Space Politics

Rep. Donna Edwards (D-MD), ranking member of the space subcommittee of the House Science Committee, announced Monday that she is introducing an alternative version of a NASA authorization bill that would approve additional funding for the space agency while giving it the goal of sending humans to Mars by 2030.

The text of the legislation, HR 2616, wasn’t immediately available, but a statement released by the Democratic leadership of the House Science Committee on Monday evening (and now available online) provided the general outlines of the bill. The bill would authorize $18.1 billion for NASA in fiscal year 2014, growing to $18.87 bilion in FY2016. By contrast, the draft authorization bill proposed by the Republican leadership of the House Science Committee would authorize $16.865 billion for NASA in FY14 and FY15 (the Republican bill is a two-year authorization, while Edwards’s version is a three-year authorization.) The Democratic bill would also give NASA the “clear goal of a crewed mission to the surface of Mars and requiring a roadmap that identifies intermediate destinations and activities which contribute to enabling achievement of that goal.”

The announcement of the bill came after Edwards spoke at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington on Monday morning. “There’s a growing consensus among the scientific community that that next great frontier really is Mars, and I agree,” she said. “In order to accomplish this challenging and pioneering endeavor, we have to declare as a nation that a manned mission to Mars is a priority and a program of national significance.”

The press release about the bill didn’t specify a timeline for such a goal, but Edwards indicated she wanted to send humans to Mars by 2030, a more aggressive schedule than what President Obama proposed in his April 2010 speech at the Kennedy Space Center. “If we commit today to reach Mars by 2030, we’ll have more than a 15-year funding profile for planning and development to meet the challenges of accomplishing a complex mission,” she said.

While the topline authorized spending level and the emphasis on an accelerated human Mars exploration program are key differences in the Democratic bill, other elements of Edwards’s legislation appear similar to the Republican bill. Her bill would authorize $1.5 billion for planetary science, as the Republican bill does, up from the approximately $1.2 billion requested by the administration. The press release doesn’t specify Earth science spending levels, although those are likely to be higher in the Democratic version given the opposition previously expressed by Edwards and others about the cuts in the Republican version.

The Democratic bill also would authorize $700 million for commercial crew development, the same as the Republican bill, but less than the approximately $820 million requested by NASA. Edwards said at CSIS that her views on commercial spaceflight have “evolved” in the last couple of years. “I was not a believer, at first, in the role of commercial companies in commercializing space transportation,” she said. “I’ve actually been quite pleased with the progress that’s been made thus far and really look forward to the future.”

Edwards’s bill has 11 co-sponsors, all fellow Democratic members of the House Science Committee, including Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), ranking member of the full committee. However, with no Republicans on board, it seems unlikely this bill would make it out of committee, if it came down to a party-line vote on it versus the proposed Republican bill. Edwards said she’s discussed some of the issued raised in her bill with Republican colleagues “and this will be a work in progress.”

The bill could have a greater influence, though, on the version of a NASA authorization bill that comes out of the Democratic-led Senate. “We have had a discussion with the Senate” about the bill, she said after her CSIS talk. “We’ve actually looked at least at some of the outlines of what the Senate is shooting for. There’s some similarities.”

With the House considering a draft authorization bill that contains provisions the space agency and the White House are unlikely to agree with, NASA is offering some helpful suggestions to those working on a Senate version of such legislation. Space News reports NASA provided Senate staffers with a 35-page “legislative proposal” that features a number of provisions the agency is hoping the Senate will include in its bill, expected to be introduced later this month.

None of the items in that proposal highlighted in the report is particularly major or surprising. One would put NASA on equal footing with the Defense Department in its ability to accept funds from commercial providers to pay for spaceport infrastructure maintenance and upgrades; the fiscal year 2013 defense authorization bill included similar language for the Defense Department, a provision backed by Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL), whose district includes Cape Canaveral. Other provisions in the NASA proposal would treat as confidential technical details of spaceflight mishap investigations and would make NASA contractors more responsible in ensuring they do not use counterfeit parts.

Whether there will be an authorization bill signed into law, though, is another issue. If the Senate version is significantly different than the draft discussed at last month’s House Science Committee hearing—and Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) suggested recently it would be quite different, at least in terms of authorized funding levels—then reconciling the two may be impossible.

When Wednesday’s hearing by the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee on a proposed 2013 NASA authorization act appeared on the calendar last week, many observers speculated the hearing might be the official introduction of the bill, setting the stage for a markup of the bill by the full committee and then consideration by the House in the coming weeks. While that likely remains the bill’s trajectory, the hearing made clear that some members have issues with the “discussion draft” of the bill that was the topic of the hearing.

In particular, the top Democrats on both the space subcommittee and the full committee expressed concerns about various provisions in the draft bill. “The draft bill would appear to shift the emphasis of NASA’s core mission to human exploration,” said Rep. Donna Edwards (D-MD), ranking member of the space subcommittee, something that she said would run counter to the goals for NASA laid out in the National Aeronautics and Space Act that established the agency. Overall cuts in NASA spending (to $16.8 billion in fiscal year 2014) and to the earth sciences program in particular ($1.2 billion in FY14, compared to nearly $1.8 billion—pre-rescission and sequestration—in FY13) was a particular issue for Edwards. She called on additional hearings on topics like earth sciences and space technology before formally marking up the bill.

The draft bill “doesn’t contain funding commensurate with the tasks NASA has been asked to undertake,” said Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), ranking member of the full committee. “In fact, it gives NASA additional, unfunded mandates while maintaining deep sequestration cuts over the life of the bill.” If the bill became law, she said, “it would not help the challenges facing the agency.”

“This is not a bill ready for markup. This is a flawed draft, starting from its funding assumptions, and I cannot support it in its present form,” she concluded. “I also predict that, if passed by the committee, this bill would be DOA in the Senate.”

One element of the bill that had received a lot of attention, language blocking funding for an asteroid retrieval mission, got a mixed reaction. “Because the mission appears to be a costly and complex distraction, this bill prohibits NASA from doing any work on the project,” said subcommittee chairman Rep. Steven Palazzo (R-MS) in his opening statement.

One of the hearing’s two witnesses, former Lockheed Martin executive Tom Young, was also critical of the mission concept. “I have a great worry about what I believe to be a declining trajectory for NASA and the civil space program,” he said, blaming it on “diffuse” leadership that lacks technical expertise. “As an example of what results from diffuse leadership, with too much authority in the wrong places, is the proposed asteroid retrieval mission. This is a mission that is not worthy of a world-class space program.”

The other witness, planetary scientist and NASA Advisory Council chairman Steve Squyres, argued that the bill may go too far in directing NASA about what it can and cannot do in human spaceflight. “I believe that it would be unwise for Congress to either prescribe or proscribe any key milestones in NASA’s Mars exploration roadmap at this time,” he said. “Personally, I agree with the draft authorization act’s position on the asteroid retrieval mission and I disagree with its position on a sustained lunar presence,” a reference to other language in the draft bill that calls for a sustained human lunar presence. However, he said that was just his opinion, and that such milestones towards the long-term goal of human Mars missions not be dictated by the President or Congress but instead established by NASA based on what it determines to be feasible, with oversight by Congress and others.

Squyres also worried about the earth sciences cuts in the draft authorization bill. “I view with considerable concern the deep cuts to earth science that are contained in the proposed authorization act,” he said. “On the administration side, I’ve seen what I view to be alarmingly deep cuts in planetary exploration, which has been, I think, one of NASA’s real shining successes in recent years. In this bill, the pendulum swings too far in the other direction, in my view, and has alarmingly deep cuts to Earth science.”

While the strongest opposition to the draft bill came from key Democratic committee members, one Republican also had issues with another aspect of the bill, the level of funding authorized for the Space Launch System (SLS) heavy-lift rocket. Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) said that the $1.45 billion authorized for SLS in FY14 was too low. His constituents—his district includes the Marshall Space Flight Center—who have reviewed the bill, he said, found that funding level “most disconcerting.” He read an email he received earlier that morning from former NASA administrator Mike Griffin, who called the proposed funding level “not adequate” and said $1.8 billion was needed for SLS in FY14.

“Unless I receive differing expertise that satisfies me that our words in support of human spaceflight match our actions and deeds,” Brooks said, “I will have no choice but to vote against and otherwise oppose this authorization act.”

With most of the hearing devoted to exploration policy, SLS, science funding, and education (there seemed to be little opposition to a provision in the draft bill blocking the administration’s planned STEM education restructuring plan), there was little talk about another topic that was controversial in the past: commercial crew. The bill authorizes $700 million for commercial crew in FY14 and the same amount in FY15, but Palazzo said in his opening statement that this should not be treated as a “blank check” by NASA. The bill includes language requiring NASA to meet a “flight readiness demonstration deadline” of December 31, 2017, for at least one commercial crew system. “This deadline is not negotiable,” Palazzo said. “NASA must do whatever is necessary in its acquisition model to meet this deadline, even if that means radically altering their current plans.”