By Jeff Foust on 2014 January 9 at 6:21 am ET After word broke that the White House had backed plans to extend the life of the International Space Station to at least 2024, the administration scrambled to make the news official, holding a midday media telecon Wednesday to discuss the extension. Late in the day, NASA administrator Charles Bolden and presidential science advisor John Holdren issued a joint statement about the extension.
“The extension of ISS operation will allow NASA and the international space community to accomplish a number of important goals,” Bolden and Holdren wrote. Those goals include enhanced research utilization of the station, technology demonstration and long-duration human spaceflight research to support human exploration beyond Earth orbit, and supporting commercial space activities, including the transport of cargo and crew to the station. “The Obama Administration’s decision to extend its life until at least 2024 will allow us to maximize its potential, deliver critical benefits to our Nation and the world, and maintain American leadership in space,” Bolden and Holdren concluded.
That decision has won support from some key members of Congress. “I applaud the decision to extend the operations of the International Space Station,” said Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, in a statement. “Keeping ISS flying—and continuing the important research that goes on there—means taxpayers get more bang for the buck from this unique laboratory.”
Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) endorsed the extension, citing the benefits of continued ISS operations for Kennedy Space Center in his state. “This means more jobs at the Kennedy Space Center as we rebuild our entire space program,” he said in a brief video message provided by his office. “This is a robust future for KSC and our space program.”
The Democratic leadership of the House Science Committee backed the planned extension, while asking for more information. “I am pleased that the Administration is initiating an important dialogue with its international partners on the extension of ISS operations to at least 2024,” said Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), ranking member of the full committee, in an emailed statement. “I look forward to further details on the Administration’s proposal and on the planned priorities and objectives for ISS activities during the proposed extension.” Rep. Donna Edwards (D-MD), ranking member of the committee’s space subcommittee, offered similar qualified support in the same statement.
The proposed extension also got the support of a Republican member of Congress. “It’s inevitable and I’m delighted that NASA understands the value of ensuring that America continues to hold the high ground,” Rep. John Culberson (R-TX) told the Washington Post. Terminating the station “would be like General Meade handing over Little Round Top voluntarily… to the Chinese.”
While continuing ISS operations to at least 2024 has the support of many on Capitol Hill, it’s not yet clear what kind of support it has among NASA’s international partners on the program. “We’ve talked to the partners about this,” NASA associate administrator for human exploration and operations Bill Gerstenmaier said during Wednesday’s media telecon. He added they had been involved in the technical studies regarding the feasibility of operating the ISS as late as 2028, and have been aware of NASA’s interest in extending the station for several months. However, he acknowledged that an extension was a “big deal” for them. “They’ll continue to evaluate that over the next several years. I think in general they see this as a positive step that we’re moving forward” on this, he said.
One European official said Wednesday that while he endorsed an extension, getting others in Europe to support continued use of ISS may be a challenge. Germany supports use of the ISS “until 2020 and beyond,” said Johann-Dietrich Wörner, head of the German space agency DLR, at a media breakfast Wednesday in advance of an international space exploration conference and heads of agencies summit meeting Thursday and Friday in Washington. Germany is the biggest supporter of the ISS within ESA, and has lobbied other ESA member nations to fund Europe’s share of station operations.
“However, there are some problems,” he added. “Some of the member nations are reducing their financial support due to the economic crisis, and now we are in a very complicated discussion process at ESA concerning the future of the ISS.” He said ESA members need to “intensify” their use of the station rather than look to whatever comes after the station.
An extension of the ISS could open the door to adding new partners to the program, particular if some partners decide not to extend their commitment to the station beyond 2020. Wörner recalled suggesting India and China join the partnership when he was asked about it by the Augustine Committee in 2009. China, of course, creates some geopolitical complications, which he acknowledged. “I don’t think we will discuss this matter tomorrow,” he said, referring to the closed-door heads of agencies summit meeting Thursday at the State Department.
By Jeff Foust on 2014 January 8 at 7:20 am ET The Orlando Sentinel reported last night that the White House has approved plans to extend ISS operations beyond 2020 to 2024. NASA is expected to announce the extension this week, likely in conjunction with an international conference on space exploration featuring officials from over 30 nations tomorrow and Friday in Washington. Such an extension would require keeping the roughly $3-billion-a-year wedge for the program in the NASA budget into the mid-2020s, as the article reports; it also requires the assent of the station’s international partners.
The decision is at least a partial victory for NASA: the 2024 date falls short of the 2028 extension that some have advocated, noting technicals reviews have confirmed that the station’s components can continue operating until then, when the oldest modules turn 30 years old. In an email obtained by the Sentinel, NASA administrator Charles Bolden says the decision “will, hopefully, prove beneficial to our international partners as they struggle with decisions on funding for their space programs.” It’s not clear what would happen, though, if some of those partners decide not to continue funding station operations beyond 2020.
By Jeff Foust on 2014 January 5 at 8:18 am ET This week, thousands of astronomers will gather outside Washington, DC, for the 223rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS). During the meeting, astronomers will share the latest results on everything from exoplanets to cosmology. However, there will also be plenty of discussion about future ground- and space-based observatories, as plans for ambitious future missions run into conflicts with budgets that struggle to maintain even existing facilities.
Last month, NASA released a document titled “Enduring Quests, Daring Visions: NASA Astrophysics in the Next Three Decades.” The document serves as a roadmap of the astrophysics research scientists believe will be priorities through the 2030s, and the notional spacecraft missions to accomplish them. Those scientific priorities boil down to three questions: “Are we alone?” (the search for biosignatures on exoplanets), “How did we get here?” (the formation of the universe), and “How does the universe work?” (the fundamental physics of the universe.) “Seeking answers to these age-old questions are Enduring Quests of humankind,” the document states (capitalization in original.)
The document includes a list of missions both under development (James Webb Space Telescope) or active study (the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope, or WFIRST) as well as “Formative” and “Visionary” concepts for the 2020s and 2030s, respectively. And some of those long-range missions concepts are indeed visionary: the “ExoEarth Mapper”, for example, “will combine signals from an armada of large optical telescopes orbiting hundreds of kilometers apart, producing the first resolved images of earthlike planets around other stars.” A “Cosmic Dawn Mapper” would emplace an array of radio telescopes on the far side of the Moon, shielded from the Earth’s radio din, to study the structure of the universe’s earliest eras.
The missions included in the report are notional concepts only, with no effort to try and determine just how much those missions would cost. But these concepts almost certainly clash with the tight budgets NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF) are facing for their astrophysics programs. At around the same time NASA released its long-term vision for astrophysics, the NSF released a “Dear Colleague” letter updating their efforts to divest a number of existing observatories. That lettre was an update of efforts reported at last January’s AAS meeting to either close or hand over to other organizations a number of observatories currently supported, partially or entirely, by the NSF.
The letter showed that divestment effort is going slowly. The Department of Energy (DOE) is interested in using the 4-meter telescope at Kitt Peak, Arizona, operated by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO), the letter states, for a proposed dark energy study, but the timing of DOE funding is uncertain. The future of several other optical and radio astronomy observatories included in the letter remains uncertain because of ongoing discussions with several potential parters. For example, the letter says “substantial” discussions are underway with unnamed universities to take over future operations of the Green Bank Telescope radio observatory in West Virginia.
If there is good news in the near term, it’s that, for NASA at least, budgets won’t be as cut as sharply as feared. In November, Paul Hertz, director of NASA’s astrophysics division, warned sequestration could cut the division’s budget from $617 million in 2013 to perhaps $592 million in 2014, cuts that could jeopardize operations of ongoing missions in the upcoming senior review of those missions.
With a budget deal in place that avoids an across-the-board sequester, though, that worst-case scenario now looks unlikely. In a presentation Saturday at a meeting of the Exoplanet Exploration Program Analysis Group, or ExoPAG, held in advance of the main AAS meeting, NASA’s Doug Hudgins said that while a final fiscal year 2014 budget isn’t done yet, “our expectation is that the astrophysics budget in ’14 is going to be somewhere between the president’s request of $642 million and the FY13 post-sequestration number” of $617 million. “We expect to be somewhere in there, but obviously that depends on the deliberations that are going on on the Hill.”
By Jeff Foust on 2014 January 3 at 12:55 pm ET Bill Nye, the CEO of The Planetary Society, is the subject of a rather positive profile by Mother Jones magazine published Thursday. In it, Nye identifies his top three “political passions”: “Climate change, raise the standard of women around the world through education, [and] asteroids.” The article describes his interest in search for, and finding ways to deflect, potentially hazardous asteroids. “Sooner or later we’re going to have to deflect an asteroid,” Nye says. “And we’re the first generation that can do something about it.”
So that means he should be a fan of NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) concept, which seeks to shift the orbit of a very small asteroid into lunar orbit to be visited by astronauts, right? Not exactly. “I don’t think it’s a good value,” Nye tells the magazine of the ARM plan. “I don’t think it will happen.”
Why Nye was speaking presumably just for himself, it is a little different position from what The Planetary Society published in May, when it offered conditional support for what was then called the Asteroid Retrieval Mission. “It’s an intriguing idea,” Nye said in the May statement. However, the organization added at that time that it was concerned “detailed goals, costs, and implementation plan for this asteroid mission are not yet well defined”—and arguably still aren’t today.
By Jeff Foust on 2014 January 2 at 8:53 pm ET A segment of public radio’s Diane Rehm Show on Thursday examined “The Future of Space Exploration” with several guests, including former NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver, and Garver used the occasion to make some of her most critical comments about two key NASA programs since leaving the space agency four months ago.
Early in the show, Garver hinted that NASA wasn’t spending its budget as effectively as it could after Rehm suggested NASA’s core problem was that it didn’t have a big enough budget. “I’m not sure it is, actually,” she said. “I believe that NASA and their $17 billion has an incredibly exciting and important space program. Of course, we could do even more with our $17 billion, and I think if we did that we would engender that support from the public and their elected leadership.”
Later, after Washington Post journalist Joel Achenbach brought up the issue of too much program for the budget, something he covered in an article last week, Garver said it was an issue of making tradeoffs and dealing with various science and human spaceflight constituencies. “Space isn’t really partisan, it’s parochial,” she said. “NASA needs to push and do new things, and be less about the status quo and the already-developed constituencies and keeping them fed.”
Later in the show, Rehm asked Garver what NASA programs she felt should be cut. “To me, I think those particular programs that are built on previous technology,” she said. “Right now, we’re building a huge rocket called the Space Launch System, the SLS. It was something that Congress dictated to NASA that it had to do, with the Orion spacecraft. It is a holdover from Constellation, which the Obama Administration tried to cancel, and it’s $3 billion a year of NASA’s $17 billion. Is that how you would be investing in the space program? Where is it going to go? When will it even fly?” (The $3-billion figure she cited is actually the approximate combined value of the SLS and Orion budgets, not SLS alone.)
Another guest, Scott Pace of George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute, defended SLS. “If we’re going to be going to Mars eventually, if someone wants to do a human mission to Mars, you basically do need a heavy-lift vehicle,” he said. Constellation, he argued would have developed that heavy-lift rocket (the Ares V) in a more logical manner by starting with the smaller Ares I.
Garver wasn’t convinced. “The rocket is so similar, and it’s built off of 1970s technology. The very engines we’re going to use are Space Shuttle engines that were developed in the 1970s. Would you really go to Mars with technology that’s 50 years old? That’s not what innovation and our space exploration program should be all about.”
She was also critical of another major NASA program, plans to send a rover to Mars in 2020 closely modeled on the Curiosity rover. “I would not redo the Curiosity mission,” she said. “I would invest that planetary science mission in doing something new like Europa, or going to Mars in a more creative and innovative way where we can again drive technology.” That built upon comments she made earlier in the show. “If you’re a Mars scientist, you want to keep having NASA fund your Mars missions and keep redoing, for instance, what we just did with Curiosity is now planned again for 2020, instead of what you could be doing, driving in a new direction on Europa.”
While NASA’s decision just over a year ago to proceed with a 2020 Mars rover met with complaints from some parts of the planetary science community, who felt NASA was overemphasizing Mars over other parts of the solar system, it is largely consistent with the decadal survey the community produced in 2011. That report identified as the top priority large, or “flagship,” mission a Mars rover that would cache samples for later return to Earth. A science definition team report published in July did indeed recommend that the rover include the ability to cache samples for a future, as yet undefined, sample return mission.
Garver’s comments about SLS in particular represented her strongest criticism of the program since leaving NASA in early September, but she previously offered more subtle criticism of the program. “In my view, we should not be debating whether or not we should have the ability to terminate a program that is not working in a cost-plus environment,” she said in a speech at the meeting of the FAA’s Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC) on December 11 in Washington. That was a reference to legislation the House Science Committee was considering that day that would effectively prevent NASA from canceling several key programs unless Congress approved. Among those programs covered by the House bill is the SLS.
In her COMSTAC remarks, Garver also emphasized innovation, as she did on the talk show Thursday. “The government should be advancing space commerce, and that is the best way to have an innovative program that out-competes the world,” she said last month.
By Jeff Foust on 2014 January 2 at 1:15 pm ET The beginning of a new year is a time for change: at the very least, putting up those 2014 calendars and tossing the 2013 versions into the recycle bin. However, as 2014 begins, it will look at least initially a lot like 2013 for space policy, as Congress deals with some unfinished business regarding spending and other legislation.
The biggest near-term priority for Congress when it returns next week will be fiscal year 2014 appropriations. While the budget deal reached last month set overall spending levels for 2014 and 2015, avoiding sequestration in the process, it’s still up to House and Senate appropriators to come up with a bill or bills to appropriate that money before the continuing resolution (CR) funding the government expires on January 15. POLITICO reported earlier this week that appropriators have been working on a single omnibus appropriations bill that is expected to be finalized next week.
Details about the bill aren’t included in that report, although it does state that the section covering commerce, justice, and science—including NASA and NOAA—is among those “largely finalized.” For NASA, that likely means falling somewhere between the $16.6 billion House appropriators approved and the $18 billion from their Senate counterparts.
Although many space advocates argue that policy should drive the budget, it’s likely the opposite will remain true. The House appropriations bill, for example, blocks any spending on NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission, while the Senate is silent on it. The two bills also have significant differences in the amount available for Commercial Crew, which could drive decisions later in 2014 on how many companies NASA can support in the next phase of the program when it awards contract(s) this summer.
Besides appropriations, there is space-related legislation awaiting action. The year 2013 ended without enactment of a bill to extend the commercial launch indemnification regime. In mid-December the Senate passed an amended version of a bill the House passed in early December, changing the House’s one-year extension to a three-year one. However, the House had adjourned for the year by the time the Senate took action. Launch licenses currently in place, or applications submitted by December 31, still have indemnification protection, but any new applications would not be included in the regime—at least until the House and Senate get around resolving their differences.
Also awaiting the House is legislation approved by the House Science Committee last month to stop NASA from withholding funds for termination liability for several key agency programs. The bill would also effectively make it impossible to cancel those programs—the Space Launch System, Orion spacecraft, International Space Station, and James Webb Space Telescope—unless Congress passes legislation to do so. The bill’s future, though, is uncertain, even if it passes the House: it’s unlikely the administration would support a bill that would, in essence, take control over the future of several key programs out of its hands.
And, if members are feeling really ambitious, they might take up the NASA authorization bills they started working on in 2013. The Senate Commerce Committee passed its version in late July on a party-line vote, after the House Science Committee approved its quite different version earlier in the month, also along party lines. Neither bill has made progress since then, and with the sharp differences in opinion both in authorized spending levels and policy, the bills might remain in legislative limbo indefinitely.
By Jeff Foust on 2013 December 26 at 2:00 pm ET Earlier this month, the polling group YouGov released the results of a recent poll on space issues. The poll covered a hodgepodge of topics, from reasons for supporting NASA to whether the poll respondent would be interested in flying in space “free of costs.” One question of interest was on NASA funding: “The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) budget for 2014 is $16 billion, its lowest level since 2007. Do you think NASA’s budget is…” with the options of much too high, too high, about right, too low, and much too low. (The question is slightly incorrect: NASA’s fiscal year 2014 appropriations have not been set yet, and it is likely to get a little more than $16 billion, with the passage of a two-year overall budget deal that avoids sequestration.)
The overall poll results indicate that the majority believe NASA is getting about the right amount of funding or too little:
| Much too high |
11% |
| Too high |
12% |
| About right |
39% |
| Too low |
25% |
| Much too low |
13% |
However, YouGov also provides detailed poll results, which break down the overall numbers (based on a survey of 1,170 adults in late November; margins of error are not included) into various categories based on the poll respondents’ ages, genders, location, and other factors. Those breakdowns reveal some interesting, but perhaps not that surprising, gaps in support.
One such gap is between men and women. Nearly half of men polled thought NASA funding was too low, while women were split almost equally between thinking NASA was getting too much or too little:
|
Male |
Female |
| too high |
20% |
26% |
| about right |
34% |
45% |
| too low |
47% |
29% |
(In this and subsequent tables, the “too high” and “much too high” responses are combined, as are “too low” and “much too low” to simplify the results.)
Another gap is on race: 44% those who identified themselves as white said NASA’s budget was too low, versus 22% who thought it was too high. However, responses among blacks were almost the reverse: 34% thought NASA’s budget was too high, versus 14% who thought it too low. Hispanics, meanwhile, were more evenly split.
|
White |
Black |
Hispanic |
Other |
| too high |
22% |
34% |
21% |
18% |
| about right |
34% |
52% |
52% |
40% |
| too low |
44% |
14% |
27% |
42% |
Another gap in support in NASA spending is based on education. For those who said they had a high school education or less, there was an even split between those who thought NASA’s budget was too high versus those who thought it too low. However, as education levels increased, the fraction who thought NASA’s budget was too high declined, while the fraction who thought it too low increased—an argument, perhaps, for NASA education efforts?
|
High school or less |
Some college |
College Grad |
Post Grad |
| too high |
28% |
24% |
14% |
11% |
| about right |
43% |
37% |
37% |
34% |
| too low |
28% |
39% |
49% |
55% |
There was also a trend in NASA support based household income: those making less than $40,000 a year were more likely to think NASA’s current budget was too high than those making $80,000 or more a year (a trend likely correlated to some degree with education levels):
|
Under $40K |
$40–80K |
More than $80K |
Prefer not to say |
| too high |
27% |
24% |
18% |
17% |
| about right |
42% |
37% |
36% |
38% |
| too low |
30% |
39% |
46% |
44% |
It’s always tempting to read more into a single poll’s results than is recommended, given the limitations of polling and the sensitivity of poll results to how questions are structured: what if, for example, the YouGov poll had used NASA’s fraction of the overall federal budget versus a dollar amount? However, the poll suggests that while support for NASA may generally be positive, it is not evenly distributed.
By Jeff Foust on 2013 December 21 at 12:29 pm ET One week ago, China’s Chang’e-3 spacecraft successfully landed on the surface of the Moon and, soon after, deployed a small rover named “Yutu” to explore the lunar terrain. As that mission proceeds, China is making plans for a 2017 lunar sample return mission and, at some ill-defined time after that, human missions to the Moon. Should the United States be concerned about China’s lunar ambitions and respond accordingly? A couple of members of Congress believe so.
SpacePolicyOnline.com reported Thursday that Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), the chairman of the Commerce, Justice, and Science subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, sent a letter to President Obama calling on him to redirect NASA once again, back to the Moon. As China carries out its lunar exploration program, Wolf’s letter states, “many are asking why the U.S. is not using this opportunity to lead our international parters in an American-led return to the Moon.”
Wolf argues there’s limited enthusiasm for NASA’s plans to redirect an asteroid into lunar orbit and send a human mission there in the 2020s, lamenting the “misguided focus” of the administration on such a mission. “It’s time to set aside the proposed asteroid mission and instead focus NASA’s direction on leading a return to the Moon, before our partners commit their resources to another country,” Wolf writes. He asks the president to convene a conference at the White House “early in the new year” to develop a plan for a US-led human return to the Moon in the next ten years. “This is a sincere good faith request which I know would be good for the country. Thank you,” Wolf wrote in a handwritten addendum at the end of the letter.
There is, in fact, a space exploration conference coming to Washington, albeit not the White House, next month, as SpacePolicyOnline.com notes. The International Academy of Astronautics is hosting a space exploration conference in January 9, followed by a heads of space agencies summit on the 10th. However, this event is unlikely to result in any agreement on an exploration program like the one desired by Rep. Wolf.
One industry organization has already backed Wolf’s call for a White House space exploration conference. “The Coalition for Space Exploration encourages the proposal to hold a conference early in the new year to develop a mission-oriented plan for a U.S.-led exploration program to send humans to Mars using the SLS and Orion systems, augmented by other systems and technologies contributed by our international partners,” the organization said in a press release late Friday not yet posted on its website. The Coalition’s statement, though, fell short of explicitly endorsing Wolf’s call for a human return to the Moon led by the US in the next decade.
Wolf, of course, won’t be around to help fund such an exploration initiative even if the White House suddenly changed its mind, since he announced earlier this week that he is not running for reelection in 2014. The CJS subcommittee’s vice chair, Rep. John Culberson (R-TX), though, appears to share many of Wolf’s views. In an interview with the Houston Chronicle, Culberson agreed that the Moon should be the focus of NASA’s human spaceflight efforts, and, like Wolf, rejects any notion of US-China cooperation in space exploration. Of China’s lunar lander, Culberson said that it “was a strategic move on their part to attempt to lay claim to, and in the future exploit the mineral resources of the Moon,” noting the landing site is reportedly rich in rare earth elements.
The concern expressed by Reps. Wolf and Culberson, though, does not necessarily extend to the general public. Results of a poll released Thursday by Rasmussen Reports showed that 33% of Americans considered the Chinese lunar landing as “bad” for the US. However, 45% said the landing had no impact on the US. The poll also included questions on whether the US should resume human missions to the Moon in the next decade and whether there will be “a superpower race to win control of the Moon,” but the polling organization withheld those results for its subscribers.
By Jeff Foust on 2013 December 20 at 6:15 pm ET Late last night the Senate passed the fiscal year 2014 defense authorization bill, after the House approved the final compromise version of the bill last week. The giant bill covers a wide range of Department of Defense (DOD) policy issues, including some related to space.
One major military space policy issue included in the bill deals with the Operationally Responsive Space (ORS) Office, a DOD office whose future has been uncertain in recent years as the Air Force sought to close it. The final bill keeps the ORS Office alive, setting side 50 percent of the funds for another program, a space-based infrared systems modernization testbed, “until the Executive Agent for Space of the Department of Defense certifies to the congressional defense committees that the Secretary of Defense is carrying out the Operationally Responsive Space Program Office.” The bill also requires the DOD to prepare a report no later than 60 days after its enactment to identify a “potential mission that would seek to leverage all policy objectives of the Operationally Responsive Space Program in a single mission.”
On a related topic, the bill requires the DOD to undertake a study on responsive, low-cost launch options, reviewing past and current efforts, a technology assessment for such systems, and the military utility of such systems. The report will also look at other “innovative methods” of achieving the goals of responsive launch, such as secondary payload opportunities on existing launch vehicles. That report is due in one year; the Government Accountability Office (GAO) will then perform a 60-day review of that report. This study comes at a time when DARPA is supporting two separate efforts to develop responsive low-cost launch systems, Airborne Launch Assist Space Access (ALASA) and the new, larger Experimental Spaceplane 1 (XS-1) program.
The bill also addresses larger launch vehicles. A section of the bill requires the Secretary of the Air Force to develop a plan for allowing new entrants into the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) program, which the Air Force has already indicated a willingness to allow. The plan must include “a general description of how the Secretary will conduct competition with respect to awarding a contract to certified evolved expendable launch vehicle providers,” including cost, schedule, performance, and mission assurance attributes. The plans also must take into account the effect of other contracts potential contracts have, “including the evolved expendable launch vehicle launch capability contract, the space station commercial resupply services contracts, and other relevant contracts regarding national security space and strategic programs.”
Several other sections of the bill deal with Congress’s concerns about threats to US satellites. One section requires the head of US Strategic Command to provide notification to Congress within 48 hours of any “intentional attempt by a foreign actor to disrupt, degrade, or destroy a United States national security space capability,” with a more detailed report to follow 10 days after that attempt. Another section requires a study by the National Research Council on ways to deal with near- and long-term threats to national security space systems. And yet another section requires the Defense Department to prepare a report on its “space control mission,” including its existing and planned space situational awareness (SSA) sensors and SSA data sharing practices.
The commercial satellite communications industry also got something they have long sought in the bill. One section of the report directs the Defense Department to develop a strategy for multi-year procurement of commercial satellite services, including any changes in law required to make multi-year deals for such services. Currently the DOD procures commercial satellite communications bandwidth on short-term leases, typically at higher costs than if they leased capacity on a long-term basis. Many satellite operators had been pressing the DOD to make use of multi-year deals, arguing it saved the government money while lessening uncertainty for the operators, who don’t know how much capacity they should expect the DOD to buy from year to year. The bill would also look at greater use of government hosted payloads on commercial satellites.
By Jeff Foust on 2013 December 18 at 7:00 am ET  The cover of this year’s Wastebook by Sen. Coburn features a NASA astronaut sleeping despite the commotion all around him, evidently worn out from spending all day studying Congress and/or in a food coma from eating too much 3D-printed pizza. On Tuesday, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) released his annual “Wastebook,” a document that identifies programs (typically small, obscure ones) that he concludes are “wasteful and low-priority” and thus could be cut. And as was the case with last year’s report, several NASA programs caught his attention.
Coburn’s report singled out NASA’s bed rest studies, where test subjects spend months in bed simulating some of the effects of long-duration weightlessness. Coburn is less critical of the science behind such studies as their current need. “No manned space missions to Mars—or anywhere else—are planned, scheduled or even possible in the foreseeable future, however, and NASA no longer has an active manned space program,” the report states. This will no doubt come to a surprise to many at NASA, including astronauts Rick Mastracchio and Mike Hopkins, who are currently in space on the ISS. The cost of this program: $360,000, according to the report.
The report also flags a $3-million program by NASA to conduct annual week-long seminars over the next several years for its employees to explain how Congress works. Coburn’s criticism is actually directed more at Congress itself and its lack of productivity than NASA itself. “NASA would be far better off looking for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.”
The report brings up a program also mentioned last year: studies to develop food for future human Mars missions. This year’s report mentions a $125,000 grant to a small company to develop a “3-D pizza printer” that is on top of other NASA food study programs. “Every year, the average budget for Martian food development is $1 million.”
Elsewhere in the report, Coburn criticizes NASA spending $390,000 on an obscure “cartoon superhero” called the Green Ninja, who is supposed to teach students about the implications of climate change. “[W]ith the manned mission to the red planet shelved, the Green Ninja may be the only little green man the space agency makes contact with for the foreseeable future,” the report states, again claiming that NASA has no plans to send people to Mars. The report also complains that NASA spent $237,205 to study Christmas Island red crabs, arguing that such research should only be funded by the NSF, and $23,000 for a portrait of former NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver.
However, after reading this report, no doubt many people will ask if these relatively small programs really are the most wasteful ones at the space agency.
|
|
