrats are running against Brooks, who is facing one Republican in the June primary, Jerry Hill. Bray said he needs to collect about 6,800 signatures from qualified voters in the district in order to appear on the ballot.
By Jeff Foust on 2014 February 7 at 3:00 pm ET One year ago, members of Congress involved in space issues had some high hopes for 2013, including a new NASA authorization bill and an update of the Commercial Space Launch Act (CSLA). By the end of the year, though, House and Senate committees had approved sharply different NASA authorization bills—neither of which had been taken up by the full House or Senate—and hadn’t even started a CSLA update. (Even getting an extension of commercial launch indemnification was a challenge.) This year, though, key members and their staffs say they’ll try again to get both bills through Congress.
Speaking Wednesday morning at the 17th Annual FAA Commercial Space Transportation Conference in Washington, Rep. Steven Palazzo (R-MS), chairman of the space subcommittee of the House Science Committee said he was hopeful that a bipartisan version of the NASA authorization bill—debate about which was unusually partisan last year—could be completed. “I think a bipartisan bill is in the realm of reality,” he said. Last month, the chairman of the full committee, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), expressed a similar desire for a bipartisan bill now that the two-year budget deal reached late last year can help resolve the sharp differences in authorized funding levels between the House and Senate versions.
During a panel at the conference later Wednesday, staff members from the House and Senate agreed that Congress will work on a revised NASA authorization bill in the coming weeks. “Sen. Nelson would certainly like to get that updated in light of the budget deal and the omnibus, and get that moving again early this year,” said Ann Zulkosky of the Senate Commerce Committee, referring to Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL), chairman of the committee’s space subcommittee.
“The only controversy that I think rose out of the NASA authorization markup really dealt with funding issues,” said Tom Hammond of the House Science Committee staff, referring to that committee’s markup of its version of a NASA authorization last July. With the budget deal and 2014 appropriations done, “I think members are hopeful that a lot of that will be behind them and they’ll be able to move forward early this spring.”
Both the House and Senate plan to take up legislation to update the CSLA this year as well, with the House Science Committee’s hearing earlier this week on “necessary updates” to current law as the first step in that process. Palazzo said the House would likely consider several issues in that update, including how the FAA calculates “maximum probable loss” figures (the amount of third-party damages that commercial launch providers must insure against before federal indemnification kicks in), extending the current restrictions (aka “learning period”) on spaceflight participant safety regulations, and the treatment by the FAA of so-called “hybrid” vehicles that have both aircraft and spacecraft elements, like SpaceShipTwo and its carrier aircraft, WhiteKnightTwo. Hammond said later other issues could include the FAA’s interest in on-orbit authority to provide oversight of commercial space activities between launch and reentry, and addressing a current aspect of the law where a vehicle developer who has a permit for test flights has to give up that permit once it receives a launch license.
Zulkosky said the Senate Commerce Committee was looking to introduce a CSLA update bill “in the spring timeframe” along with a hearing on the topic. “This is an election year, so we have limited legislative days,” she said. “We’d like to get things going as quickly as possible this year.” Several issues she said the Senate bill would address are standards development, the license/permit issue, oversight within FAA of hybrid launch vehicles, updating commercial launch indemnification, and the commercial spaceflight regulatory restriction. “We are just really at the beginning phase of identifying what needs to be in a CSLA update,” Zulkosky said later in response to a question about potential provisions of the bill.
By Jeff Foust on 2014 February 6 at 6:27 am ET When Congress passed the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act (CSLAA) of 2004, one section of the bill restricted the FAA’s ability to promulgate regulations regarding the health and safety of spaceflight participants and crews of commercial spacecraft. While sometimes called a “moratorium” on regulations, it is more accurately a partial restriction: the law (51 USC 50905) still allows the FAA to issue regulations in the event of a serious of fatal injury during a flight, or an incident that posed a “high risk” of causing such an injury. The commercial space industry frequently refers to this restriction as a “learning period,” since the intent of the bill was to allow companies to fly vehicles and build up experience upon which regulations could later be based.
The CSLAA originally set this regulatory restriction to expire eight years after the bill’s enactment, or December 2012, after which the FAA Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST) would be free to craft safety regulations. With suborbital vehicle developers experiencing delays in entering service, Congress extended the period to October 2015 in an FAA reauthorization bill two years ago. Now, Congress is weighing a further extension as part of a broader update of the Commercial Space Launch Act on tap for this year.
However, the head of FAA/AST made it clear in a hearing Tuesday by the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee that he does not support another extension of the learning period. At the hearing, Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-OK) asked George Nield, FAA associate administrator for commercial space transportation, whether he supported one proposal to extend the restriction to eight years after the first flight to carry a spaceflight participant, an approach some in industry have endorsed, including the FAA’s own Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC). “No, I do not agree with that,” Nield responded. “The US has over 50 years of experience in human spaceflight,” he argued, providing a large set of lessons learned for commercial spaceflight providers. “For us to just put that aside and start over without taking advantage of what we’ve learned, I think is irresponsible.”
Bridenstine then asked Nield if he opposed the original eight-year regulatory restriction in the 2004 CSLAA. “That’s correct,” Nield responded, “but I’m very sensitive to the concerns that industry has about government being overreaching and burdensome and holding things back. That is not what we want to do in the Office of Commercial Space Transportation. We want to enable safe and successful commercial operations.”
Some on the committee, though, supported some kind of extension of the current regulatory restriction. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), who authored the CSLAA ten years ago, said in retrospect that the restriction should have been structured “so that the eight-year timeline started with the first commercial flight carrying a spaceflight participant.” “Regulating in the absence of flight data is the worst choice we can make,” he warned.
The subcommittee chairman, Rep. Steven Palazzo (R-MS), also quizzed the witnesses about extending the regulatory restriction to eight years after the first participant-carrying flight (notably calling the current restriction a “learning period,” the industry’s preferred term.) “An arbitrary extension, such as the eight years that you mentioned in your question, might not be wise,” said Henry Hertzfeld of George Washington University. “But I think there is, at some point, a judgement call that will have to be made to end that period, and it should be based on the technical experience we’ve had” from flights.
By Jeff Foust on 2014 February 5 at 8:34 am ET Speakers at a panel on export control reform at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington on Tuesday said that the part of the US Munitions List (USML) that deals with satellites and related items, Category XV, is the next one to be finalized. Kevin Wolf, Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Export Administration, said that satellites and another category, covering military electronics, are starting the process of Congressional notification “as soon as we can.” He declined to give a specific timeline for completing that effort and publishing the final rule, beyond that it should be done by “spring and early summer.”
“Satellites will be first, ahead of electronics,” added Brian Nilsson, Director of Non-Proliferation and Export Controls at the National Security Council.
The administration published a draft of the revised Category XV in late May. While generally well received by industry, given that it moved most commercial satellites and their components off the USML and thus no longer under ITAR, one area of concern was the decision to keep “man-rated sub-orbital, orbital, lunar, interplanetary or habitat” spacecraft on the USML. Nearly half of the comments submitted during the public comment period after the release of the draft Category XV list addressed this issue, with the vast majority calling for taking such spacecraft off the list. The panelists at the CSIS event did not directly address this specific issue.
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