By Jeff Foust on 2007 March 20 at 7:12 am ET When the House Appropriations Committee approved a supplemental appropriations bill last week to cover spending on Iraq and Afghanistan, it declared the bill to be free of earmarks. Yet, as the New York Times reported late last week, it does have some provisions that look an awfully lot like earmarks, including $35 million for NASA’s Stennis Space Center. (The NASA funding isn’t mentioned in the committee statement about the spending bill, but is presumably part of the “Gulf Coast Recovery” section.) The money isn’t considered an earmark as currently defined by Congress since it is going to a federal agency and not a local government or entity.
Over the weekend, President Bush singled out the NASA money and a couple other earmark-like additions to the appropriations bill in his weekly radio address, saying that such provisions “do not belong in an emergency war spending bill.” But then, the president has much bigger issues with the bill than a seemingly out-of-place $35 million for Stennis.
By Jeff Foust on 2007 March 19 at 7:40 am ET Back in the late 1990s, when he was chairman of the House Science Committee, Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) was a staunch critic of Russian involvement in the International Space Station, saying that their inclusion had failed to yield the promised cost savings and had delayed the overall effort. Sensenbrenner, who left the committee after the 2000 elections to chair the House Judiciary Committee, returned to the House Science and Technology Committee this year, and talks about some space policy issues in an interview in this week’s issue of The Space Review. Sensenbrenner still calls the Russian involvement in the ISS a “disaster”, but believes that there has to be some kind of international cooperation in NASA’s lunar exploration plans “because we can’t afford to do it alone”. Some other items:
- China’s recent ASAT test is “a deal breaker” for any kind of future US-China cooperation on space or other science projects.
- He was noncommittal on whether now was the right time for some kind of export control reform.
- He said he didn’t know enough about NASA administrator Michael Griffin and overall agency leadership to determine if they’re making the best decisions for the future of the space agency.
- Sensenbrenner is skeptical of NASA’s role as an inspiration for youth to study math and science, saying instead the real problem is “a disconnection in math and science in education” at an early age.
By Jeff Foust on 2007 March 19 at 7:29 am ET From the Zanesville (Ohio) Times Recorder: “Space co-sponsors resolution honoring John Glenn”. This is, of course, freshman Rep. Zach Space (D-Ohio), and the resolution referred to is H.Res. 252, designed to honor the 45th anniversary of John Glenn’s historic orbital flight. Why Rep. Space and his colleagues (the resolution has 10 cosponsors) waited nearly a month after the actual anniversary to introduce the resolution, which has been referred to the House Science and Technology Committee.
By Jeff Foust on 2007 March 16 at 6:38 am ET Yesterday’s hearings by the House Science and Technology Committee and the CJS subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee covered a lot of the issues that had already been covered in previous hearings this week, including plenty of hand-wringing by both Democrats and Republicans about the lack of money to meet all of NASA’s priorities. There was even a proposal by Sen. Barbara Milkulski to hold a bipartisan summit with the White House to create “a national commitment to our space program to put it on a path for success.”
Perhaps the most interesting comments, though, came by Mike Griffin late in the House hearing Thursday morning, in response to a question by ranking member Ralph Hall about the various delays in the CEV/Orion program. Griffin explained that when he became administrator he set a goal of having the CEV enter service in 2012. However, funding cuts to cover ISS and shuttle operations, Hurricane Katrina repairs, and other issues, pushed the start date back to late 2014. After Lockheed Martin won the Orion contract last year, Griffin said they re-baselined the program and budgeted “to a 65-percent confidence level”. All of those factors pushed the start date back further, to March 2015. In other words, NASA had missed the end-2014 deadline for putting Orion in service before the final FY07 budget cut more money from the program. That budget caused a six-month delay, but Griffin said that this had been negated by terminating lower-priority programs, like the follow-on missions to LRO in the robotic lunar exploration program, moving the start date back to March 2015. This is a bit different from earlier testimony, such as before the Senate Commerce Committee’s space subcommittee, which suggested that the FY07 cut was the reason for missing the 2014 deadline. (One can argue that NASA would have still made the 2014 deadline had it received full funding in FY07 and made the cuts in other programs, but this makes it clear that the program was not in the best of fiscal health well before the 2007 budget was approved.)
Unfortunately, the major media accounts of the hearing opt for sensationalism over substance: the Washington Post and Houston Chronicle instead lead with comments by Griffin, in response to a question by Rep. Ken Calvert, that China might beat us (back) to the Moon. Because, of course, if the Chinese did somehow land humans on the Moon before the US returned, they would… uh, do something. Like steal all the Moon’s helium-3 for their fusion reactors. Yeah, that’s it.
By Jeff Foust on 2007 March 15 at 6:12 am ET This week’s issue of the journal Nature has an excellent essay by David Goldston, the former chief of staff of the House Science Committee, about why NASA-related policy often seems so dysfunctional. (Unlike most Nature content, this piece is available for free.) A key passage:
Congress often alters the proposed NASA budget, but it rarely, if ever, manages to make fundamental decisions about what the agency’s priorities should be. That’s why NASA so often looks like it is carrying a broad portfolio of programmes, all of them seeming as though they are on life support.
There’s little here that should be terribly surprising to anyone who has followed the issue in any detail (including such well-known observations that there’s no obvious partisan lines on NASA issues, and that there’s little public input to members on those issues). Goldston does have a good analysis of NASA aeronautics funding in particular, where Congress has moved to shore up funding even though the aviation industry “has barely lifted a finger” in support of aeronautics. The result leaves the program “in a kind of limbo: aeronautics lacks the money for its programmes to thrive, but it still consumes dollars that NASA’s leaders want to shift into higher-priority areas.”
By Jeff Foust on 2007 March 14 at 5:55 am ET The limited coverage of NASA administrator Mike Griffin’s testimony before a subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee didn’t reveal any new insights about the agency and its budget. Griffin, in prepared opening remarks, reiterated that the final FY07 budget will force a six-month delay in the development of Orion. He also said that NASA will release its FY07 operating plan on Thursday, with the agency “working closely with the White House to make sure that NASA’s stakeholders on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue are fully informed of the impact of this appropriation on NASA’s program plans.”
Perhaps recognizing the shift in power in Congress, Griffin evoked the memory of President Kennedy in his remarks, quoting Kennedy both near the beginning and at the end of his statement. “That was an eloquent argument for adding money to NASA,” subcommittee chairman Alan Mollohan (D-WV) said in response, according to a Space News article. “I assume you are making it to the administration.” Mollohan said that the administration’s request of $17.3 billion was “not sufficient” but didn’t say what he thought would be a sufficient level of funding for the agency to carry out all its programs.
Not that some members aren’t thinking ahead. According to Florida Today, unidentified committee members asked what NASA was doing to prepare for human missions to Mars. Griffin said that such a mission could be performed “by the mid-2030s” by using hardware developed for the return to the Moon, especially the Ares 5 launch vehicle. (Griffin said his “personal best guess” for such a mission was the late 2020s when he spoke at the Mars Society conference in Washington last August.)
By Jeff Foust on 2007 March 13 at 6:54 am ET House appropriations hearings schedule
The hearings on the FY08 NASA budget by the Commerce, Justice, and Science subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee will actually be spread over two days, according to the schedule on the subcommittee web site:
03/13/07
Commerce, Justice, Science Subcommittee
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
10:00 AM – General Overview 2362 A Rayburn House Office Building
2:00 PM – Science and Aeronautics
2362 B Rayburn House Office Building
Michael D. Griffin, Administrator
03/14/07
Commerce, Justice, Science Subcommittee
NASA Exploration and Space Operations
10:00 AM & 2:00 PM 2362 A Rayburn House Office Building
Michael D. Griffin, Administrator
None of the hearings, unfortunately, will be webcast by the committee, nor apparently will they be on NASA TV.
By Jeff Foust on 2007 March 13 at 6:49 am ET Last week George Washington University hosted the 2007 Planetary Defense Conference, organized by The Aerospace Corporation and co-sponsored by a number of organizations, including NASA. During that meeting NASA released its Congressionally-mandated report on how it would be able to detect 90 percent of all near Earth asteroids 140 meters in diameter and larger by 2020. (The report itself was quietly placed on the web late last week by NASA.) The big news to come out of that conference and the report was that NASA lacks the funding needed to carry out the surveys recommended by the report, with as much as $1 billion needed through 2020 to achieve the stated goal.
Now that conference is being seen by one member of Congress as an example of lobbying at government conferences. An article in Federal Times provides the background, which goes back to a court case about federal funding of conferences by religious organizations. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) said that if the courts eventually find that such funding is unconstitutional, he would move to block federal funding for any conference that features “political propaganda”. Coburn aide Roland Foster says a prime example is, you guessed it, the Planetary Defense Conference:
He cited as an example last week’s Planetary Defense Conference 2007, partly funded by NASA, where the agency argued it needs more funding for its program to deflect asteroids headed toward Earth. Such calls, while permissible on Capitol Hill, amount to political lobbying that should be banned at federally funded conferences, according to Foster.
From the accounts of the conference (I didn’t attend the whole event), it wasn’t clear that NASA was lobbying for additional funding, only some people who are either employed by or receive research funding from the space agency. One suspects that if someone dropped a billion dollars into Mike Griffin’s lap, enhanced asteroid searches would not be on the top of his list of spending priorities.
By Jeff Foust on 2007 March 12 at 6:01 am ET It was easy to miss (I know I did), but the Commerce, Justice, and Science subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee held a hearing Friday morning about the NASA budget. (Unfortunately, appropriators are not as enlightened as their colleagues, and the hearing was not webcast, nor opening statements of the witnesses or committee members posted online.) The two witnesses at the hearing were Len Fisk, chair of the Space Studies Board of the National Research Council, and Ray Colladay, chair of the Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board of the NRC. According to a Florida Today article, Fisk said that NASA is overextended and lacks the financial resources to carry out both the Vision for Space Exploration as well as science missions. The Houston Chronicle reported that one member of the subcommittee, John Culberson (R-TX), said he would seek to add $1.7 billion to NASA’s FY08 budget to both make up for the shortfall in the final FY07 budget as well as provide for an increase along the lines of the “Mikulski Miracle” attempted last year. Culberson said some of the money for the NASA increase could come from the Commerce Department’s budget, but he didn’t specify what programs there he had in mind.
This week NASA administrator is scheduled to come to the Hill for several hearings: one on Tuesday before the same House appropriations subcommittee that met on Friday, and again on Thursday morning for a hearing on the NASA budget proposal by the space subcommittee of the House Science and Technology Committee. On Thursday afternoon Griffin will appear at a NASA budget hearing by the Commerce, Justice, and Science subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee. So there should be plenty of fodder for discussion about the state of the space agency and its budget.
As a prelude to those hearings, the Denver Post discusses today how the “Mars focus” the space agency has affected the space agency and its other priorities. (Nevermind that there’s not much of a focus on Mars at NASA other than as either a destination for a steady stream or robotic spacecraft or as a nebulous long-term destination for human exploration.) The article quotes Rep. Mark Udall, chair of the House Science and Technology Committee’s space subcommittee, as saying he supports “as much as we can in equal measure” human spaceflight, earth and space science, and aeronautics, and that if there’s not enough money to fund all of them, “you’ve got to spread the pain.”
By Jeff Foust on 2007 March 9 at 7:05 am ET Yesterday’s “Decision 2008″ event at CSIS was billed as a “discussion”, and that was an accurate description: although Sen. John Kyl (R-AZ) and Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) are from opposite sides of the aisle, there was more agreement than disagreement between the two on the topic of China’s anti-satellite weapon test and its ramifications. Some highlights:
- The moderator, CSIS’ James Lewis, noted that the test may have been a “miscalculation” on China’s part, as China may not have anticipated the strong negative reaction the test got internationally. Nonetheless, Kyl, previously criticized the administration for its initial low-key response, is still dissatisfied with the official response. “I’m still concerned that neither the administration nor the Congress has been adequately vocal about the implications of the test or what our response should be.”
- Kyl said that, to counter any Chinese ASAT threat, the US needs to invest in four key areas: defensive counterspace, offensive counterspace, space situational awareness, and operationally responsive space. He expressed some concern that the budget for space situational awareness has been but in the FY08 budget proposal. “We have to create in my view a major force program for space, similar to how we budget for special operations, so that the funds can be protected from other Air Force priorities.”
- Harman agreed with Kyl on three of his four key areas, with the only area of disagreement being (not surprisingly) offensive counterspace. Harman was concerned about the “polarizing” effect of the debate on weaponization of space, and worried that such a debate would prevent greater cooperation with allies, or even consensus within the US government, on the general topic. “I think we lose the opportunity to, perhaps, develop better policy.”
- Kyl was skeptical of arms control or even “code of conduct” agreements about the use of space, believing that they would be ineffective in general, including subject to concerns about definitions and verification. Harman, though, said she would pursue such agreements in parallel with private discussions with various nations. “But I would, at the same time,” she added, “be very clear about what would not be acceptable to the United States.”
- In a broader strategic sense, Kyl noted that China’s ASAT program fit into its general military approach of asymmetric warfare, developing relatively low-cost approaches to attack the perceived weaknesses of American military systems. (Another example of this, he said, is China’s development of quiet diesel subs to counter American naval fleets.) However, he said, news that China is planning the development of an aircraft carrier represents a shift in strategy. “It almost suggests to me that they’re preparing to make a big mistake, which is to move out of an area of doctrine that can serve them very well… into more prestige kind of weaponry that can cost a lot of money and not necessarily fulfill your immediate doctrinal requirements.”
- Harman, following up on that point, said that the US military, including space systems, is in need of transformation—a point of personal concern for her, since her district in southern California includes the Space and Missile Systems Center and a number of military satellite manufacturing facilities. “Maybe we’re not going in the right direction” with existing systems, she said.
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