By Jeff Foust on 2013 November 21 at 9:30 am ET When multimillionaire and one-time space tourist Dennis Tito announced Inspiration Mars early this year, it was billed as a non-profit venture, funded via philanthropy, to send two people on a 501-day Mars flyby mission that would launch in early January 2018. Tito said he planned to fund the mission primarily through donations; they were open to selling some data collected during the mission to NASA, but that was, at that time, the only kind of funding they were seeking from the space agency.
Less than nine months later, Tito and Inspiration Mars have changed course. In a report summary released yesterday, timed with testimony given by Tito before a hearing of the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee, Inspiration Mars rolled out an alternative plan that relies on a public-private partnership with NASA that makes use of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and a modified Orion spacecraft, as well as commercial crew transportation systems. It would also rely primarily on NASA funding to make the mission possible. This proposal would, in effect, reshape national space policy, with a very short period for Congress and the White House to endorse this approach in order to meet its launch window.
“The way that we’re proposing this is that this is a NASA mission with a philanthropic partner contributing to the mission,” said Inspiration Mars Foundation program manager Taber MacCallum in a conference call with reporters Wednesday afternoon. “This has to be, first and foremost, a NASA mission.”
MacCallum said that the shift in focus was driven by two factors. One was that the commercial systems they studied to do the mission “really didn’t come in with the kind of margins that gave us a good feeling about the risk associated with that.” The other was their growing confidence that the SLS could do the job. “It’s a good thing the SLS is being developed,” he said. “We really came around to independently validating the need for SLS. I didn’t frankly start off as an SLS supporter in this, and I came around to being one.”
The report summary itself does not go into great details about costs, other than Inspiration Mars expects the need for several hundred million dollars in additional NASA funding, primarily to accelerate development of the Dual Use Upper Stage (DUUS) for the SLS. That upper stage, needed to send the Inspiration Mars “Vehicle Stack” from low Earth orbit onto a Mars flyby trajectory, is currently not slated by NASA to be ready until the early 2020s. In his Congressional testimony, Tito indicated that up to $700 million in additional NASA funding—about $100–200 million per year over several years—would be needed to develop the DUUS and other elements, with Inspiration Mars providing on the order of $300 million.
To maintain schedule to achieve their planned mission—the spacecraft would have to depart in a window that opens Christmas Eve 2017 and closes less than two weeks later—Tito said they would need to get a commitment of support from Congress and the White House in the immediate future. “We have just a couple of months to get some signals that would indicate serious interest developing,” Tito said in the media teleconference. He and MacCallum said they have bene in touch with Congress and White House officials; on the latter, “we have had good discussions so far,” MacCallum said. Tito said later that an unnamed member of Congress would introduce a bill “in the next week or two” about the mission, but declined to name that member or members, or the contents of the bill.
NASA, though, doesn’t seem to be on board in support of that mission at the moment. “The agency is willing to share technical and programmatic expertise with Inspiration Mars, but is unable to commit to sharing expenses with them,” NASA spokesman David Weaver said in a statement provided to media. “However, we remain open to further collaboration as their proposal and plans for a later mission develop.”
NASA could, of course, be directed to support that mission by Congress and the White House, but there was no clear enthusiasm for the concept among members of the House Science Committee at yesterday’s hearing, some of whom were wary of Tito’s request for federal dollars. “Are you suggesting that the mission couldn’t be undertaken without additional NASA funding?” asked Rep. Donna Edwards (D-MD), ranking member of the space subcommittee. “Right now, I don’t see a lot of evidence that money is available,” Tito responded.
Inspiration Mars is already developing a fallback plan if support from the federal government doesn’t materialize in time for their late-2017 mission plan. Tito and MacCallum discussed an alternative trajectory for a 2021 mission that, while 88 days longer than the original plan, would include flybys of both Mars and Venus. Tito in particular said he was convinced someone would attempt that mission, claiming that Russia was planning to revive the long-retired Energia heavy-lift rocket for just such a mission (he admitted that he had no evidence to support such a proposal but “it seems pretty obvious to me.”)
“Why not move this mission to the here and now and now wait until the 2030s?” he asked in his Congressional testimony. Waiting until 2021, he warned, means that “another country, almost surely China, will have seen our missed opportunity and taken the lead themselves. May I offer a frank word to the subcommittee: the United States will carry out a flyby mission or we will watch as others do it. If America is every going to do a flyby mission of Mars, we’re going to have to do it in 2018.”
By Jeff Foust on 2013 November 21 at 6:24 am ET With the current commercial launch indemnification regime, which protects companies from third-party damages that exceed a level those companies must insure against, set to expire at the end of this calendar year, the House and Senate made moves Wednesday to provide an extension. However, the two houses disagree on how long that extension should be.
Late Wednesday, the Republican and Democratic leadership of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee announced the introduction of HR 3547, legislation that would extend the launch indemnification regime for one year. The bill is sponsored by full committee chairman Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) and ranking member Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), along with space subcommittee chairman Rep. Steven Palazzo (R-MS) and ranking member Donna Edwards (D-MD). The bill offers a “clean” extension, with no other provisions; the text of the bill runs only a little more than one page.
The comments in the committee press release indicate that Republican leadership was interested in a longer extension, but that Democrats on the committee preferred a short-term extension in order to study whether the indemnification system was still needed. “While a longer extension would have been preferable, this bipartisan compromise bill will at least provide temporary stability to our commercial space industry by protecting companies against third party liability costs,” Smith said in the statement. Johnson, meanwhile, said that the looming expiration of indemnification “should not and must not detract us from the greater goal of examining this and other commercial space issues comprehensively.”
At a hearing on commercial space held by the space subcommittee, Edwards also called for a short-term extension in order to buy time for broader studies of commercial space issues. “I hope that, over this next year, we will take to the task of doing the kind of oversight hearings we need to give the commercial space industry the kind of certainty that we need with respect to indemnification, and we can only do that if we get the FAA in here and get experts in so that we can look at the future environment and climate with respect to commercial activity,” she said.
A key senator, though, has a different plan. Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) was, as of late yesterday, planning to introduce a separate launch indemnification bill. It, too, would be a clean bill, but would instead offer a three-year extension through the end of 2016. According to a source familiar with the senator’s plans, Nelson planned to seek expedited consideration of the bill by the full Senate to get passage via unanimous consent as soon as Thursday.
By Jeff Foust on 2013 November 20 at 12:56 pm ET Last last week, NASA announced that it was ending production of the Advanced Sterling Radioisotope Generator (ASRG), a replacement for existing radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) that make more efficient use of plutonium fuel. As I reported for Space News, NASA justified the decision by noting the existing stockpile of plutonium-238, which will grow as production of the isotope resumes, and the lack of immediate demand for the ASRG among future missions. It also frees up funding within NASA’s planetary science program—about $170 million through 2016—at a time when the program is dealing with reduced budgets.
One group of scientists is working this week to address those funding concerns for NASA’s planetary programs. The Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) issued a call for action earlier this week, asking its members and others to contact their members of Congress and ask them to restore funding for planetary programs at the space agency. “[R]eductions proposed in the President’s Fiscal Year 2013 and 2014 budget requests could cripple planetary science,” states a sample letter included in the announcement. “We have already seen missions delayed and cancelled, international partnerships broken, and we face decades of lost science.”
Members of Congress are asked to do to things to address this concern: ensure that NASA can meet the goals laid out in the most recent planetary science decadal survey, which, the letter notes, calls for a mix of small, medium, and flagship-class missions as well as adequate research and technology development funding; and to end budget sequestration, “which has had a severely damaging impact on NASA, planetary science, and federal research and development across the board.”
The DPS lobbying effort has a social media twist, too, as scientists use the #FundPlanetary hashtag on Twitter to raise awareness of the issue.
By Jeff Foust on 2013 November 19 at 12:00 pm ET The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) issued a report yesterday on strategies for reducing the federal budget deficit, identifying ways to reduce spending and increase revenue. Among the proposals for cutting spending was the eliminate NASA’s human spaceflight program: “This option would terminate NASA’s human space exploration and space operations programs, except for those necessary to meet space communications needs (such as communication with the Hubble Space Telescope),” the report states (p. 74). Science and aeronautics programs would not be cut by the proposal.
The CBO report’s primary reason for eliminating NASA’s human spaceflight programs is that “increased capabilities in electronics and information technology have generally reduced the need for humans to fly space missions” and that, by terminating human spaceflight, it avoids the risk to human life inherent with such missions. However, it added that ending current human spaceflight programs “would end the technical progress necessary to prepare for human missions to Mars” (but then, if you’re ending human spaceflight, you’re probably not thinking about sending humans to Mars.) It added that there are limitations to the capabilities of robotic missions and “there may be some scientific advantage to having humans at the International Space Station to conduct experiments in microgravity.” The CBO report does not mention any geopolitical significance, positive or negative, to terminating NASA’s human spaceflight efforts.
The savings the CBO estimates would result from ending NASA’s human spaceflight program are significant: $73 billion from 2015 through 2023. The CBO report doesn’t go into details on how it calculated those estimates, but the near-term numbers are similar to the budget projections for the Space Operations and Exploration accounts in the NASA budget. That $73 billion is the third-largest spending cut among discretionary programs, behind a 25% cut in international affairs programs ($114 billion in 2015–2023) and reducing defense spending to conform to the caps in the Budget Control Act ($495 billion in the same period.)
The CBO emphasized that it was not endorsing any of the proposals included in the report, but instead providing a set of options for policymakers. “As a collection, the options are intended to reflect a range of possibilities, not a ranking of priorities or an exhaustive list,” the office stated. “Inclusion or exclusion of any particular option does not imply endorsement or disapproval by CBO, and the report makes no recommendations.”
By Jeff Foust on 2013 November 17 at 11:13 am ET The House Science Committee’s space subcommittee is holding a hearing Wednesday simply titled “Commercial Space.” The subcommittee will first hear from House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), followed by a panel of witnesses: Satellite Industry Association (SIA) president Patricia Cooper, Mojave Air and Space Port CEO and general manager Stu Witt, and Dennis Tito, the businessman who flew to the ISS in 2001 as its first commercial visitor (aka space tourist) and, more recently, established the Inspiration Mars Foundation to attempt a human Mars flyby mission late this decade.
The committee hasn’t disclosed yet additional details about the content of or other details about the hearing. McCarthy, besides being one of the top Republicans in the House, has been an advocate of commercial spaceflight, supporting efforts like last year’s extension of the “learning period” that restricts the FAA’s ability to establish regulations for commercial human spaceflight. McCarthy also introduced legislation in August to “streamline” commercial spaceflight regulations. (Mojave Air and Space Port is in McCarthy’s district, no doubt helping to explain his interest.) Later panelists may bring up other pressing commercial space issues, such as the ongoing reform of export control regulations (a proposed final rule for the new Category XV of the US Munitions List, which covers satellites and related components, is due out by year’s end) and the need to extend the third party commercial launch indemnification regime, which expires at the end of the year.
By Jeff Foust on 2013 November 14 at 7:28 am ET As NASA celebrated the end of its Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program at a press conference in Washington on Wednesday, it also made another pitch for the program following in COTS’s footsteps, the Commercial Crew Program. But as NASA leadership were calling for full funding for commercial crew, a separate report by NASA’s Inspector General said it looked increasingly likely NASA would not be able to support more than one company in the next phase of the program.
“It’s now critically important to get full funding from Congress to keep us on track to begin these launches in 2017,” NASA administrator Charles Bolden said in opening remarks at the COTS press conference, referring to commercial crew. He said that NASA will release the request for proposals for the next phase of the program, called Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap), next week (November 19, according to a notice by NASA earlier this month.) “In many ways, the completion of COTS is simply a passing of the torch of innovation to our partners in the commercial crew program.”
NASA requested $821 million from Congress for commercial crew in its fiscal year 2014 budget proposal. However, House appropriators only offered $500 million for the program in its spending bill, while their Senate counterparts proposed $775 million. (There’s been no recent action on either bill as appropriators await the outcome of broader House-Senate budget negotiations.) In late July, shortly before announcing plans to leave NASA, then-deputy administrator Lori Garver said the Senate figure would be good enough, but pressed for full funding to stay on schedule and “keep competition as long as possible.”
“It’s obviously a very difficult budget environment for all discretionary programs,” said Phil McAlister, director of commercial spaceflight development at NASA, during Wednesday’s press conference. “We’ve said this many times: less money means we go slower than we’d like to go. It’s a pretty straightforward equation.”
An alternative would be for NASA to downselect to a single company in the CCtCap round, a move some in Congress have endorsed to keep the program on schedule with constrained funding. “Getting the systems as soon as possible and also having competition are both goals that NASA would like to maintain through this program,” McAlister said. “I can’t say one is more important than the other.” He added they would wait to see the contents of the CCtCap proposals, due in January. “Those proposals will really dictate how fast we go and how many we have.”
Shortly after the press conference ended, NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) issued a report on the commercial crew program, identifying funding as one of several key challenges it faces. The report noted that the program has received only 38 percent of its original budget requests in fiscal years 2011 through 2013, pushing back the beginning of service to 2017. “Generally speaking, we determined that each year’s budget decrement has resulted in an additional year of schedule delay,” the report concluded. “Even if the Program receives its full budget request in future years, the cumulative difference between the Program’s initial budget requests and receipts over the life of the Program would be approximately $1.1 billion.”
The report added that continued funding shortfalls could force NASA to downselect to a single company in the upcoming CCtCap contract. “While NASA officials said they would prefer to continue to work with at least two companies until the transportation services contract, a lack of funding will likely require them to ‘down select’ to a single partner during Phase 2 of Certification [aka CCtCap], which is currently scheduled to begin in mid-2014.” The reports adds that such a downselect, while saving money in the short term, may drive up costs in the long term based on experience with other major spaceflight programs.
The OIG report includes one additional item of interest about commercial crew funding, regarding the amount being provided by the industry partners. Specific amounts of investment by the commercial crew partners—Boeing, Sierra Nevada, and SpaceX—have been hard to come by; specific information has been redacted from their Space Act Agreements, and company officials have spoken only vaguely of making significant internal investments. However, according to the OIG report, the commercial crew partners have contributed “under 20 percent” of the overall development costs for the ongoing Commercial Crew Integrated Capability (CCiCap) effort. By comparison, the report notes that the two COTS awardees, Orbital Sciences and SpaceX, contributed “roughly 50 percent” of the total development costs of their systems.
By Jeff Foust on 2013 November 13 at 7:14 am ET Tuesday afternoon, NASA and Bigelow Aerospace held an event at a downtown Washington hotel to discuss the delivery to NASA of a Bigelow report on commercial lunar exploration architectures. That report, as I summarized yesterday at NewSpace Journal, calls for the use of a COTS-like model to allow NASA to partner with industry (including Bigelow) to develop capabilities to enable human spaceflight activities beyond Earth orbit, including in orbit around and on the surface of the Moon.
The report also emphasized the need for a lunar property rights regime. Companies “must known they will be able to (1) enjoy the fruits of their labor relative to activities conducted on the Moon or other celestial bodies, and (2) own the property that they have surveyed, developed, and are realistically able to utilize,†the report states. And, in a point emphasized in the report in bold, italic, and underlined type: “Without property rights, any plan to engage the private sector in long-term beyond LEO activities will ultimately fail.â€
At yesterday afternoon’s event, Bigelow Aerospace founder and president Robert Bigelow indicated that the company plans to press their case for lunar property rights in the near future. “Bigelow Aerospace will be making an application to the FAA/AST [Office of Commercial Space Transportation] for a policy review pertaining to lunar property rights before the end of this year,” Bigelow said.
That policy review would take advantage of the FAA’s ability to perform a policy review of a license application, which involves interagency consultation. “I think it’s abundantly clear that, in terms of establishing lunar property rights or even making that request, that the FAA/AST is the proper gateway to begin that process,” said Mike Gold, Bigelow Aerospace’s chief counsel and head of the company’s Washington office, citing that interagency review process. “I know it sounds like a lot for one company or one request, but that is actually the way the process goes from a legal perspective.”
Bigelow Aerospace doesn’t have immediate plans for a lunar base, although it is a long-term goal for the company; it’s focused for now on developing orbital habitats and awaiting the developing of commercial crew transportation systems before launching those modules and lining up customers for them. So why press for it now? “We think that, first of all, this is not an overnight process, and that is probably the main reason why we are starting on this,” Robert Bigelow said. “We want to galvanize support where we can, and find out where the most significant support is derived from.”
“I have a more pessimistic view of the need for property rights,” he added. He cited an unnamed foreign country that has “significant ambition” in space and “significant financial resources”—a not-so-veiled reference to China. “It’s very possible that, in another dozen years, America could have quite a surprise.” Bigelow has previously stated his concerns that China could claim the Moon as its territory, although that view is not shared by those that closely follow Chinese space efforts.
By Jeff Foust on 2013 November 13 at 6:37 am ET On Tuesday, the Marshall Institute and the TechAmerica Space Enterprise Council hosted an event titled “Beyond Earth: Removing the Barriers to Deep Space Exploration” in Washington. (The event was broadcast on NASA TV and archived on YouTube.) NASA associate administrator Bill Gerstenmaier and representatives of four major aerospace companies—Aerojet Rocketdyne, ATK, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin—gave an overview of NASA’s exploration efforts, including the status of the development of the Space Launch System launch vehicle and Orion spacecraft and the agency’s plans to use them for missions beyond Earth orbit.
In his slides opening the 90-minute event, Gerstenmaier identified six key principles for a “sustainable” NASA exploration program. The first on the list had to deal with funding: “Executable with current budget with modest increases.” “We have to recognize there’s a finite budget, and our activities have to be executable within the budget we have available to us,” he said. That issue, though, came up in the Q&A session after the panel discussion: is it realistic to expect “modest increases” in NASA’s budget—or any increases at all—in the current fiscal environment?
It was clear that the uncertainty about budgets is a topic of frustration for Gerstenmaier. “I’m continually amazed at how the Congress can figure out new ways to calculate new numbers and provide those to us,” he said. “Probably my biggest challenge is not so much the level of the budget but the uncertainty associated with the budget.” He noted that he didn’t have final fiscal year 2013 budget numbers until August, when the agency’s operating plan for the year was finally approved; the fiscal year ended September 30. “That’s a lot of uncertainty to manage through. It’s hard to tell companies how to plan for that.”
That uncertainty continues into 2014, with a continuing resolution funding the agency at 2013 levels through January 15. “We’re not sure what we’ll get for sequester, or not, and I don’t know exactly what the sequester level is,” he said. That makes it impossible to state exactly what impacts the budget will have on NASA’s exploration programs. “I learned to live and operate under continuing resolutions, and I thought I had that mastered,” he added. “Then we got sequester, and they upped the game on me.”
That desire for stability was echoed by one of the industry panelists at Tuesday’s event. “Stability with that funding over a long period of time, I think, is as important as the level of funding going forward,” said John Elbon, vice president and general manager of Boeing Space Exploration. Such stability, though, may be more of a challenge for NASA’s exploration program than any technological issue.
By Jeff Foust on 2013 November 9 at 10:53 am ET In an interview with ABC News and Yahoo! News earlier this week, former Speaker of the House and 2012 presidential candidate Newt Gingrich looked back briefly on what was one of the signature moments of his ill-fated campaign nearly two years ago: the speech he gave in Florida in January 2012 where he called for, among other goals, a human base on the Moon by 2020. The reaction that announcement got, he said this week, illustrated the problems with the current political system.
“I gave a serious speech in Florida on the Space Coast, outlining a very bold strategy,” he recalled. “I got savaged by two of my competitors, [Mitt] Romney and [Rick] Santorum, who deliberately distorted the speech. I got ridiculed by Saturday Night Live.” He said that only one person in the media, Greta Van Susteren of Fox News, asked the “key question” about why the reaction to Gingrich’s call was far more critical than John F. Kennedy’s famous May 1961 call to land humans on the Moon by the end of the decade. “The American optimism of 1961 said, ‘That’s cool, let’s go do it,'” he said. “The American pessimism of 2012 said, ‘That’s absurd.'”
Gingrich’s interview was tied to the release this week of his latest book, Breakout, which outlines his views on a variety of policy positions. The book includes one chapter on space, titled “Breakout in Space.” The book is less reflective of his experiences on the campaign trail than the interview, though. “When in my presidential campaign I advocated a manned base on the moon—a goal I have supported for my entire career—many in the media and in my own party howled with laughter,” he writes. “Yet building a moon base had been official government policy through most of the Bush administration and for the first two years of Obama’s presidency, until he canceled the project in 2010 following ludicrous cost overruns in the early stages.”
The chapter instead largely reiterates familiar themes in Gingrich’s space policy, including disgust with NASA’s bureaucracy and a call for prizes to spur innovation in the private sector. NASA, he writes, “was once almost synonymous with the future, but in the four decades since the moon landings, it has become one of the government’s most tragic prison guards of the past.” NASA is now a risk-averse agency, he argues, no better than any other government bureaucracy, something he says the public doesn’t understand. “[F]or some reason it’s a little harder for Americans to believe that NASA, the agency behind moon landings and the Hubble Space Telescope, is just another bureaucracy. We don’t want to believe that they often act more like IRS agents than intrepid explorers.”
Gingrich also levels blame at big aerospace companies (“gigantic bureaucracies themselves”) and Congress. “Many of the agency’s strongest supporters in Congress have NASA centers in their districts or states, and the centers themselves are astute lobbyists for a piece of the action,” he writes. “Many of NASA’s activities, therefore, are driven by politics, not by the needs or interests of the space program.”
Not everything NASA is doing is wrong, he acknowledges, citing the progress made by companies like SpaceX, supported by NASA, to develop commercial space transportation systems. “NASA deserves some credit for taking such steps towards reliance on commercial space services in recent years, and so does the Obama administration, which pushed the agency further in this direction.”
Gingrich, though, still has his eyes on prizes, as he has for the better part of two decades. In the book, he proposes setting aside ten percent of NASA’s budget for prizes. “We could reduce the size of NASA and refocus its mission on breakthroughs in science and technology rather than developing or operating basic launch vehicles and spacecraft,” he argues.
By Jeff Foust on 2013 November 9 at 10:02 am ET Lt. Gen. Susan Helms, a former NASA astronaut who returned to the Air Force after leaving the space agency, is expected to retire after the administration withdrew her nomination Thursday to become the next vice commander of Air Force Space Command (AFSPC). Although there had been no formal announcement, an online catalog of presidential nominations operated by the Library of Congress noted that Helms’s nomination to be AFSPC vice commander, designated PN207-113, had been withdrawn by the administration on Thursday. The Air Force Times reported Friday that Helms has applied for retirement.
The nomination, made in March, was being held by Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) because of a controversial decision by Helms last year, in her current position as commander of the 14th Air Force at Vandenberg Air Force Base. to overturn the sexual assault conviction of an Air Force captain there. Helms concluded that there was not enough evidence in her opinion to approve the conviction, made by jurors in a court martial. That decision angered McCaskill, who has been pressing for reforms in how the military deals with sexual assault cases. McCaskill put a hold on Helms’s nomination and refused to lift it, effectively blocking Helms from taking her new position.
Helms, an Air Force officer since 1980, joined the NASA astronaut corps in 1990 and flew on four shuttle missions between 1993 and 2000, then spent 163 days in space as part of the International Space Station’s Expedition 2 crew in 2001. She left the NASA astronaut corps in 2002 and, unlike many other astronauts with military backgrounds, elected to return to active duty. Helms, rising through the ranks from colonel to lieutenant general upon her return to Air Force duties, served in a number of primarily space-related positions, including vice commander and commander of the 45th Space Wing in Florida and director of plans and policy at U.S. Strategic Command.
|
|
