By Jeff Foust on 2013 April 10 at 11:41 am ET The White House has released its documents for the FY14 budget proposal, including a fact sheet for NASA. The administration is seeking approximately $17.7 billion for NASA, about the same as its FY13 proposal. The proposal, as expected, includes funding to begin work “on a mission to rendezvous with—and then move—a small asteroid.” There’s also some consolidation of agency education programs as part of a broader administration STEM education initiative. More details will be posted early this afternoon when NASA releases its own, more detailed, budget documents.
By Jeff Foust on 2013 April 9 at 7:13 am ET Everything is set for tomorrow’s unveiling of the administration’s fiscal year 2014 budget proposal. The overall budget proposal will likely show up on the OMB website Wednesday morning, with NASA posting its detailed budget proposal documents at 1 pm Eastern. At 1:30 pm, the Office of Science and Technology Policy will hold a budget briefing, with NASA administrator Charles Bolden among the participants; Bolden will hold a NASA-specific briefing at 3 pm.
However, the book is not yet closed on the final 2013 budget. Late last week, OMB used its powers under the Budget Control Act to make an additional 0.2% across-the-board cut for all agencies to account for differences in economic forecasts for the housing market as well as adjusting for additional spending added by the Senate for meatpacking inspectors. Combined with the original 1.877% rescission and 5% sequestration, it means NASA’s $17.862 billion in the bill is reduced to about $16.62 billion.
NASA also has the ability to make some modest reallocations of the funding among its various programs by submitting an operating plan for FY13 to Congress. “They can make proposals to mitigate the impact of cuts on certain programs,” said Diana Simpson, on the majority staff of the House Appropriations Committee, during a joint meeting of the Space Studies Board and Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board in Washington on Thursday. “But, of couse, the other side of that is in order to mitigate the cuts to some programs you have to take even bigger cuts in other areas.” That operating plan is due to Congress 45 days after the enactment of the appropriations bill, in early May, but she said she expects NASA to complete it before that deadline. “I think they want to put all of these questions to bed as much as everyone else does.”
What changes might NASA make? One area that might benefit from reprogramming of funds is commercial crew. Speaking at the SSB/ASEB meeting later Thursday, Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA associate administrator for human exploration and operations, noted that the Space Launch System and Orion programs did well in the final budget, even after taking into account rescission and sequestration, ending up with slightly more than in the president’s original request. Commercial crew, though, ended up with $488 million, well short of the requested $830 million. “We kind of knew we were not going get this level, so we planned back at this kind of level,” he said, referring to the $525 million the Senate proposed. “We can repair some of this with an ops plan change with Congress, so we’ll probably make some movement to try and fix commercial crew a little bit.” He didn’t specify how much of a change he would seek.
One program that could suffer under any reprogramming is NASA’s planetary sciences program, which got $1.415 billion before rescission and sequestration in the final appropriations bill, more than $200 million above the administration’s original request. If those cuts are applied evenly, planetary science would still end up with more than $1.3 billion, but James Green, head of the planetary science division at NASA, fears his program will take a bigger share of the cuts in order to reprogram funds to higher priority programs. That could jeopardize plans Green discussed last month to use additional funding to make early payments for the launch of upcoming missions, freeing up money to move up the next Discovery-class mission a year, from 2015 to 2014.
By Jeff Foust on 2013 April 5 at 9:12 pm ET Details about the fiscal year 2014 budget are supposed to be embargoed until Wednesday, when the administration formally releases its budget proposal. When NASA administrator Chalres Bolden spoke before the joint meeting of the Space Studies Board and the Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board in Washington on Thursday, he said he knew some people there were hoping he might accidentally say something about the budget during his presentation. “Trust me, I purged it all from my mind before I came through the door,” he said to laughter.
Bolden was true to his word, and offered no details about the impending budget proposal. The same can’t be said, though, for Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL), who apparently didn’t feel compelled to wait until Wednesday to spill the beans about one rumored element of the proposal. Nelson told reporters in Orlando on Friday that the budget proposal will include more than $100 million to begin work on a mission to retrieve a small asteroid and bring it back to cislunar space, where astronauts will visit it on an Space Launch System/Orion mission in 2021.
The proposal, Nelson said in a statement, was a little of something for everyone. “The plan combines the science of mining an asteroid, along with developing ways to deflect one, along with providing a place to develop ways we can go to Mars,” he said. And the release also emphasized the use of the SLS, which Nelson’s statement refers to on more than one occasion as a “monster rocket,” as the senator has done in the past.
Rumors that some kind of asteroid capture mission, like the concept previously studied by Caltech’s Keck Institute of Space Studies, had been floating around for weeks, and the $100-million figure was reported last week by Aviation Week. Nelson’s comments confirm those statements, as do leaked NASA documents reported late Friday by Space News and the AP. The requested funding of $105 million, as reported by Space News, includes $20 million for asteroid searches, $40 million to begin work on the spacecraft to capture the asteroid, and $45 million for solar electric propulsion system technology that the spacecraft would use.
By Jeff Foust on 2013 April 5 at 1:05 pm ET A week from Monday marks the third anniversary of President Obama’s speech at the Kennedy Space Center where he formally announced the goal of a human mission to an asteroid by 2025. While that is an official goal of NASA’s human space exploration program, there remains some opposition or, at the very least, lack of acceptance of the goal by many people, including some with NASA, as a report on NASA’s strategic direction concluded last December.
At a joint meeting of the Space Studies Board and the Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board in Washington on Thursday, the head of that study, Al Carnesale of UCLA, reiterated those concerns. “Since it was announced, there was less enthusiasm for it among the community broadly,” he said of the asteroid mission goal. “The more we learn about it, the more we hear about it, people seem less enthusiastic about it.”
Carnesale suggested that, in his opinion, it might be better to shelve the asteroid mission goal in favor of a human return to the Moon. “There’s a great deal of enthusiasm, almost everywhere, for the Moon,” he said. “I think there might be, if no one has to swallow their pride and swallow their words, and you can change the asteroid mission a little bit… it might be possible to move towards something that might be more of a consensus.”
Carnesale was followed at the meeting by NASA administrator Charles Bolden, who showed no sign of accepting Carnesale’s advice. He noted that a number of nations have expressed interest, to varying degrees, in human lunar exploration. “They all have dreams of putting human on the Moon,” he said. “I have told every head of agency of every partner agency that if you assume the lead in a human lunar mission, NASA will be a part of that. NASA wants to be a participant.”
However, he made it clear NASA has no plans to lead its own human return to the Moon under his watch. “NASA will not take the lead on a human lunar mission,” he said. “NASA is not going to the Moon with a human as a primary project probably in my lifetime. And the reason is, we can only do so many things.” Instead, he said the focus would remain on human missions to asteroids and to Mars. “We intend to do that, and we think it can be done.”
“I don’t know how to say it any more plainly,” he concluded. “NASA does not have a human lunar mission in its portfolio and we are not planning for one.” He warned that if the next administration tries to change course again back to the Moon, “it means we are probably, in our lifetime, in the lifetime of everybody sitting in this room, we are probably never again going to see Americans on the Moon, on Mars, near an asteroid, or anywhere. We cannot continue to change the course of human exploration.”
By Jeff Foust on 2013 April 3 at 9:39 pm ET When the House Science Committee met last month to discuss the threats posed by near Earth objects (NEOs), they indicated that there would be at least one other hearing on the topic in April. That hearing has been scheduled: “Threats from Space: A Review of Non-U.S. Government Efforts to Track and Mitigate Asteroids and Meteors, Part II” is planned for the afternoon of April 10. It will again be the full committee, rather than just the space subcommittee, convening for this hearing.
Unlike the first hearing, which heard from key officials including NASA administrator Charles Bolden and Presidential science advisor John Holdren, this hearing instead features subject matter experts: Ed Lu, chairman and CEO of the B612 Foundation (which is seeking to raise funding for a NEO detection mission called Sentinel); Donald Yeomans, manager of the NEO Program Office at JPL; and Michael A’Hearn, a University of Maryland astronomy professor who served as vice-chair of the National Research Council’s Committee to Review Near-Earth Object Surveys and Hazard Mitigation Strategies, which released a report in 2009 on the topic.
By Jeff Foust on 2013 April 3 at 7:06 am ET After many months of drama, the end was rather anticlimactic. On Tuesday, New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez signed into law the New Mexico Expanded Space Flight Informed Consent Act in a ceremony at Spaceport America in the southern part of the state. The bill extends the state’s existing commercial spaceflight liability indemnification to suppliers of companies who operate such vehicles. After a previous effort to extend that protection died in the legislature last year, Virgin Galactic, the anchor tenant for Spaceport America, suggested it might move elsewhere if the liability law wasn’t updated. Spaceport supporters and the state’s trial lawyers association, who had previously opposed such legislation, worked out a compromise that breezed through the state legislature.
“With this legislation in place, Spaceport America will continue to become one of our nation’s hubs for commercial spaceflight,” said Michael Lopez-Alegria, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, in a statement. That includes helping lure additional companies to the spaceport, something Virgin has been seeking for some time to take some of the burden of the spaceport’s operating costs off of it. The company told the AP that “all stakeholders must now turn their attention to the future and to recruiting additional companies to the spaceport to fulfill its full potential and maximize new job growth.”
Meanwhile, the Texas Legislature is considering bills that could help close the case for SpaceX to establish its planned commercial launch site in the state. On Monday a House committee took testimony on one bill that would amend the state’s “open beaches” laws. HB 2623 would allow county officials to close beaches for a launch, with exceptions for summer weekends from Memorial Day through Labor Day, plus the Fourth of July. Another House committee last week favorably reported out HB 1791, which makes some tweaks to the state’s existing liability indemnification law. One provision states that “Noise arising from space flight activities… if lawfully conducted, does not constitute ‘unreasonable noise.'” A Texas Senate version of the bill, SB 1636, is slated for a public hearing today.
Speaking last month at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, Musk indicated that Texas was the leading candidate for SpaceX’s planned commercial launch site, although it is in competition with locations in Florida, Georgia, and elsewhere. He specifically cited the need for legislation to allow for beach closures during launches and “protection for the 1-in-10,000-person case who complains about the thing,” which the noise provision in one set of bills may cover.
By Jeff Foust on 2013 March 29 at 7:09 am ET At a media telecon Thursday afternoon to talk about the just-completed Dragon mission to the International Space Station, NASA administrator Charles Bolden said that budget sequestration could have an adverse effect on the agency’s commercial crew program if it extends beyond the end of this fiscal year. “So far, we don’t see any significant impact the rest of this fiscal year, but our projection is that if we’re not able to get out of this sequester condition, it may slow down our progress on commercial crew, and that’s my big concern,” he said.
Bolden said the final 2013 budget, based on the Senate bill, gave commercial crew more money that it would have received under a continuing resolution (which would have funded the program at the pre-sequestration amount of $406 million versus the $525 million, before rescission and sequestration, the program got in the bill passed last week). This budget, therefore, mitigated the worst of the adverse effects possible to the program NASA warned about in a letter to the Senate last month. But he warned milestones planned beyond the end of this fiscal year could be pushed back. “We’re already talking to our partners about delays in milestones that may be necessary if we don’t get the funding we want,” he said. There could also be modifications to the Commercial Resupply Services contracts NASA has with Orbital Sciences and SpaceX for cargo delivery to the ISS because of sequestration, he added.
Meanwhile, the fiscal year 2014 budget finally appears to be on the horizon. The White House confirmed Thursday that the administration will release its 2014 budget proposal on April 10. Budget proposals are supposed to be released on the first Monday in February, but the administration postponed the release, blaming the uncertainty about sequestration and the final FY13 budget.
That budget proposal could include advance work on a new asteroid mission. Aviation Week reported Thursday that the budget proposal may include $100 million to start work on a mission to capture a very small asteroid and bring it to cislunar space. That funding would be spread among the human exploration and operations, science, and space technology mission directorates to begin initial planning. A study released last year by the Keck Institute of Space Studies at Caltech estimates that a near Earth asteroid seven meters in diameter could be captured and moved to high lunar orbit for about $2.6 billion.
By Jeff Foust on 2013 March 28 at 7:11 am ET Back in December I noted the space advocacy community’s continued, if perhaps misguided, fascination with White House petitions. Petitions have been the tool of first resort—and sometimes the tool of only resort—to demand funding increases for NASA or other policy changes. The problem is that they often fail to reach the necessarily threshold (recently increased to 100,000 signatures) for an administration response, and even when they have, the response has been more a reiteration of current policy than a willingness to change.
That hasn’t stopped people from continuing to use this tool. In response to NASA’s decision last Friday to temporarily suspend most educational and public outreach efforts because of sequestration, advocates started a petition demanding that the suspension be overturned. “The Sequester’s recent cuts on NASA’s spending in public outreach and its STEM programs must not be allowed,” it states. As of early Thursday morning, the petition had garnered almost 6,000 signatures, with three and a half weeks to go. Although that’s a sizable amount, unless the petition becomes more popular it will fall well short of the 100,000-signature threshold.
The danger posed by near Earth objects is the subject of another petition. “Find the asteroids, before they find us,” demands this petition, without going into more details. (Find all the asteroids, or just those above a certain size threshold? And by when?) The petition started Sunday and, as of Thursday morning, had received 11 signatures.
Petitions like these don’t hurt, but they don’t alone help much, either, based on past experience. If you feel strongly enough about these issues to sign one of these petitions, make sure it’s not the only advoacy activity you undertake.
By Jeff Foust on 2013 March 26 at 12:04 pm ET The Senate Commerce Committee’s space subcommittee hearing last Wednesday on “Assessing the Risks, Impacts, and Solutions for Space Threats” was seen by many as the Senate’s counterpart to a House Science Committee hearing the day before on the subject of threats posed by near Earth objects (NEOs). While it didn’t have the star power of the House hearing, which featured NASA administrator Charles Bolden and presidential science advisor John Holdren, the Senate hearing did include Jim Green, head of the planetary science division of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, as well as Ed Lu, chairman and CEO of the B612 Foundation, which is raising funding for Sentinel, a mission to look for NEOs.
In fact, the hearing went far beyond NEOs. The “space threats” considered during the hearing went beyond NEOs to include include orbital debris, geomagnetic storms, radiofrequency interference for communications satellites, reliability concerns among spacecraft and launch vehicles, and even the lack of awareness the public has about the importance space plays in modern society. The result was a hearing that, while perhaps informative for those who attended (although only two senators, subcommittee chairman Bill Nelson and new ranking member Ted Cruz, were present), didn’t break much new ground in terms of policy.
They did, though, try to give a boost to actor Bruce Willis’s career. After Nelson read the list of four witnesses testifying before the subcommittee, Cruz chimed in. “I will confess, given the topic today, disappointment that Bruce Willis was not available to be a fifth witness today on the panel,” he joked, referring to the actor’s role in the 1998 asteroid impact movie Armageddon.
Later, after the witnesses’ opening statements, Nelson went back to that earlier comment. “Maybe we ought to have Bruce Willis start doing another Armageddon movie to get everybody sensitized to the fact of how space could well play such a huge consequence in our lives if one of these asteroids starts coming towards us,” Nelson said (perhaps forgetting that Willis’s character, Harry Stamper, dies in Armageddon.) Cruz then chimed in. “There is probably no doubt that actually Hollywood has done more to focus attention on this issue than perhaps a thousand congressional hearings, although I would not wish a thousand congressional hearings on anyone.”
Joan Johnson-Freese of the Naval War College, who testified about her concerns that space is not appreciated by the public, argued that movies like Armageddon did more harm than good with respect to raising public awareness. “What that movie did was basically convince the American public that if anything bad happened, people would get into the shuttle and go fix it,” she said. There needs to be more of an effort, she said, to get the facts about NEOs and the threats they pose to the public, and the ability—or inability—to deal with them. “The movie industry has really convinced much of the American public that we’re all over it, we can take care of it.”
Moreover, if there was any effort to try and deflect a threatening NEO, humans likely wouldn’t be flying to such an object. Asked by Nelson if NASA’s goal of a human asteroid mission by 2025 would be useful for mitigation activities, Lu said there there would be “great science” in such a mission, but it would be less relevant for deflecting asteroids. “I think likely the deflection mission that we have to mount someday—and we will have to, someday, we know that—is likely to be done robotically, just because the distances are quite large from the Earth,” he said. If only Harry Stamper had known that in 1998…
By Jeff Foust on 2013 March 23 at 11:20 am ET The good news for NASA and other federal agencies is that they finally have a fiscal year 2013 budget. On Thursday, the House passed the Senate’s version of a 2013 spending bill as expected, a day after the Senate approved it. The passage ends any worries about a potential government shutdown when the current continuing resolution (CR) that was funding the government expired next week. Moreover, the bill is not just a CR, providing specific appropriations (and guidance) for much of the government, including NASA.
The bad news, though, is that the appropriations bill does nothing about budget sequestration that went into effect at the beginning of this month. That 5% cut, along with the 1.877% rescission that was included in the appropriations bill passed this week, means that while NASA on paper gets $17.862 billion for FY13, after those cuts it will only have $16.65 billion to spend, a cut of more than $1.2 billion.
NASA has already been working to factor in the effects of sequestration into its activities. The latest blow came late Friday with a pair of memos from NASA regarding the agency’s education and public outreach activities. “Effective immediately, all education and public outreach activities should be suspended, pending further review,” stated the first memo, first published by SpaceRef. (The second memo, also published by SpaceRef, exempts “mission announcement media events and products” and other news activities from the suspension.) The memos don’t indicate how long the suspensions will last, but NASA mission directorates and other organizations face a deadline of April 15 to submit a list of those activities planned for May 1 and beyond that they deem “mission critical.”
Some people interpreted the memos as NASA canceling its education and public outreach activities, although a spokesman confirmed to NBCNews.com that this is a suspension, not a cancellation. More guidance on activities that will be exempt from the suspension is expected next week.
These memos come after NASA issued a memo last week putting limits on agency travel, including participation in conferences. The memo came just days before a major planetary science conference, the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, causing some last-minute cancellations in participation in the event. The memo also singled out the National Space Symposium in Colorado next month, and the Goddard Memorial Symposium and Dinner earlier this week in the Washington, DC area, as events specifically excluded from travel.
The decision didn’t sit well with the Space Foundation, the organization that runs the National Space Symposium. “The Space Symposium is the largest annual gathering of the global space community anywhere in the world, and meets your criteria more strongly than any other event,” Space Foundation president Elliot Pulham wrote to NASA administrator Charles Bolden, as reported by AOL Defense. “If the Space Symposium does not meet your criteria, then neither does any other conference in the world.”
Bolden, though, did speak at the Goddard Memorial Symposium, saying that the event was local to him. “We kept getting calls from people saying, ‘Hey, I’m supposed to go to this, and I’m supposed to go to that, and can I go?'” Bolden said at the conference Wednesday, explaining why that conference and the National Space Symposium were “singled out” in the memo. “Finally, I said, ‘Look, I’m not going to NSS. I’m going to go to the Goddard Symposium because it’s in town and it doesn’t cost the government a dime. I suggest you follow my example.'”
Bolden said, though, that the situation could be worse for NASA under sequestration: there are no plans to furlough any civil servants at the agency because the various agency directorates have been operating at a reduced funding level so far this fiscal year, anticipating sequestration or other cuts to come. Other agencies now planning furloughs, he said, spent at faster rates, thinking that that the situation would improve. “We just didn’t think things were going to get better.”
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