By Jeff Foust on 2005 July 24 at 2:22 am ET A few additional notes about the House’s approval Friday of HR 3070:
- The House approved three amendments, the most significant of which was a “manager’s amendment” that added $1.26 billion to the authorization for exploration programs. The amendment also allows NASA to complete the ISS “in such a configuration as to support fewer than six persons”, but only after reporting to Congress on why a six-person configuration cannot be completed.
- Two other amendments approved Friday require NASA to report quarterly to Congress on outreach activities within its Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization, as well as submit a plan explaining how NASA will “protect employees who raise concerns about a potentially catastrophic risk to health or safety.”
- One amendment on funding for historically black colleges was submitted and then withdrawn, while another that would involve building facilities on minority campuses that would later be turned over to industry (??) failed in a roll call vote.
- As for Rep. Costello’s proposed amendment that would ban offshoring of ISS jobs—a provision which one person described as “Buy American on steroids”—was reportedly offered and withdrawn, but does not even merit a mention in the House Science Committee’s press release about the bill’s passage.
The bill’s passage was widely praised in press releases ranging from House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and House Science Committee space subcommittee chair Ken Calvert to the House Science Committee’s Democratic Caucus, all claiming some of the credit. Success, after all, has many parents.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 July 23 at 12:24 pm ET Since Michael Griffin became NASA administrator a few months ago we have seen a gradual change in the agency’s position on the role of commercial entities in carrying out the VSE. Griffin initially said he was open to it, but noted in early May that he did not want to get into a position where the agency had to rely on commercial contracts to carry out the vision: “I cannot put public money at risk depending on a commercial provider to be in my critical path.” Last month, Griffin said he wanted to press ahead with commercial ISS resupply services—cargo initially, later extending to crews—to free up resources elsewhere.
Yesterday, though, NASA raised its commitment to commercialization even higher. Speaking at the Return to the Moon conference, NASA’s Chris Shank made it very clear: “We’ve run the budget and we can’t afford to do this with a traditional approach.” A non-traditional approach, he explained, will put a far greater emphasis on commercialization, including ISS crew and cargo and perhaps other opportunities, such as purchasing launch services for the CEV. Later in the day, NASA’s Brant Sponberg unveiled the agency’s new Innovative Programs effort, which includes a mix of service procurements, other transaction authority, and prize competitions.
Michael Mealling has been blogging the conference at Rocketforge; his posts on Friday’s sessions and Innovative Programs in particular offer plenty of details. I’ll have more to say on this in the next couple of days.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 July 22 at 1:32 pm ET The House passed HR 3070, the NASA authorization bill, around midday Friday. The bill passed by an overwhelming margin: 383-15. I haven’t had the chance to review the debate on the floor about the bill, but it appears at first glance that there were few, if any, significant amendments.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 July 22 at 11:42 am ET At last year’s Return to the Moon conference in Las Vegas, Constellation Services International (CSI) unveiled “Lunar Express”, a proposal for a lunar exploration architecture using Soyuz spacecraft that could permit human circumlunar missions within just a few years. CSI also discussed Lunar Express during a session yesterday of this year’s RTM conference. The technical details were little changed from last year, although CEO Charles Miller played up more the role Lunar Express could play in sustaining the Vision for Space Exploration as the Bush Administration transitions to its successor:
There’s going to be a new president elected in 2008. That President is going to come in and possibly say, “This ain’t my vision for space exploration, this is George Bush’s. Why should I care about this?” So there’s a key milestone here, and NASA needs to lock in political sustainability for the Vision. We could help NASA deliver two NASA astronauts around the moon before that election. That would be an early result.
Of course, for that to happen, NASA would have to sign on the Lunar Express concept pretty soon, since some new hardware and a new heat shield for the Soyuz capsule are required.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 July 21 at 8:55 pm ET Wouldn’t you know that just after I write up a long-overdue summary of NASA authorization activities in the House that there’s some activity on the legislation. Aerospace Daily reports Thursday that the full House is set to consider the bill on Friday. One issue that will have to be dealt with is a proposed amendment by Rep. Jerry Costello (D-IL) that would prohibit the offshoring of any ISS jobs. (The bill already has a similar measure, but “only when such actions are consistent with international treaties and obligations”, according to the article. It’s not clear if offshoring is really that big of an issue for ISS employment in any case.)
A bigger issue that will not be resolved Friday is any change to the Iran Nonproliferation Act (INA). Any amendment to the authorization bill that loosens the existing INA restrictions on purchasing Russian hardware or services will wait until the House and Senate meet in conference to resolve differences between their two versions of the legislation, which could take a while.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 July 20 at 5:42 pm ET Missed in all the attention given last week to the impending, only to be scrubbed, launch of the shuttle Discovery was progress on the House version of a NASA authorization bill. In late June the space subcommittee of the House Science Committee approved a proposed bill, HR 3070, but all but one of the Democrats on the committee opposed the bill on a variety of grounds.
Last week, Democrats introduced their own version, HR 3250, designed to rectify the flaws they perceived in the original bill. Those changes, according to a Democratic caucus press release, included authorizing additional funding for several programs, including the James Webb Space Telescope, as well as reversing a planned decline in aeronautics finding. The bill also contained a provision that would require any future cuts to be made proportionally to all parts of the NASA budget, rather than singling out a single of limited group of programs (like aeronautics or science.) The bill would also recommend that NASA put the CEV into operation by 2010 but require that NASA not require the entire shuttle fleet until the CEV is ready (hence avoiding any gap in US manned spaceflight.)
Almost as soon as the Democratic version of the bill was introduced, a compromise was reached. The full Science Committee approved an amended version of HR 3070 during a hearing last Thursday morning (called on fairly short notice) that incorporated some, but not all, the changes proposed in HR 3250. A committee press release lists the various changes. For example, the compromise version drops a provision in the original bill that mandates shuttle retirement in 2010, but also excludes language from HR 3250 that would prevent shuttle retirement until the CEV is ready—in other words, making effectively no major recommendation on the issue. The compromise version also includes funding authorization for FY 2007 (the original covered only 2006, while HR 3250 went through 2008). The compromise also endorses a shuttle servicing mission to Hubble.
The big question, though, is whether it will be possible to reconcile the House bill with the Senate one (S. 1281), which contains a number of significant differences, particularly on shuttle/CEV issues. A complicating matter is that the Senate still has a lot of appropriations bills to deal with, and much of September is going to be lost to a Supreme Court confirmation battle.
I will be out in Las Vegas for the rest of the week for the Return to the Moon conference, by the way, so updates will be infrequent through the weekend—unless, of course, there are major policy-related developments at the conference.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 July 18 at 1:07 pm ET This week marks the 30th anniversary of the Apollo-Soyuz mission, a time when the surviving members of that crew have been reflecting on the mission and the role of international cooperation in space endeavors. International cooperation is generally perceived as a good thing, with benefits for all involved as well as for foreign policy in general. However, in an essay in this week’s issue of The Space Review, James Oberg cautions from, as former astronauts and cosmonauts often do, from assigning too many benefits from such cooperation. “If they want to think their flight caused the international thaws rather than merely reflected them, they’ve earned the right to their point of view—just as sober historians, practical politicians, and sensible space buffs have the right to gently refuse to believe them,” he writes. Oberg is not against international space cooperation, but does not see it as a panacea for all space policy problems, and can in some cases generate new ones. This will no doubt be an issue of some importance as NASA, the Congress, and others grapple with how much a role should other countries play in the Vision for Space Exploration—assuming they’re interested at all.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 July 17 at 1:28 pm ET A bill that passed the House last week would result in some commemorative coins for NASA. The “NASA and JPL 50th Anniversary Commemorative Coin Act” (HR 68), introduced back in January by Rep. John Culberson (R-TX) and with 290 co-sponsors, passed the House on a voice vote July 12. The bill would require the Treasury Department to mint up to 50,000 gold and 400,000 silver coins with face values of $50 and $1, respectively (while legal tender, the coins would be worth far more than their face value in metal content alone: the gold coin would contain one troy ounce of gold, currently valued at around $420, while the silver coin would contain a little over three-quarters of a troy ounce of silver, worth over $5.) The coins would be minted in 2008, the 50th anniversary of NASA and the transfer of JPL from the Army to NASA, although JPL itself dates back to the 1930s.
The bill goes into considerable detail about the design of the coins. The gold con would feature “an image of the sun” on the obverse (front) and “a design emblematic of the sacrifice of the United States astronauts who lost their lives in the line of duty over the course of the space program” on the reverse, while the silver coin would have nine obverse designs, one for each planet, and the reverse “shall be emblematic of discoveries and missions of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to the planet depicted on the obverse of the coin”, with specific requirements for four of the coins (Earth, Jupiter, Saturn, and Pluto). In addition, the bill requires any federal agency with spacecraft in its possession on the ground to provide gold, silver, and other metals to the Mint for inclusion in the coins, so long as that retrieval does not damage the usefulness or historic nature of such spacecraft.
See this collectSPACE article for more details.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 July 17 at 1:08 pm ET How strongly does the American public support the Vision for Space Exploration? It depends on who you ask, and how. Last week the Coalition for Space Exploration released the results of a Gallup survey that suggested strong support for the public. When asked if they supported a “stepping-stone approach” to space exploration that included the key milestones of the VSE (although not using the Vision name), 50.5% said they supported it and 26% said they strongly supported it; 20.4% said they either opposed or strongly opposed it. The coalition noted in its press release that the 76.5% support figure is up from the 68% in a similar poll last year.
A different result, though, came from a USA Today/CNN poll also performed by Gallup. According to a USA Today article about the poll results, “When respondents were asked how they felt about the United States setting aside money to land humans on Mars, 58% opposed the idea and 40% approved it.”
Why the difference? It’s very easy to shape poll results with some simple, subtle wordsmithing of the questions themselves. USA Today/CNN/Gallup didn’t publish the details about their polls, but the Coalition for Space Exploration did put online the detailed results, including the questions from the survey instrument used for the poll. The question in particular about support for the VSE reads as follows:
In January 2004, a new plan or goal for space exploration was announced. The plan includes a stepping-stone approach to return the space shuttle to flight, complete assembly of the space station, build a replacement for the shuttle, go back to the Moon, and then on to Mars and beyond. If NASA’s new budget did not exceed one percent of the federal budget, to what extent would you support or oppose this new plan for space exploration?
Compare that to at least what appeared in the USA Today article, which talked about “setting aside money to land humans on Mars”, a venture that sounds more vague, and potentially more expensive, than what was described in the coalition’s poll. That may well explain the diverging results, and where the sensitivities in public support for the VSE lie.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 July 14 at 7:53 am ET At the tail end of yesterday’s White House press briefing by press secretary Scott McClellan (dominated, as usual the last few days, by topics like Karl Rove), the issue of the shuttle’s return to flight and the status of the Vision for Space Exploration came up:
Q Scott, is the President going to watch the Shuttle launch? And has he shelved his Mars proposal?
MR. McCLELLAN: Yes, I do expect the President to watch the launch. We wish the crew of the Space Shuttle Discovery a safe and successful mission. The President looks forward to seeing the Space Shuttle Discovery launch and the return to flight.
In terms of the mission of NASA, yes, NASA has been moving forward on the vision that the President outlined. And this is a long-term vision that you bring up, one part of that. But today’s flight is an important step in advancing space exploration. I think all Americans are proud of our space program, and look forward to the launch of the Space Shuttle Discovery. It’s also a day to remember those who tragically lost their life on February 1, 2003, in — onboard the Space Shuttle Columbia. I know all of us in this room remember that day very well. And today’s flight is a way to honor their commitment and their dedication to space exploration.
As it turned out, less than a half-hour after the briefing ended the launch was scrubbed.
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