By Jeff Foust on 2013 February 27 at 6:08 am ET Yesterday, five members of Congress formally introduced HR 823, the new version of the Space Leadership Preservation Act that they originally introduced last September. The text of the legislation, provided by SpacePolicyOnline, indicates a few changes from the original version, most notably that the NASA administrator would serve a six-year term, instead of a ten-year term as proposed last year.
“The Space Leadership Preservation Act is our effort to start a national conversation on this very necessary reform effort,” said Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), one of the bill’s sponsors, in a statement yesterday. “Our bill gets America back on the road to being a leading competitor in the next space race by outlining a leadership structure to develop a bold, strategic, and long-term direction for the future of NASA and US space exploration.”
Wolf and Rep. John Culberson (R-TX), another bill sponsor, will testify about the bill before the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee at 10 am today. Also appearing before the committee are former Lockheed Martin executive Thomas Young, a frequent participant in studies of the space industry as well as hearings like this; and Space Foundation CEO Elliot Pulham. The Foundation published its own report nearly three months ago on making NASA a “pioneering” organization, including recommendations to give the NASA administrator a five-year term and the creation of a commission similar to the board of directors in the Space Leadership Preservation Act.
By Jeff Foust on 2013 February 26 at 6:45 am ET Monday afternoon the House briefly debated and then approved HR 667, legislation that woud rename NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center the Neil A. Armstrong Flight Research Center, while the Western Aeronautical Test Range in California would be renamed the Hugh L. Dryden Aeronautical Test Range. It’s the second attempt by the House to rename the center after the late astronaut, who passed away in August; it passed a similar bill in the final days of the last Congress, but the Senate did not act on it before the previous Congress ended.
Most of the statements on the House floor or subsequent press releases were supportive of the bill. “This bill recognizes the achievements of Neil Armstrong in aerospace travel and space exploration, and emphasizes his affiliation with Kern County,” said the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), whose district includes the center, in a statement after the bill’s passage.
Rep. Donna Edwards (D-MD) offered a somewhat contrarian view during consideration of the bill on the House floor. While supporting the bill, she questioned the decision to honor Armstrong by renaming Dryden. “I doubt in this era of declining funding for NASA that either Neil Armstrong or Hugh Dryden would want a single precious dollar to be spent on a cosmetic facility name change when that money could be spent instead on fulfilling NASA’s mission to reach for the stars,” she said. She also questioned considering the bill just days before sequestration is set to take effect. “I am sad that, here in this Congress, we’re also prepared to cut millions of dollars in a budget that should be spent on the kind of science and exploration that both of these two gentlemen pioneered.”
The legislation passed on a vote of 394-0. Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), the ranking member of the House Science Committee, elected to vote “present”; she did not speak during the consideration of the bill nor offered an explanation of her vote.
By Jeff Foust on 2013 February 23 at 10:27 am ET Once upon a time, NASA administrator Charles Bolden wasn’t worried about the across-the-board budget cuts, known as sequestration, incorporated into the Budget Control Act of 2011. “I don’t talk about sequestration because I don’t think it’s going to happen,” Bolden said in a December 2011 speech, not long after to so-called “supercommittee” established by that 2011 bill failed to come up with an alternative deficit reduction package. At the time, he said he was optimistic that Congress and the White House would come up with another way to reduce deficits and avoid sequestration. “We are not planning for sequestration,” he said in that 2011 speech.
He’s planning for it now. Bolden told media during a visit to the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville that sequestration would have major effects on NASA programs, in particular commercial crew. “The gap is going to get bigger,” the Huntsville Times quotes Bolden as saying, referring to the gap in NASA access to low Earth orbit that the agency hopes to close with commercial providers. NASA earlier this month identified commercial crew as one of the programs that would take the biggest hit from sequestration-induced spending cuts. “I’m just being very blunt about. Anybody who thinks this is no big deal – it’s a big deal.”
So what changed in the last 14 months? Bolden puts the blame on one end of Pennsylvanaa Avenue. “Sequestration was intended to never have to happen,” he said. “Well, guess what. The Congress wasn’t able to do what they were supposed to do, so we’re going to suffer.”
By Jeff Foust on 2013 February 22 at 6:46 am ET A week after the Chelyabinsk meteor and asteroid 2012 DA14 flyby, which got the attention of some members of Congress, two other key members of Congress are expressing interest in the issue of tracking near Earth objects (NEOs) and mitigating any impact risks, although it remains to be seen if this interest will translate into additional funding for NASA NEO activities or other actions.
On Wednesday, Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI), a current member and former chairman of the House Science Committee, sent a letter to NASA administrator Charles Bolden asking for information on NASA’s NEO activities. Sensenbrenner asked Bolden to provide answers within a month to several questions about NASA’s efforts to track “cosmic objects” (the phrase he uses throughout his letter to refer to NEOs) as well as any “plans designed to eliminate the threats posed by cosmic objects on a collision course with Earth” and the required lead time. “We would be remiss if we did not use the recent events as an opportunity to survey our current capabilities and assess how we can better use limited resources to identify potential threats,” he wrote.
Rep. Steven Palazzo (R-MS), chairman of the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee, tells the Huntsville Times that upcoming hearings on NEO impact risks will involve “tough questions” about what NASA should be doing. “Are we focusing our dollars in the right place? Should we be worrying about Mars or distant planets, or should we be worried about the things that could disrupt our way of life on Earth?” he told told the newspaper during a visit to the Marshall Space Flight Center.
By Jeff Foust on 2013 February 22 at 6:26 am ET Legislation introduced last fall to reorganize how NASA is managed appears to be getting a second shot in the new Congress. The House Science Committee’s space subcommittee has scheduled a hearing titled “A Review of The Space Leadership Preservation Act” for Wednesday, February 27, at 10 am. No witnesses or other information about the hearing have been released by the committee so far.
Last September, several members of Congress introduced the Space Leadership Preservation Act to correct issues they perceived with how NASA is run. The original legislation, HR 6491 in the 112th Congress, created a board of directors for NASA, eight of whose 11 members would be appointed by the majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate. A key task for that board would be to nominate candidates to serve as NASA administrator; the president would appoint one of the nominees to serve a ten-year term. The board would also draft budgets submitted simultaneously to the White House and Congress. The legislation would also give NASA authority to perform multi-year procurements.
Despite optimistic statements by the bill’s sponsors at the time of its introduction, the legislation went nowhere in the last Congress, not even getting a formal hearing. The new version of the bill has not been formally introduced yet (as of early Friday morning), so it’s uncertain if it will be a copy of last year’s bill or incorporate any changes. While the original bill had a bit of bipartisan support (one co-sponsor was Houston-area Rep. Gene Green, a Democrat), there was little overt interest in the bill in the Senate. In addition, the White House would likely be opposed to legislation that would appear to shift power, in terms of freedom to nominate administrators and control of the budget process, from the administration to Congress.
By Jeff Foust on 2013 February 21 at 6:54 am ET With the deadline for budget sequestration now just over a week away, Congress is… on break this week. As members of Congress spend time in their home districts this week, some are offering varying perspectives of what budget sequestration would be for NASA, and the centers in their districts.
In Huntsville, Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) offered some relatively good news. The Marshall Space Flight Center “is going to survive sequestration a little bit better than most of the centers around the country,” he said in a speech to community leaders, the Huntsville Times reported. That assessment is not surprising, since Marshall’s key programs, notably the Space Launch System, were not singled out for reductions in NASA’s sequestration plan released last week.
Brooks, though, warned of long-term budget trends that work against NASA as a whole. “The short time I’ve been in Congress, I have noticed a disturbing trend that the budget for NASA is getting harder and harder to sustain it or even keep it from dropping too much,” he said, adding he would work with other members of the state’s congressional delegation to secure funding for the space agency.
In the Houston area, Rep. Steve Stockman (R-TX), whose district includes the Johnson Space Center, was also advocating for NASA funding, putting the blame for cuts squarely on the White House. “Obama’s proposed sequester would be disastrous for NASA, which is already his punching bag,” he claimed in comments to the Bay Area Citizen.
Stockman visited with JSC officials and “outlined his plans to stop proposed cuts to NASA funding,” according to the report. Exactly what those plans are weren’t clear in the article, although Stockman indicated he preferred to fund NASA over some social programs. “I am working with other Texas members of Congress to stop sequester and instead focus the cuts on wasteful or unnecessary spending,” he said.
In Florida, the concern is about commercial crew, a program that would, under the proposed sequestration plan, grind to a halt, at least temporarily, later this year. All three companies currently funded under NASA’s Commercial Crew Integrated Capability (CCiCap) program plan to eventually launch from the Cape, and some have plans for nearer-term tests there as well as development of facilities to support those efforts.
“This is going to push out that much longer the amount of time before we can have our own U.S.-built vehicle launching U.S. astronauts from U.S. soil, and I think that’s unsatisfactory,” former astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, said in a speech Wednesday on Florida’s Space Coast, Florida Today reported. A delay in commercial crew, he warned, meant spending more money on Russian crew transportation services later this decade. However, few in Congress or elsewhere are thinking much beyond March 1 right now.
By Jeff Foust on 2013 February 20 at 6:57 am ET The transition to the second term of the Obama Administration has resulted in a number of key administration officials choosing to leave, most notably the Secretaries of State and Defense. The administration’s top science policy official, though, suggested over the weekend that he plans to stick around.
“People always ask me what the job is like,” said John Holdren, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), during a panel session on dealing with uncertainty in science policy-making at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting in Boston on Saturday. “And I always say it’s a mixture of exhilaration and frustration, but exhilaration is still winning.”
Holdren was responding to a question about the expected departures of a number of scientists from postions in the administration, such as Jane Lubchenco as administrator of NOAA and Steven Chu as Secretary of Energy. “My prediction is that many of those will be replaced by scientists of comparable distinction,” Holdren said.
As for his own work, Holdren described working for a president more interested in details on science and technology issues than he anticipated. He said there’s long been a rule of thumb that you don’t give a president a memo more than two pages. Holdren adhered to that rule in his first memo to President Obama. “It came back with his handwriting scrawled across the top: ‘Where’s the rest?'” Holdren recalled. His average memo to the president, he said, is now five to six pages.
“It helps to have a boss who knows how and why science and technology matter, and therefore makes sure you are in the room when you need to be in the room” to provide input on relevant issues, Holdren said, indicating the president was such a person. “The degree of success that you can have in this position does depend on your relationship with the boss and also with your relationship with the other senior advisors around the president.”
Holdren did not discuss space policy specifically during the session, and did not stick around for questions afterwards, citing another meeting. However, his comments did suggest that Holdren will continue to have a key role in shaping those issues for some time to come.
By Jeff Foust on 2013 February 15 at 1:48 pm ET Two similar but unrelated events on Friday—a meteor that struck the Chelyabinsk region of Russia, reportedly causing hundreds of (mostly minor) injuries, and the flyby Friday afternoon of asteroid 2012 DA14, which will pass closer to the Earth than geostationary orbit satellites—have gotten the attention of many people, including a key congressman who is vowing to look into the issue in the near future.
“Today’s events are a stark reminder of the need to invest in space science,” said Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), chairman of the House Science Committee, in a statement Friday. “We should continue to invest in systems that identify threatening asteroids and develop contingencies, if needed, to change the course of an asteroid headed toward Earth.”
Smith’s statement noted that the science committee will hold a hearing “in the coming weeks” on the issue, specifically “ways to better identify and address asteroids that pose a potential threat to Earth.”
The committee’s vice-chairman, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), has frequently talked about what is sometimes called planetary defense, and he’s also spoken out on the issue. “This should serve as a wake-up call,” he said in a separate statement Friday. He added that he’s particularly concerned “we have no plan that can protect the Earth from any comet or asteroid. So, even if we find one that will hit us, we might not be able to deflect it.”
Rohrabacher also noted that he is working with Rep. Smith “to expedite a hearing on planetary protection from these ‘near Earth objects’ as soon as we can.”
By Jeff Foust on 2013 February 14 at 9:32 pm ET If budget sequestration goes into effect next month, NASA plans to enact a series of spending reductions that would effectively bring the agency’s commercial crew program to a halt by the summer, and delay or cancel some science and technology missions, according to a letter released by a Senate committee today.
The letter from NASA administrator Charles Bolden to Senate Appropriations Committee chairwoman Barbara Mikulski, dated February 5, was one of many from various federal agencies that Mikulski’s committee released today as part of a hearing on the effects budget sequestration would have on the government should the automatic across-the-board cuts go into effect as currently planned on March 1.
Bolden, in the letter, said that the agency assumed that the current continuing resolution (CR), which funds the government at FY 2012 levels until March 27, would be extended through the rest of the fiscal year, and that the sequester would cut five percent from that level, or about nine percent from the remaining part of the fiscal year. That works out to a full-year budget of $16.985 billion, or $894 million below the CR level (and $726.7 million below the administration’s FY2013 budget request.) By comparison, NASA was looking at a larger cut of $1.46 billion under the original sequestration plans released in September.
Those cuts will not be distributed evenly across NASA’s various programs. Exploration would see a cut of $332.2 million from the FY13 request. Commercial crew would bear the brunt of that cut. “After sequestration, NASA would not be able to fund milestones planned to be allocated in the fourth quarter of FY 2013 for Commercial Crew Integrated Capability (CCiCap),” the letter states, including a number of reviews scheduled for Boeing, Sierra Nevada Corporation, and SpaceX. “Overall availability of commercial crew transportation services would be significantly delayed, thereby extending our reliance on foreign providers for crew transportation to the International Space Station.”
NASA would also cut $45 million from its exploration R&D efforts, delaying or canceling several research programs in this area. NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion crew exploration vehicle would not be directly affected by the cuts.
Elsewhere, NASA would cut $251.7 million from the proposed $619.2 million for its construction account, affecting a number of agency construction projects, including ground facilities needed for SLS and Orion. NASA would cut $149.4 million from the requested $699 million for its space technology program, with potential effects ranging from several planned technology demonstration programs to a reduction in parabolic or suborbital flights in its Flight Opportunities program.
Science would get a $51.1 million cut from its requested $4.91 billion. That would result in potential delays or lower funding levels for new Explorer and Earth Venture class missions, and a reduction in funding of about 2% for research and analysis grants. Major ongoing programs, like NASA Mars exploration efforts and the James Webb Space Telescope, would not be affected by the cuts. Paul Hertz, head of NASA’s astrophysics division, said during a NASA Advisory Committee astrophysics subcommittee telecon Thusday afternoon that he hasn’t seen the letter outlining the agency’s plans, but suggested one approach would be to delay the start of the next Explorer-class mission, slated to be announced this spring, until the beginning of fiscal year 2014.
The letter doesn’t identify any cuts to NASA’s space operations, education, or cross-agency support programs, suggesting that they would not participate in the cuts. In fact, the total cuts (relative to FY13) included in the letter, including the $7.3 million for aeronautics and $0.4 million for the office of the inspector general, sum to $792.1 million, more than the $726.7 million figure cited in the letter. The cause of that difference isn’t immediately clear.
By Jeff Foust on 2013 February 14 at 1:09 pm ET With just two weeks before the across-the-board budget cuts known as sequestration are now scheduled to take effect (two months later than originally planned), organizations concerned about what those cuts could do to various agencies are stepping up their outreach and lobbying. The American Astronomical Society (AAS) is urging its members to reach out to its members today—via Twitter, oddly enough.
“The AAS asks all members to take a moment today to contact their members of Congress,” the organization notes in a blog post. AAS is part of a 3,200-member coalition of organizations called NDD United that is seeking to avoid the cuts sequestration would impose on non-defense discretionary (NDD) spending. Interestingly, the post emphasizes outreach using Twitter, offering sample tweets people can use, pasting in the Twitter handle of their senator or representative. (One sample: “Remember [insert member twitter handle], over 3200 groups want you to say #NoMoreCuts to discretionary investments! http://bit.ly/11Bzd0t #sequester”)
It’s not clear, though, that outreach via Twitter will have much influence on members, given it, like email, is so easy to use and abuse. The post, in fact, notes that “email is not an efficient way of communicating with Congress” and recommends that AAS members that don’t use Twitter to use phone, fax, or letters instead. Tweeting can’t hurt, but it may not help much, either, and space advocates seeking to stop sequestration should only begin, and not end, their efforts with a 140-character plea.
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