By Jeff Foust on 2005 October 27 at 7:47 am ET The House passed by voice vote last night legislation that would amend a provision of the Iran Nonproliferation Act that prevents NASA from purchasing Russian space hardware and services. The Iran Nonproliferation Amendments Act (S.1713), was approved by unanimous consent in the Senate last month. However, the House amended the bill slightly, as the Washington Post explains: the Senate version would prohibit payments starting in 2012, but allow those services and goods to be delivered after that date; the House version would terminate all contracts in 2012, regardless of when the payments were made. The bill also extends the policy to nuclear-related imports to Syria and nuclear exports by both Iran and Syria. The Senate is expected to approve the House version of the bill and send it on to the President, who, the Post reports, “despite some early misgivings, is prepared to sign it.”
By Jeff Foust on 2005 October 26 at 9:45 pm ET At Wednesday’s meeting of the FAA’s Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC), Brant Sponberg of NASA talked about some of the agency’s commercialization efforts, including various Centennial Challenges prize programs. He also offered some details about NASA’s upcoming procurement of commercial ISS transport services, which may be of interest to readers given the rhetoric about the role of commercialization in the Vision for Space Exploration:
- The procurement will cover a wide range of options for ISS transport: cargo (pressurized and unpressurized) to the station, cargo return to the Earth, and crew transport to and from the station.
- A draft procurement will be issued by around Thanksgiving (it will be preceded later this week by a procurement synopsis; Sponberg said that synopsis was sitting on his desk as he spoke). The final RFP will be out by the end of the year. However, it will be around May before NASA awards any contracts (I could have sworn I heard someone in the audience groan when Sponberg said that.)
- Someone asked what sort of regulations regarding “human-rating” of a crew transport vehicle would apply here. Sponberg said that, during the development phase, NASA would be open to using the FAA’s own regulations for the vehicle, since it would only be carrying one or more commercial pilots. However, once NASA starts to procure actual crew transport services, with the vehicle carrying NASA astronauts, NASA would “absolutely” require the vehicle to meet its human-rating requirements.
Update 10/27 12:30 pm: A few addenda to my previous comments, now that I have my notes from the meeting:
- If and when NASA does get to the point where they procure commercial ISS transport services, those contracts will be done under a firm fixed price, not cost-plus, basis, with fixed milestones and a payment schedule tied to those milestones. Sponberg added that companies “should be willing to take a little bit of the risk.”
- Insurance and indemnification of commercial ISS transport launches are apparently thorny issues that are still under discussion within NASA.
- NASA is still studying the possibility of a manned orbital spaceflight prize, analogous to the suborbital Ansari X Prize. Bigelow Aerospace already has something similar with the America’s Space Prize, but Sponberg said that it remains to be seen what relationship, if any, there will be between NASA and the Bigelow prize. (Recall that last fall there were reports that NASA would fund half of the $50-million prize, but those negotiations apparently fell through, and Bigelow is now fully funding the prize itself.)
By Jeff Foust on 2005 October 26 at 6:32 am ET The space subcommittee of the House Science Committee and the subcommittee on government finances of the House Government Reform Committee are joining forces for a joint hearing Thursday morning (10 am, Rayburn 2318) on NASA’s financial management system. The hearing plans to examine how NASA’s new integrated financial management system is performing, and what else the agency is doing to ensure the accuracy of NASA’s financial data, something auditors have raised concerns about in recent years. As the Government Report Committee’s announcement of the hearing noted, “Although NASA management blamed conversion to the new system for its poor audit performance in both FY2003 and FY2004, auditors also found that NASA did not follow proper accounting procedures, did not accurately account for property and equipment, and was unable to effectively reconcile its Treasury account (the equivalent of balancing its checkbook).” Witnesses include several NASA and GAO officials, including NASA CFO Gwendolyn Sykes.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 October 24 at 7:36 am ET A few policy-related articles of note in this week’s issue of The Space Review:
- I take a look at some of the opposition to the ESAS report from the space advocacy community, including comments made by Rick Tumlinson and Robert Zubrin at the Space Frontier Conference on Friday in LA. Zubrin wants the shuttle program ended as soon as possible to accelerate development of a heavy-lift launch vehicle, while Tumlinson and others would be happy to end the shuttle program now as well, but build up an “economically sustainable set of transportation options” that can support the Vision and other activities, instead of a government-specific heavy-lift vehicle. Neither Tumlinson nor Zubrin were terribly optimistic about the fate of the Vision should the program continue on its present course, but there’s no consensus on what an alternative to ESAS should be.
- Dwayne Day offers a reason for why China has been so deliberate in its manned spaceflight program: the government gains considerable prestige at the moment for the program, and thus wants to avoid any disasters. However, as he points out, that prestige will diminish over time, but the risk of disaster remains. At some point there will be an accident and “it is perhaps inevitable that eventually the Chinese public will come to view human spaceflight as a waste of money when the peasants need health care.”
- Taylor Dinerman sheds some light on the problems with the US Navy’s space efforts, which have in large part been ignored because of the attention paid on troubled Air Force programs. The Navy rated poorly in a recent report on its space expertise, and space has not received a lot of attention in a service branch focused on problems with some shipbuilding programs. (Dinerman calls the Mobile User Objective System (MUOS) ” reasonably healthy”, but even that program has suffered delays.)
By Jeff Foust on 2005 October 24 at 7:24 am ET An article in Sunday’s edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch looks at how some members of Congress from the St. Louis area plan to address potential budget cuts to pay for hurricane relief. One of those quoted in the article is Rep. Jo Ann Emerson (R-MO) talks about changes in the Medicare prescription drug plan, then veers sharply in another direction:
“Consider that everything else is negotiated: wheelchairs, doctors’ fees, everything but drug prices,” she said. “I also hope they eliminate Mars out of the NASA budget.”
One assumes that Rep. Emerson is referring to the Vision for Space Exploration, and not the existing (and relatively small) robotic exploration program. Oddly, speaking earlier in the article about the drug plan, she said, “We could probably find all the savings we need right there.” If so, why eliminate Mars?
By Jeff Foust on 2005 October 23 at 11:18 am ET Right now it appears that NASA’s supporters will have to fight hard to avoid budget cuts, if not this year then in 2007 and beyond, given the emerging fiscal environment. Now, as Florida Today reports today, NASA actually needs more money than currently planned to carry out everything: on the order of $5 billion through 2010. The problem is that the budget estimates compiled in 2004 assumed the cost of the shuttle program, currently about $4.5 billion a year, would drop roughly in half by the time the shuttle is retired in 2010. Those cost savings have not materialized, hence the need for extra funding. Without that money NASA will be faced with some hard decisions about how many of the 19 shuttle flights currently planned it can afford to carry out. It will also probably trigger renewed debate on whether any more shuttle flights should be flown: an extreme position, to be certain, but not as unlikely an outcome as it once might have been.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 October 22 at 11:40 am ET SPACE.com has a summary of the comments made by Congressman Bart Gordon (D-TN), ranking Democrat on the House Science Committee, at a breakfast event Friday previously noted here. Gordon believes that supporters of the Vision for Space Exploration will have to fight a two-front battle for it on Congress: against Democrats who would rather see the money spent on “problems here on Earth” and fiscal conservative Republicans who would rather not see the money spent at all. That’s no real surprise, of course, given the prevailing attitudes and comments made in recent weeks. He sees cuts to NASA’s budget over the next few years as a “realistic scenario”; he wants to avoid “blood in the water” in the near term in the form of near-term cuts that could make NASA look vulnerable to cuts down the road.
Gordon said he believes the space industry needs to work harder to sell the program and “explain that we are going to the Moon not just on a tourist expedition but that there are good reasons for it.” That, of course, has been the purpose of organizations like the Coalition for Space Exploration and the Space Exploration Alliance; his comments suggest these and other groups will need to step up their efforts on Capitol Hill in the months to come.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 October 20 at 12:50 pm ET Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW), whom you might remember took on the Vision for Space Exploration this past summer, now has a new target: Air Force space policy. In a press release today, CAGW takes issue with plans for the formation of the United Launch Alliance (ULA), the Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint venture to manufacture EELVs and sell them to the government. In the eyes of the organization, the Air Force is “propping up failing ventures with lucrative long-term contracts, forcing taxpayers to fund the EELV boondoggle for years to come” by endorsing the formation of the ULA and awarding it contracts for a new round of EELV launches.
CAGW is correct that there are some concerns about the competitiveness of the EELV contracting process should the formation of the ULA be approved by the Federal Trade Commission. However, even without the ULA the Air Force had dropped broad hints that it would adopt a “leader-follower” approach to future EELV contact awards, ensuring that even without a 50-50 split between the two companies, the “losing” bidder would still receive a substantial share of the launches awarded. This is all rooted in the Air Force’s desire for “assured access to space” by having two different launch vehicle families available. (Under the ULA both the Atlas 5 and Delta 4 would continue to be produced, although manufacturing would be consolidated at Boeing’s Alabama plant.) So this problem really has more to do with the assured access strategy rather than the ULA itself, something that the CAGW press release glosses over.
The CAGW concludes that to “keep the U.S. space launching industry competitive, the Air Force should do whatever it can to open the field to new competitors.” That, of course, is easier said than done: about the only company that is reasonable able and interested in competing with the EELVs for the foreseeable future is SpaceX and its newly-announced Falcon 9. However, the Falcon 9 is still a few years away from entering service, and the company has yet to launch any rocket, let alone anything approaching EELV-class in performance.
Update 10/21 11 am: As one person alludes to in the comments, SpaceX filed a lawsuit on Thursday in a bid to block the ULA, according to the Los Angeles Times and Reuters. There hasn’t been an official reaction yet from Boeing, Lockheed, or the Air Force.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 October 19 at 1:01 pm ET The Space Transportation Association is holding a breakfast Friday morning with Rep. Bart Gordon (D-TN), the ranking Democrat on the House Science Committee, as the featured speaker. Congressman Gordon will be speaking on “Congressional Perspectives on NASA and the Space Exploration Vision”. The breakfast starts at 8 am (networking at 7:30 am) in Rayburn House Office Building B-340. RSVP with Rich Coleman if you’re interested in attending; unlike past STA breakfasts there is no registration fee. Alas, I will be out of town Friday and unable to attend. Perhaps any readers who are planning to attend can comment afterwards on what the Congressman had to say.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 October 19 at 12:56 pm ET On a couple of occasions in recent weeks people have come up to me and asked how I keep the comments section of this blog so lively—only sometimes they replace “lively” with “nasty”. While it’s great that this blog has attracted this much interest, I have become increasingly concerned about the level of discourse in the comments. Most of the time there aren’t any problems, but there have been cases where the exchange of opinions has been far from professional, to the detriment of all.
I am loathe to institute measures that would restrict the dialogue, but I do have some guidelines—which should be common sense to everyone—that should help matters:
- Who are you? I can understand some people’s concerns about anonymity, but if you’re not going to disclose your real name, please at least use a valid email address. It helps ensure some degree of accountability for your comments.
- No copying: Please don’t copy large chunks of documents from other web sites (especially copyrighted documents): just provide a URL to that document.
- On topic: Topic drift is natural in any discussion, but please be sure your comments have some degree of relevance to the original post. If you start debating minor technical details of launch vehicles, you’re probably going off topic; if you start debating gun control, you definitely are.
- Play nice: Remember the old saw about disagreeing without being disagreeable?
I’ve maintained a fairly hands-off approach to comments here, but I plan on taking a more active role in order to maintain the quality of this blog. Hopefully this should avoid the need to take more drastic measures. Thanks for your cooperation!
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