By Jeff Foust on 2004 November 30 at 7:20 am ET Hmmm… is it a side effect of Thanksgiving turkey leftovers that has resulted in so many newspaper editorial writers turning their attention to NASA? An editorial in Tuesday’s Philadelphia Inquirer [free registration required] discusses NASA’s FY2005 budget. Like the New York Times yesterday, the Inquirer is skeptical about continuing the shuttle and station: “Why continue spending on the shuttles and space station if the results will be of dubious scientific value?” The editorial concludes that “with a federal budget awash in red ink, President Bush and NASA must make sure they’re committing money to the projects likely to yield the greatest scientific benefits.” (Yes, Rand, I can hear your rejoinder already.)
The Palm Beach Post weighs in on a much smaller part of the budget Tuesday: a lack of funding for the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM). Readers may recall that NASA announced earlier this year it was shutting down the spacecraft, which is used in part to support hurricane forecasts, only to reverse that decision under pressure from the scientific community and Congress. However, the FY05 budget failed to include the estimated $28-36 million needed to keep TRMM operating through 2006. “[T]he budget cut for potentially life-saving research is untimely, given President Bush’s push for exorbitant manned missions to the moon and to Mars,” the editorial claims. “Such glamour projects tend to get more attention and money.” Ironically, the editorial undercuts its support for TRMM by including a quote from National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield, who said that what forecasters really need is more aircraft reconnaissance of hurricanes.
By Jeff Foust on 2004 November 29 at 7:44 am ET Monday’s New York Times published an editorial on NASA’s budget windfall, calling it “a budgetary coup in a year when most federal programs were ratcheted back to make room for the costly war in Iraq and to alleviate huge deficits.” The editorial does warn, though, that the agency will have to find money to pay for the increasing costs of shuttle return-to-flight activities and a robotic Hubble mission, requiring it to make “wise choices” in other programs to find the additional money. The Times’ suggestion:
NASA should look very hard at terminating its two costliest programs, the International Space Station, now orbiting in a partially built state overhead, and the shuttle fleet that is being resuscitated to carry parts and astronauts up to the station. Those two programs eat up much of the NASA budget for little real gain.
As the editorial also notes, “The one thing that has become apparent since President Bush proposed putting astronauts on the Moon and Mars is that no such plan can gain momentum until the station-shuttle complex is shut down.”
Meanwhile, another Times, the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, also takes aim at NASA in an editorial Saturday. Like their counterparts in New York, the St. Pete Times is somewhat skeptical of NASA’s plans:
Americans may be mesmerized by the prospect of reaching new frontiers in space, but the nation has hardly had a debate about NASA’s mission and the associated costs. O’Keefe has a role to play as the agency’s cheerleader, especially in the wake of the shuttle disasters. But his larger responsibility is to guide the nation as it sets both creative and fiscal priorities.
The editorial concludes that “the administration, Congress and the scientific community need to weigh more thoroughly how the president’s plan would serve science and affect other domestic priorities.”
By Jeff Foust on 2004 November 29 at 7:34 am ET Space News reported last week in its print edition that an effort to pass legislation to expand NASA’s authority to offer prizes has stalled in the Senate. On November 18 Rep. Sherwood Boehlert introduced HR 5385, which authorizes NASA to establish the Centennial Challenges program and allows it to award prizes as large as $1 million, four times the current limit. A similar effort in the Senate, however, stalled when Democrats on the Senate Commerce Committee blocked an effort by sponsor Sen. Sam Brownback to pass the bill by unanimous consent. Even though Congress will reconvene again next week for another short lame-duck session, there seems little chance the Senate will pass the bill, and because of that the House seems unlikely to take the time to pass the bill, despite the lack of opposition there.
The Space News article doesn’t provide any details regarding why Democrats blocked the Senate version of the bill. According to one version of the story, though, the Democrats were not necessarily opposed to the bill itself but instead acted in retaliation for a hearing that Brownback, who chairs the science, technology, and space subcommittee of the commerce committee, held last month on prenatal genetic testing technology; the Democrats felt that Brownback biased the hearing by stacking it with witnesses primarily opposed to such testing.
By Jeff Foust on 2004 November 24 at 7:36 am ET NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe took some time Tuesday to celebrate, in a sense, NASA’s budgetary victory in Congress in talks to employees and a meeting with reporters. O’Keefe noted that the budget was “as strong an endorsement as anyone could have hoped” for the Vision for Space Exploration, the New York Times reported. Florida Today said that O’Keefe seemed to take some pleasure noting that just this time last week it appeared NASA’s budget would come up several hundred million dollars short of the original request:
“Lots of folks were writing (that) we were stalled,” O’Keefe told the NASA employees, a hint of a smirk peeking from under his salt and pepper mustache. “Well, we beat that.”
Reports were mixed regarding earlier claims that jobs cuts were in store in the shuttle program at KSC and perhaps JSC. The Houston Chronicle said that O’Keefe “dismissed” that earlier report, but didn’t rule out the possibility for future cuts once safety upgrades are completed on the three remaining orbiters. The Orlando Sentinel, which first published reports of the potential job cuts, also reported that O’Keefe said future job cuts were possible, but said there was no specific number (the Sentinel had originally reported that about 100 jobs were to be cut starting December 1.)
The news is not all good, though: the Chronicle reported that O’Keefe said NASA still faces “tough decisions” about how to distribute the $16.2 billion NASA received. The article notes that shuttle RTF activities have now generated an overrun of $760 million, and starting the Hubble repair mission will cost nearly $300 million more. On top of that, Congress added $400 million in earmarks.
By Jeff Foust on 2004 November 23 at 7:38 am ET Yesterday House Majority Leader Tom DeLay visited NASA’s Johnson Space Center to celebrate winning effectively full funding for the agency in FY05, according to the Houston Chronicle and Galveston Daily News. Perhaps the most interesting comment he made suggests that support for the Vision for Space Exploration is not unanimous within the Bush Administration: “The president’s support has not wavered, but there are some within the administration that would like to see this money go elsewhere.” He added that NASA was the last agency dealt with during negotiations on the omnibus budget bill: DeLay reportedly said he would block the full omnibus bill if NASA did not get its full funding.
Some people, like Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, are already thinking ahead to FY06, according to a quote in the Chronicle: “However, in the future, the administration will need to propose, and Congress enact, a larger budget if we are to return to flight and pursue the moon, Mars and other bold initiatives for space exploration.”
Both the Chronicle and Florida Today note that the budget will eliminate the need for layoffs of shuttle or other workers. However, the Orlando Sentinel reported Tuesday that KSC plans to “phase out” 100 shuttle processing jobs, relying on attrition rather than layoffs. The report also said that similar steps are expected in shuttle offices at JSC.
Finally, the New York Times takes note of NASA’s fortunes in an overall review of the budget Tuesday, referring to the VSE as the “Mars Program” in the article’s headline. It plays up the fact that the across-the-board cuts in other programs were increased slightly to pay for the additional NASA funding. However, I think few will bemoan the fact in the Times article that the IRS also ended up with “substantially less” than requested…
By Jeff Foust on 2004 November 22 at 7:23 am ET Nathan Horsley, a lawyer with a background in space law, has written a detailed analysis of HR 5382. His conclusion: while there are “functional additions” to and “useful clarifications” of existing laws and regulations in the bill, the legislation is more useful “as a public relations or marketing tool than as a functional change to current procedures.” Thus, if the bill is not approved by the Senate before the end of the year, “there should not be a need to start looking into overseas launch regulations (which are far less well developed than ours) anytime soon.”
By Jeff Foust on 2004 November 21 at 11:50 am ET The comments in a previous post led to a debate over the claims made by one person regarding the sales of a recent space policy book. I have since closed the comments for that post after adding a final comment that tried to clarify the issue. However, during the time since those comments were posted I have received messages that implied the potential for legal or other action against myself and/or my employer, the Futron Corporation, for allowing such messages to be and remain posted.
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By Jeff Foust on 2004 November 21 at 10:58 am ET One of the banes of the budget process, not just for NASA but other agencies, is the inclusion by some members of Congress of earmarks to aid little-known programs and organizations in their home districts. On NBC’s Meet the Press this morning Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) weighed in against earmarks, using NASA as an example:
We’ve got to exercise not only overall budgetary control, but stop these earmarks. We’re harming agencies like NASA and their ability to carry out their mission because we’re diverting so much of the funds to other projects that are unnecessary and wasteful.
The conference report for the omnibus budget bill includes several pages of such earmarks in the NASA budget.
By Jeff Foust on 2004 November 21 at 9:40 am ET Both the House and the Senate passed the omnibus budget bill, HR 4818, yesterday, with the Senate finally passing the bill a little after midnight. (The bill actually won’t be delivered to the President for a few days because of a last-minute glitch with language in the bill regarding Congressional access to tax returns, which will apparently be handled by a separate bill in the next few days.) As previously noted, the bill gives NASA $16.2 billion, roughly the full amount requested by President Bush. However, as the Orlando Sentinel reports, the bill gives NASA an unusual degree of flexibility to determine how much of that money it needs to return the shuttle to flight and begin a Hubble repair mission. NASA must report to Congress within 60 days regarding how much money it needs and how it plans to reallocate its funding accordingly.
Some more details about NASA’s budget are buried in the conference report on the omnibus budget bill. (The section that deals with the VA-HUD-independent agencies portion of the bill is here [warning: large PDF file], with the subsection that deals with NASA begins on page 176 of the PDF file, or printed page 116.) A few interesting tidbits gleaned from an early morning review:
- The budget includes only $10 million for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission—compared to $70 million in the original request—with a directive that at least a quarter of the money spent on LRO instruments be used for basic science research rather than exploration-driven objectives. (The hand-edited document shows that they previously planned to give LRO $20 million, then cut it apparently at the last minute.)
- The budget includes $25 million for the X-43C, the successor to the just-completed X-43A hypersonic research program. NASA had announced earlier this year that they were canceling the X-43C since it did not fit into the exploration program.
- The budget includes $10 million for the Centennial Challenges prize program, “subject to passage of authorizing legislation.” I did not see an explicit mention of a provision that would increase the limit on prizes from its current level of $250,000.
- The report notes that “conferees are prepared to commit funds for development of a Crew Exploration Vehicle [CEV], but remain concerned that there has not been enough initial planning to determine what specific capabilities the CEV should have.” The report calls on NASA to deliver a report “that details the criteria and developmental goals the CEV must meet to accomplish the missions envisioned by NASA” to Congress within 60 days.
By Jeff Foust on 2004 November 21 at 8:58 am ET The bad news is that the Senate did not take up HR 5382 before adjourning after midnight Saturday. HobbySpace reports that while the bill was track to be handled by the Senate Saturday night, a hold was placed on the bill, although it’s not clear whether this was a simple administrative maneuver or if a senator objected to the bill. The good news is that the Senate is not done for the year: they have agreed to return on December 7 to handle remaining legislation, which will likely be the very last chance for the bill.
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