By Jeff Foust on 2005 September 16 at 7:00 am ET The Senate passed its version of the Commerce/Justice/Science appropriations bill on Thursday, approving the $48.9-billion bill on a 91-4 vote. The bill includes $16.4 billion for NASA in FY06, $60 million less than what the President requested and $75 million less than what the House approved earlier this year. There appears to be no significant changes to the NASA portion of the bill since its passage by the Senate Appropriations Committee this summer; a bid to restore full funding to NASA’s aeronautics program failed. This bill will have to be reconciled with the House version.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 September 15 at 7:39 am ET The FY2006 budget is still far from complete, but JPL has already seen the writing on the wall. The Pasadena Star-News reports that JPL has enacted a lab-wide hiring freeze, the first in recent memory at the lab, anticipating a five to eight percent cut in its FY06 operating budget. Lab officials said they will be feeling the effects of the cancellation of JIMO and Mars Telecom Orbiter, both announced earlier this year.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 September 15 at 7:34 am ET Space News reports that NASA has briefed the White House on its new exploration architecture and has received permission to share that plan with Congress and the public. According to the report, key Congressional committees will learn about the plan Friday, and NASA will make the plane at during a press conference Monday. The article also has some general details about the plan, which shouldn’t be too surprising to those who have followed the leaks about the plan over the last few months. Interestingly, the planned Monday release of the plan would coincide with the beginning of the International Lunar Conference in Toronto. There is a “NASA Keynote” scheduled for Monday morning, but it appears focused on robotic lunar exploration plans, and not the overall exploration architecture—although that could change now that the plan has been cleared for public release.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 September 15 at 7:25 am ET The Moscow Times, an English-language newspaper, reports that the the issue of the Iran Non-proliferation Act and its affect on NASA will be a topic of discussion at a meeting tomorrow between President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin:
Putin and Bush will brainstorm on how to circumvent a U.S. law to allow NASA to pay the Federal Space Agency to launch cargo and astronauts to the international space station, Kommersant reported. The law restricts payments to Russia made in connection with the space station unless the United States confirms that Russia has not transferred banned technology to Iran in the previous 12 months.
The choice of language isn’t ideal (“circumvent” a law doesn’t have positive connotations), but at least the problem is on their radars.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 September 14 at 7:46 am ET Sorry, I couldn’t resist. NASA Administrator Mike Griffin’s plan to shift development efforts from nuclear propulsion to other programs is having some concrete effects now. The Albany Times Union reports that NASA has cancelled a $65-million program at the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory in upstate New York that was intended to develop nuclear electric propulsion systems for Project Prometheus. The money that would have been spent on the plan, lab officials said, will instead be diverted to the Crew Exploration Vehicle program. The lab hired 150 people to work on the project when it started in March 2004; their fates are uncertain. The decision is no surprise, since Griffin said as early as May that he intended to shift Prometheus towards developing nuclear reactors, not propulsion systems, and such an effort would be a lower priority than near-term projects like the CEV.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 September 13 at 1:01 pm ET There is a “hearing” scheduled for tomorrow on Capitol Hill about one of the most popular contentious space issues, placing weapons in space. Only this is not your ordinary hearing. Rather than involve a House or Senate committee, the “e-Parliament” (which sounds like a late 90s dot-bomb but is actually an organization that claims to “link democratic members of parliament and congress into a global forum, combining meetings and electronic communication”) is conducting a “Parliamentary Hearing on Space Security”. The event will bring together legislators from ten countries, ranging from the US to Ghana, to take testimony from a panel of experts and discuss the issue. The hearing doesn’t appear to have an obvious slant one way or the other on the topic: the presenters include Henry Cooper, a staunch proponent of space-based missile defense, and Theresa Hitchens, an outspoken critic of space weaponization. Being an “e-Parliament” this event will be webcast, or you can attend it the old-fashioned way by going to Rayburn 2105.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 September 13 at 7:39 am ET At least one member of Congress is concerned that hurricane relief may put a squeeze on NASA’s budget. The Huntsville Times reports that Rep. Bud Cramer (D-AL), speaking in his Huntsville office Monday, said that the combination of supplemental spending for hurricane relief as well as Iraq could make it difficult for Congress to fully fund the space agency for FY2006: “We were already looking at a tight federal budget before this disaster, and now there’s going to be some give and take” in the budget. Cramer also appeared be dropping some broad hints that NASA should consider shifting some of its facilities from hurricane-prone locations like Louisiana and Mississippi. Perhaps to, say, northern Alabama?
Cramer is also concerned that the revised NASA exploration plan may be too expensive to fund within NASA’s current budget. He said that he and fellow members of Congress have yet to be briefed by NASA about those plans and their effect on the budget. Cramer sees two possible scenarios: “One calls on the administration to fully fund going back to the moon and beyond because it was set forth as a national priority. The other plan would be one that cuts numerous NASA programs to pay for a return trip to the moon, and that will have to be evaluated” by Congress. In any event, the Times reports, Cramer said that “for the NASA budget to survive in Congress, the Bush White House would have to make NASA programs a priority.”
By Jeff Foust on 2005 September 13 at 7:30 am ET When it was announced in early May, the United Launch Alliance (ULA), the Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint venture to build EELVs, looked like it would win wide acceptance from the government. Now, a Wall Street Journal article (subscription required) suggests some obstacles ahead for ULA. Part of the problem is a dispute between the two companies on how to recover costs for their respective launch vehicles. However, the article also notes that both the Air Force and the FTC haven’t received enough information about the joint venture from the companies; both must approve the venture before it can go forward. One issue the article does not address is the effect, if any, SpaceX’s plans to develop the EELV-class Falcon 9 vehicle would have on the formation of the joint venture and its required government approval. Of course, SpaceX is still a long way from actually proving it can build and fly the Falcon 9 at a much lower price than the Atlas 5 and Delta 4.
(A funny goof near the end of the article: “Boeing and Lockheed are squabbling over Boeing’s bid to recoup $1 billion or more of the total it invested in earlier years to develop the Delta IV family of rockets. Lockheed spent considerably less than Boeing to develop its rival Saturn V rockets…″. Oh, if only.)
By Jeff Foust on 2005 September 12 at 7:36 am ET There are a couple of articles with policy implications in this week’s issue of The Space Review. First, I report on a recent panel that grappled with the question “Why are space stations so hard?” As you might expect, panelists mentioned a combination of technical and management issues, from the difficulty of trying to test on the ground components designed to interface with items already in orbit to ever-shifting requirements. One issue that many panelists agreed upon was a desire to develop a heavy-lift vehicle that could launch a complete station in just one or two flights, avoiding the complexity of on-orbit assembly as much as possible: a topic that is less relevant to the ISS per se than for exploration mission architectures, particularly those that eschew HLLV development in favor of multiple flights of smaller vehicles to stage lunar and other missions.
Taylor Dinerman, meanwhile, addresses the critical but often-overlooked issue of ground infrastructure as it relates to the Vision for Space Exploration. Dinerman in particular makes the case for replacing the existing Vehicle Assembly Building, four decades old and vulnerable to hurricanes, in favor of a new facility that is better suited to shuttle-derived launch vehicles (as well as the Florida weather). The VAB is not the only infrastructure aspect that NASA and Congress will need to address: there will also need to be renovations of the shuttle launch pads to support shuttle-derived vehicles, and perhaps even replacing the aging crawlers that transport the shuttle from the VAB to the pad.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 September 9 at 8:28 pm ET The Office of Management and Budget published a “Statement of Administration Policy” (SAP) on HR 2862, the appropriations bill that includes NASA. The SAP is effectively the administration’s response to what the House and Senate appropriations committees have done to date on the legislation, identifying changes the administration would like to see.
Regarding NASA, the administration is largely happy with what Congress has done to date, but does have some problems with the legislation. In particular, OMB “strongly objects” to nearly $600 million in earmarks, including $220 million for a future Hubble Space Telescope repair mission. Those earmarks “would significantly reduce the resources needed for critical ongoing and planned science and technology efforts.”
The SAP also criticized the Senate for zeroing out two small but relatively high-profile NASA programs, Centennial Challenges and ISS crew/cargo services. The Senate Appropriations Committee report explained that the latter received no money because it had not spent any of the $98 million appropriated for it in 2005, while its opposition to Centennial Challenges was because “NASA is asking for a lump sum of funds for the Centennial Challenges program and only then will NASA identify the challenges and assign prize levels for completion.”
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