By Jeff Foust on 2014 February 4 at 6:52 am ET At first glance, NASA’s astrophysics division got a pleasant surprise in the final fiscal year 2014 appropriations bill signed into law last month. The bill gives astrophysics $668 million, $26 million more than the $642 million originally requested by the administration. (The James Webb Space Telescope, funded as a separate line item in the budget, received its original request of $658 million.)
But, as Paul Hertz, director of NASA’s astrophysics division, told members of the Astronomy and Astrophysics Advisory Committee at a meeting Monday, there’s a catch. The final bill includes language from the earlier Senate report allocating $56 million of astrophysics funding for early development work on the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), a proposed mission that was the top-ranked large mission in the latest astrophysics decadal survey, but which NASA has not formally requested a new start for. That was significantly more than NASA had requested for the program, which will have impacts on other NASA astrophysics programs despite the increase in the overall budget.
“The rest of astrophysics, not including WFIRST and JWST, got $30 million less than we had requested and were planning for,” Hertz said. The agency is now working out how to accommodate that change in its FY14 operating plan, although he said he did not expect any major impacts to other astrophysics programs. “I think that we will be able to adjust to this appropriation without any noticeable negative effects on astrophysics” by rephasing programs.
At least, though, Hertz knows what his overall 2014 budget is. James Ulvestad, director of the NSF’s Division of Astronomical Sciences, told the same committee later Monday that since his division is not a line item in the appropriations bill, he doesn’t know yet how much money he’ll have available. NSF knows its funding in Research and Related Activities (R&RA), which funds the organizations broad range of research activities and constitutes more than 80 percent of NSF’s total budget, but not for the various directorates and divisions funded by R&RA.
Instead, Ulvestad said, the division has to wait for the NSF to develop its FY14 operating plan, due at the end of March. The R&RA account suffered about a 6.5% cut from its original request, but was up more than 4.5% from fiscal year 2013. How those changes percolate down to his division, which received $233 million in 2013 and requested $244 million for 2014, remain unknown. “So, somewhere between $230 and $244 million is likely where we will land,” he told the committee.
By Jeff Foust on 2014 February 2 at 2:19 pm ET Canada is expected to roll out a new national space policy later this week. The Canadian Press reports that Industry Minister James Moore, whose portfolio includes the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), will unveil the new policy on February 7 at 10 am in Ottawa. Neither Industry Canada nor CSA have formally announced plans to release the policy, although Canadian Press reports CSA sent invitations to the event have been sent to industry. The Canadian space community has sought such a policy for some time, but previous efforts had falled by the wayside; in December, Moore said a new long-term policy was complete and would be released in early 2014.
Florida Today reported Sunday that Rep. John Mica (R-FL) will hold a hearing at the Kennedy Space Center next Monday on how NASA has handled the distribution of excess property in the post-Shuttle era. The field hearing of the government operations subcommittee of the House Oversight and Government Reform hearing, chaired by Mica, will take place at 9 am EST on February 10 at the Debus Center of the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. (The hearing does not yet show up on the subcommittee’s website.) Mica told the Orlando Sentinel in November that he planned to hold the hearing to see what else NASA can do to rid itself of facilities it no longer needs. NASA has already entered into agreements with various companies and organizations to lease or otherwise take over operations of Shuttle processing facilities, the Shuttle Landing Facility runway, and Launch Complex 39A.
By Jeff Foust on 2014 January 31 at 12:30 pm ET To hear it from NASA, development of its largest science mission, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), remains on track. Last week, the agency announced that the program passed another milestone: a spacecraft critical design review (CDR), the last of several CDRs for various aspects of the space observatory. “What that means is all of the designs are complete for the Webb and there are no major designs left to do,” said NASA spacecraft bus manager Richard Lynch in the statement. And, this coming Monday, NASA administrator Charles Bolden will visit the JWST facilities at NASA Goddard along with the telescope’s biggest Congressional patron, Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, to discuss the progress being made on the telescope.
So, is JWST really in good shape? A report released earlier this month by the Government Accountability Office offers a qualified “yes” that question. “The JWST project has maintained its cost and schedule commitments since its 2011 replan, has continued to make good technical progress, and has implemented and enhanced efforts to improve oversight,” concludes the report.
However, that GAO report identified a number of issues with JWST’s development. The program’s cost and schedule performance had declined in 2013: its Cost Performance Index, a measure of the value of the work done versus the cost, dipped below 1 for much of the first half of 2013 (the latest time such data were available), which the GAO report notes is “unfavorable” since “work is being performed less efficiently than planned.” The report specifically noted issues with JWST’s cryocooler that caused schedule delays and increased costs, as well as other items that could reduce the program’s cost reserves. The program had 14 months of schedule reserve when the report was prepared, although Paul Hertz, director of NASA’s astrophysics division, noted at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society earlier this month that last October’s government shutdown caused a loss of about three weeks of that margin.
The GAO report also noted that NASA was not planning to update the joint cost and schedule confidence level analysis, or JCL, it performed in 2011 when it “replanned” JWST in response to schedule delays and cost overruns. The GAO recommended both to NASA and to Congress that the agency should perform another JCL analysis that is “based on a reliable schedule and current risks.
In a statement provided by the House Science Committee when the GAO issued its report, chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) praised the progress NASA made on the telescope but also echoed the concerns in the GAO report. “The GAO report shows that efforts made by NASA to tighten management show promise,” he said. “But recent cost and schedule performance has been declining since early 2013. NASA needs to better manage risks and control cost increases and schedule slips. Failure to reverse these recent negative trends jeopardizes not only JWST but also all of NASA’s science projects.”
By Jeff Foust on 2014 January 30 at 12:51 pm ET When Congress passed a three-year extension of the third-party commercial launch indemnification regime earlier this month (the pending legislation was used as the “legislative vehicle” for the omnibus fiscal year 2014 spending), industry celebrated the move, but some wondered if the extension would take pressure off Congress to take a broader look at commercial launch law, including a reauthorization of the Commercial Space Launch Act. House Democrats had sought only a one-year extension in order to examine the indemnification regime and related issues.
A House committee, though, plans to at least start the process of examining what needs to be changed in commercial space transportation law. The House Science Committee’s space subcommittee will hold a hearing next Tuesday afternoon titled “Necessary Updates to the Commercial Space Launch Act.” George Nield, associate administration for commercial space transportation at the FAA, will testify, along with Alicia Cackley of the GAO and Henry Hertzfeld of George Washington University. Nield and Cackley testified before the same subcommittee in mid-2012 specifically on launch indemnification.
That hearing, incidentally, comes on the eve of the FAA’s annual Commercial Space Transportation Conference on February 5-6 in Washington. Among those scheduled to speak: Rep. Steven Palazzo (R-MS), chairman of the space subcommittee.
By Jeff Foust on 2014 January 30 at 7:08 am ET California has lagged other states in enacting measures to support commercial space companies, but is now working hard to catch up. On Wednesday, the California Assembly passed AB 777 on a 69-5 vote. The bill would grant an exemption to property taxes for equipment “that has, or upon manufacture, assembly, or installation has, space flight capacity” of various forms, as well as property that would be flown on such vehicles, as well as fuels “used exclusively” for spaceflight. The tax exemption would remain in place until July 2024.
While the bill benefits any firm that has “a primary business purpose in space flight activities,” the company that triggered the legislation is SpaceX, after it received a property tax bill from Los Angeles County, Reuters reports. The bill was introduced by Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi (D), whose Southern California is near, but does not include, SpaceX’s headquarters and primary manufacturing facility in Hawthorne. The California State Association of Counties opposed the bill since they will lose out on an estimated $1.1 million a year in tax revenue should this become law.
AB 777 isn’t the only space-based legislation California’s legislature took up this week. On Monday, the Senate unanimously passed SB 415, which clarifies that an “informed consent” waiver provision for commercial human spaceflight is not “contrary to the public policy of this state.” That bill was introduced by Sen. Steve Knight (R), a vocal proponent of the state’s commercial space industry who has expressed an interest in running for the US House seat held by the retiring Rep. Buck McKeon (R-CA).
While California looks to give tax breaks to space companies there, one New Mexico legislator is seeking to better spend tax money being collected for that state’s commercial spaceport. New Mexico Sen. Lee Cotter (R) introduced this week SB 172, a bill that would require local sales taxes earmarked for Spaceport America be spent solely on paying off bonds for building it. Cotter recently expressed concern that the New Mexico Spaceport Authority was using the sales tax revenue to pay for spaceport operations, which he considers to go against the intent of voters in two southern New Mexico counties who voted for the tax in 2007 and 2008.
Spaceport officials say the tax revenue is needed to cover operations at a key time for the spaceport, whose major facilities are essentially complete but whose anchor tenant, Virgin Galactic, has not started operations here. “This money is really critical,” Christine Anderson, executive director of the New Mexico Spaceport Authority, told the Las Cruces (N.M.) Sun-News. “It’s really protecting the investment of the taxpayers because if we don’t have that, we may have to close the spaceport.”
By Jeff Foust on 2014 January 28 at 7:15 am ET Given the current range of space policy issues under discussion and debate, the concept of space property rights can seem a little, well, out there. Lunar bases and asteroid prospecting are still likely years in the future: can’t this issue wait? Not in the eyes of some legal experts and space advocates.
In an op-ed in this week’s Space News, Berin Szoka and Jim Dunstan argue that the US should take steps now to address the issue of space property rights, particularly regarding resources extracted from the Moon or other celestial bodies. They cite in particular Bigelow Aerospace’s interest in establishing a lunar base and utilizing lunar resources. “Fortunately, what’s needed to drive private investment isn’t the right to own a plot of land on the Moon or resell it to raise capital,” Szoka and Dunstan write. “It’s the rights sought by Bigelow: to extract, use and profit from extraterrestrial resources without interference.”
The approach they seek is not to go through a body like the UN or engage in protracted international negotiations, but instead to get support from the US government, in particular the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation (FAA/AST), to recognize the ownership by Bigelow (or other US companies) of the resources they extract, and to bar interference by US companies in those operations. They chose FAA/AST in part because their launch licensing process includes an interagency “payload review” that ensures that launches and their payloads comply with treaties and related international obligations. That process could become, they argue, a catalyst for a more permanent solution.
This op-ed was a response to one in Space News last month by lawyer Michael Listner, who argued any discussion of a space property rights regime was premature. “The current legal and policy environment is not ready for a regime that would unilaterally grant private property rights in outer space, and any attempt by the United States at this juncture to create such an independent regime for its citizens would be opposed by other nations and would result in significant geopolitical backlash,” he wrote in early December.
This topic came up at last month’s meeting of the FAA’s Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC) in Washington, just days after Listner’s original op-ed. “We want to reaffirm to the FAA that what we are looking for is confirmation that a company that invests in extraction of resources has ability to profit from them,” Bigelow’s Mike Gold, who is also chairman of COMSTAC, said during a meeting of the committee’s business and legal working group on December 10 as they crafted a recommendation calling for such an approach.
“We want property rights recognized, but I don’t think we’re interested in a very extensive regulatory regime,” said Paul Stimers of K&L Gates, who representing Planetary Resources at last month’s COMSTAC meeting. “We do need to provide that certainty to investors, to the people who are preparing to make a significant commitment to this effort, that they will be able to enjoy the fruits of their labor.”
By Jeff Foust on 2014 January 24 at 7:05 am ET The position of NASA Deputy Administrator has been vacant since Lori Garver left the agency in early September to become general manager of the Air Line Pilots Association. There has, since then, been occasional speculation about who might be picked to take the job, with some wondering if the position—which, like the administrator, requires a presidential nomination and Senate confirmation—might simply be left open through the end of the administration.
On Thursday, however, NASA administrator Charles Bolden said there is an active search underway to pick a new deputy administrator, although the ultimate decision is out of his hands. “The search is on,” he said during a question-and-answer session with attendees of a “NASA Social” event at the Kennedy Space Center prior to last night’s launch of the TDRS-L communications satellite there. “I don’t pick the deputy administrator. Like me, the deputy administrator is a presidential appointee. We’ve been through several candidates and everything, and my hope is that we’re narrowing in on a final candidate.”
Bolden didn’t disclose who the candidates for the position are, or when he expected the administration to formally nominate a deputy administrator. “I will say there are some very, very promising prospects out there, so I’m excited to get a deputy whenever they can get around to it,” he said.
By Jeff Foust on 2014 January 24 at 6:59 am ET Congress has been on recess this week, but there still have been a couple of developments this week involving members who have an interest in NASA programs and policy.
On Tuesday, Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) announced that he plans to run for governor of Louisiana, which means he could leave the Senate before his current term expires in 2016. Vitter, who once served as the ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee’s space subcommittee, has taken a particular interest in NASA’s use of the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. Last week, he visited Michoud with NASA administrator Charles Bolden to see work being done there on the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft. However, last fall he put a hold on the nomination of NASA chief financial officer Beth Robinson to become undersecretary at the Department of Energy, claiming that “NASA has been stalling on a job creating project at the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans for no apparent reason.” Robinson’s nomination is still pending.
Rep. Steve Stockman (R-TX), the congressman whose district includes the Johnson Space Center, had already announced that he would not run for reelection in 2014 to instead challenge Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) in the Republican primary for Cornyn’s Senate seat. Now, the AP reports, Stockman has effectively gone missing, skipping a string of House votes before this week’s recess and making “virtually no public appearances” in his long-shot Senate campaign. Stockman, who serves on the House Science Committee and its space subcommittee, has been active on social media, though, despite not making public appearances.
By Jeff Foust on 2014 January 21 at 7:13 am ET Late last week, the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) released its annual report on safety issues at NASA. As in recent years, one concern it highlighted in the report and accompanying cover letter is the level of funding for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program (CCP). ASAP remains worried that shortfalls in funding appropriated for the program versus the administration’s request could jeopardize safety of the systems.
“While the budget request to appropriated funding ratio was slightly improved in 2013… the shortfall remains a top concern and the 2014 budget remains uncertain,” ASAP chairman Joseph Dyer wrote in the report’s cover letter, presumably composed before the 2014 omnibus spending bill was completed last Monday; that bill gave the program $696 million of the requested $821 million, a higher ratio than in past years. “This shortfall is seriously impacting acquisition strategy, and there is risk that force-fitting the CCP into a fixed-price contract with only the funds available has the potential to adversely impact safety.”
That shortfall, though, doesn’t mean ASAP is recommending NASA change course on commercial crew development. “The ASAP does not recommend suspending efforts to return the U.S. to a capability to launch humans into space, even in the face of budget or other real-world constraints that yield increased risk in pursuit of great reward,” Dyer writes. “However, we fundamentally believe that NASA should be plain-speaking and transparent with regard to risk acceptance and that risk and reward must be pursued in harmony and balance.”
In ASAP’s previous report, the advisory group expressed similar concerns about commercial crew funding, including a version of the same chart depicting the differences between requested and appropriated funding for the program. (The chart in the 2013 report did get some better formatting from the 2012 version, apparently lifted directly from a default Excel chart layout.) “In FY13, we predict this planning-funding disconnect will again drive a change to acquisition strategy, schedule, and/or safety risk,” Dyer said in the cover letter to the 2012 report. However, in 2013 NASA continued its strategy to shift to FAR-based contracts for the next phase, Commercial Crew Transportation Capability, or CCtCap; it’s also maintained a schedule that has vehicles entering service in 2017, provided the program is fully funded. (Whether the $696 million appropriated for 2014, including $171 million withheld until NASA completes a cost-benefit analysis of ISS commercial crew transportation, is sufficient to maintain that schedule is unclear.) ASAP might consider the third prediction—safety risk—fulfilled, though, based on concerns in the 2013 report that “NASA is being perceived as sending a message that cost outranks safety” in the CCtCap request for proposals.
Unlike some recent ASAP reports, though, the panel took some time in the 2013 report to take a broader look at the question of safety in human spaceflight. “In the human space flight endeavor, the questions remain: How much risk is too much? How do we know if we’ve considered all the risks? Is perfection the goal or is ‘safe enough’ the objective?” asks the report. “It is unfortunate that we must use terms like ‘safe enough’ rather than ‘perfect,’ but we must also realize that there is no such thing as guaranteed mission success.” The ASAP report doesn’t attempt to determine what exactly is “safe enough,” noting that it “is not a classical scientific decision; rather, it is a policy decision.”
Of course, no mode of transportation is perfectly safe: people die every year doing everything from flying airplanes to riding bicycles. In this week’s issue of The Space Review, I contrast the ASAP report with a recent book, Safe Is Not an Option, by Rand Simberg. In the book, he makes the argument that the threshold of what’s considered “safe enough” has been set too high, limiting progress in space exploration; he attributes that in large part to the perception that spaceflight is not considered that important, and thus not worth a high degree of risk. As the ASAP report states, risk acceptance in government-funded human spaceflight boils down to a “policy decision”: what is it that you’re trying to achieve by sending humans to space, and how much risk are you willing to accept to achieve that goal?
By Jeff Foust on 2014 January 19 at 2:23 pm ET Most of the space community spent this past Tuesday, January 14, examining the details of the omnibus spending bill for fiscal year 2014 that funds NASA at ann overall level of $17.65 billion. Overlooked in that analysis, though, was another event: Tuesday marked the tenth anniversary of the speech by President George W. Bush at NASA Headquarters that formally unveiled what became known as the Vision for Space Exploration, a space exploration policy that has since been superseded by the Obama Administration’s policy, but whose shadow still stretches across the agency and the broader industry today.
The anniversary itself went largely unnoticed in the media. “Remember When George W. Bush Wanted to Send People to the Moon Again by 2020?” read the headline of a National Journal article Tuesday, one of the only articles about the Vision’s tenth anniversary. It only superficially examined the life and death of the Vision, and in its original version claimed NASA received $86 billion in 2004.
An op-ed in USA Today by Rand Simberg a day later looked a little more closely at the history of the Vision, blaming the Vision’s demise on NASA’s implementation of it through the Constellation program. Despite the chaos of 2010, when the Obama Administration “did a poor job of explaining its plans,” Simberg believes NASA is back to realizing the original, broader goals of Bush’s policy of “opening the cosmos” rather than the more specific goals of the policy of returning humans to the Moon by 2020. “But it is a future based not on nostalgia for the expensive crash Apollo program of 40 years ago, but more on traditional American values: competitive private activities, with both public/private partnerships and independent entrepreneurial activities from Internet billionaires.”
One similarity between the Vision for Space Exploration and the Obama Administration’s policy is the focus on Mars as a long-term goal: while they differ on where to go in the near- to mid-term, both plans feature humans going to Mars. “With the experience and knowledge gained on the Moon, we will then be ready to take the next steps of space exploration: human missions to Mars and to worlds beyond,” Bush said in his 2004 speech, without setting a specific deadline for such missions. Obama, in his April 2010 speech at the Kennedy Space Center, was more specific: “By the mid-2030s, I believe we can send humans to orbit Mars and return them safely to Earth. And a landing on Mars will follow. And I expect to be around to see it.”
A decade after Bush’s speech, is NASA really any closer to being able to send humans to Mars? One group thinks so. In a statement Tuesday by the Mars exploration advocacy group Explore Mars, a group of experts recently concluded “a human mission to Mars is both feasible and affordable assuming policy consistency among international space agencies and levels of funding consistent with pre-sequestration levels and modest increases annually in line with inflation.”
That conclusion was based on the findings of a three-day meeting held in Washington last month by a working group of more than 60 experts from various government, industry, and academic institutions. That group endorsed six principles for human Mars exploration, including that it is technically feasible by the 2030s and that it should be “the priority for human space flight over the next two to three decades.” That means making use of the International Space Station, and making sure that future human spaceflight activities are “prioritized in a manner that advances the objective of initial human missions to Mars beginning in the 2030s.”
As for what constitutes affordable, the report accompanying the release says that means spending at least a little more than today. “Current flat budgets are not realistic and result in reduced buying power over time. Modest increases will be necessary to achieve adequate support of this and other NASA priorities,” the report states. ” Budgetary increases for inflation must also be included as a minimum, so that NASA and our international partners’ buying power can be maintained for the duration of this long-term program.” (emphasis in original)
That budget stability, though, is hard to come by, as the Vision for Space Exploration demonstrated. In the infamous “sand chart” released with the Vision in 2004 (see slide 14 of the FY 2005 budget presentation by then administrator Sean O’Keefe), the administration projected that, by fiscal year 2014, NASA would have a budget of about $20 billion, with about a third of that being spent on exploration programs. The actual FY14 appropriations bill gives a little less than a quarter of its $17.65-billion budget on exploration programs—and that budget has been widely praised by the space community as being better than expected.
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