By Jeff Foust on 2012 December 13 at 9:37 am ET In the search for consensus for the future of NASA, there was some consensus during a hearing Wednesday by the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee: members are, by and large, not particularly supportive of the agency’s current direction. However, there were far fewer signs of consensus of what alternative approach NASA should pursue.
After the Columbia accident nearly a decade ago “we emerged with guiding principles and goals that were overwhelmingly endorsed by both Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate, resulting in the NASA authorization acts of 2005 and 2008,” said Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX), the outgoing chairman of the committee, in his opening statement. The consensus in NASA’s direction outlined in those bills was broken by the Obama Administration in 2010, he claimed. “The current agreement, if it can be called that, is not a consensus as much as it is a compromise,” he said of the 2010 NASA authorization act. “It’s been clear over the last few budget cycles that there are fundamental disagreements.”
Former astronaut Ron Sega reviewed the National Research Council’s (NRC’s) report on NASA’s strategic direction, released last week, which found “no national consensus on strategic goals and objectives for NASA.” Like the committee as a whole, Sega did not offer any recommendations, or preferences regarding the options identified in the report. When asked by Hall about reaction to the report from the administration, he said the report was “well received” when the committee briefed NASA administrator Charles Bolden and staff last week. John Holdren, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, was also briefed on the report and “they were mostly in a listening mode,” Sega said.
While Sega wouldn’t endorse a particular option, former House Science Committee chairman Robert Walker did, expressing a preference for increased partnerships by NASA, particularly with the private sector, as a means of closing the gap identified in the NRC report between NASA’s missions and its budgets. “No federal budget in the foreseeable future is going to provide NASA with the money it needs to do everything we want it to do,” he said. He supported in particular commercial sponsorships, saying that allowing companies to effectively buy naming rights to NASA missions could bring in hundreds of millions of dollars above and beyond federal funding: “When the GoDaddy Rover is traversing Martian terrain, we will be more solidly on our way to fulfilling our destiny in the stars.”
The idea of selling naming rights to missions did get some pushback from Rep. Brad Miller (D-NC). “I just can’t quite imagine that picture of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon, or Ed White walking in space, in spacesuits that made them look like NASCAR drivers,” the retiring congressman said. (Miller later hastened to add that he has nothing against NASCAR per se; “I didn’t run for reelection but I do want to be able to go out in public.”) He also said that sponsorships may not provide a stable source of funding.
The conclusion in the NRC report that NASA’s goal of a human asteroid mission by 2025 isn’t widely accepted either inside or outside of the space agency also came up during the hearing. Scott Pace of George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute suggested going to the Moon instead would create a stronger basis for international cooperation, noting interest in lunar missions by Europe, Russia, and several Asian nations. “There are many geopolitical, scientific, exploration, commercial, and educational objectives that could be achieved at the Moon,” he said. “And in contrast, the case for a human mission to an asteroid is unpersuasive and unsupported by technical or international realities. We should be visionary, but focused on practical actions.”
Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), who will chair the committee next year, asked if there were any alternatives for a human mission to an asteroid, citing the lack of support noted in the NRC report. Sega noted a common long-term theme in past space exploration policies has been sending humans to Mars. “General Sega, do you think we should reconsider that mission to the near Earth asteroid?” Smith asked. “The committee didn’t adress that directly, but there were many questions that concerned that as the path forward,” Sega responded.
Smith also quizzed Pace on public interest in space exploration and what goals the agency should pursue. “Public opinion has actually been remarkably stable for space activity” over the years, Pace said. “The American public have a sense, I think, that we’re an exploring nation, we’re a pioneering nation, and they expect, or assume, that our leadership is, in fact, doing that.”
But the meaning of space leadership and exploration varied among the committee’s members. Some, like Hall, continued to regret the cancellation of Constellation. Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) said it was fortunate that Congress mandated the development of the heavy-lift Space Launch System (SLS) rocket; while he supported commercial cargo and crew efforts, he said, “it’s up to NASA to develop the heavy-lift rocket because the private sector doesn’t have enough funds to do it by itself and that heavy-lift rocket needs enough thrust to overcome the administration’s shortsightedness.”
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), who, like Sensenbrenner, vied for the committee chairmanship but lost to Smith, had a very different vision of what NASA should be doing. Given the growing national debt, he warned, “I don’t believe the American people are going to put NASA on the top of their priority list, which means that we have to be even more creative” in coming up with goals and missions for NASA. He suggested the agency should take on bigger roles in space debris cleanup and planetary defense. “I believe that NASA should be the one who is actually pushing the envelope on what space-based assets will benefit humankind in the future.”
Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD) raised the question of whether NASA should have a major human spaceflight program at all. “Given the expense of the redundancy necessary in a manned program” and the need to maximize the benefits of the agency’s limited budget, he suggested, “isn’t it time to say that maybe manned programs should be really rare and reserved for rare occasions because they just don’t deliver the bang for the buck?” That was opposed by some of the witnesses, including Pace, who noted that NASA is more than just a science agency. “Human spaceflight is probably the most interdisciplinary scientific and technical activity that this country can engage in,” he said. “That’s where the benefit is, from pushing into the unknown.”
The hearing itself lasted more than two and a half hours, although that length was due in part to accolades for Hall, who is stepping down from the chairmanship of the committee, and Hall himself offering farewells to the members who are leaving Congress through retirements or losing reelection. (That got a bit awkward when it came to one leaving member, Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO), who lost a Senate race in part due to controversial statements about rape. “He’s a good man. He served well for us,” Hall said of Akin, who did not participate in the hearing.) The hearing, the last scheduled by the committee for this Congress, ended with a feeling of dissatisfaction about NASA’s current direction, but also a feeling it will be a challenge for the next Congress to find consensus on an alternative direction.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 December 12 at 10:00 am ET Last week, to the surprise of many, NASA announced it would launch in 2020 a Mars rover based on the Curiosity spacecraft currently exploring the Martian surface. While NASA was studying options for a mission either the 2018 or 2020 launch windows, based on the options developed by the Mars Program Planning Group earlier this year after NASA terminated its cooperation with ESA on ExoMars, the timing in particular was unexpected since a decision was thought to be deferred to the release of the fiscal year 2014 budget proposal in February. John Grunsfeld, NASA’s associate administrator for science, said last week that the decision on the 2020 rover had been cleared with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).
The decision did get some immediate Congressional support. Congressman Adam Schiff (D-CA), whose district includes JPL, said he was “pleased” with the decision in a statement his office released just a couple hours after Grunsfeld announced the 2020 rover mission in a talk at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting. Schiff, though, wasn’t settling for a 2020 mission. “While a 2020 launch would be favorable due to the alignment of Earth and Mars, a launch in 2018 would be even more advantageous as it would allow for an even greater payload to be launched to Mars,” he said, adding that he would work with NASA, Congress, and the White House to try and advance the mission to the earlier launch window. (Grunsfeld, in a press conference a few hours after the announcement, said that getting the rover done for the 2020 launch window was challenging enough.)
The mission also got an endorsement from Rep. Judy Chu (D-CA), whose district in the next Congress includes most of Pasadena. “After facing a nearly 40% cut earlier this year, we have now won an important victory – it’s [sic] future is secure,” she said in a statement, referring to NASA’s Mars exploration program. “I am going to fight to make sure we get the most out of this mission.”
Missed in the Congressional and other praise about NASA’s decision (as well as some dissent from other planetary scientists who would prefer to fund other planetary missions, such as one to Jupiter’s moon Europa) is the fact that the selection of this rover mission is, in effect, a return to a Mars sample return architecture the administration has rejected just earlier this year. As an insider familiar with the development of NASA’s Mars exploration program notes in this week’s The Space Review, the rover is most likely going to have the ability to cache samples for later return to Earth, just as the original 2018 ExoMars rover mission was intended to do. (Grunsfeld said that a decision on whether the rover will collect samples would be made by a science definition team, but that team would be “front-loaded” with scientists who supported that.) Such a mission would also aligned with the planetary science decadal survey last year, which picked a Mars rover to cache samples as its highest priority flagship-class mission.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 December 11 at 7:13 am ET Last week the Senate passed a defense authorization bill that included none of the space-related amendments that had been proposed, including export control reform language and provisions to extend commercial launch indemnification and NASA’s waiver from the Iran North Korea Syria Non-Proliferation Act (INKSNA) so it can continue to purchase ISS-related goods and services from Russia. Fo export control reform, the lack of an amendment in the Senate bill is less of a concern, since export control language is in the House version of the defense authorization bill and thus may remain in the final version of the bill. However, the other amendments do not have counterparts in the House bill (the House passed a two-year launch indemnification extension as a standalone bill last month.)
To address those other issues, Sens. Bill Nelson (D-FL) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) introduced late last week S.3661, “A bill to reaffirm and amend the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Act of 2010.” The text of the legislation isn’t yet posted, but according to Space News, the bill offers a combination of provisions that the two senators had sought to include as amendments to the defense authorization bill. They include a two-year extension of commercial launch indemnification; a permanent extension of NASA’s INKSNA waiver; “language meant to ensure that NASA adequately funds” the SLS, Orion, and commercial crew programs; and a report to Congress on how NASA’s human spaceflight program could establish a presence beyond Earth orbit “through the robust utilization of cis-lunar space.”
Not surprisingly, prospects for the bill aren’t too great. Introduced less than a month before the new Congress convenes, and with many other issues to deal with, including the infamous “fiscal cliff,” the chances that the bill will even be taken up, let alone make it through the Senate and House, are low. The Space News notes that the INKSNA provision in particular might generate opposition by the House Foreign Affairs Committee. In that case, the best scenario might be for the Senate to pass the House’s commercial launch indemnification bill (perhaps through unanimous consent since it is not a particularly controversial bill), as indemnification is set to expire at the end of the calendar year unless Congress acts, and take up an INKSNA extension and other provisions in the next Congress.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 December 11 at 6:41 am ET The House Science Committee has scheduled a hearing for Wednesday at 9:30 am on “The Future of NASA: Perspectives on Strategic Vision for America’s Space Program.” (This hearing was originally scheduled for last week, but postponed when the House was not in session at the previous time.) The title of the hearing is pretty self-explanatory, with one of the topics of discussion to be the release last week of the report by the National Research Council on NASA’s strategic direction, or lack thereof. Scheduled witnesses include:
- The Honorable Robert Walker, Wexler & Walker
- Maj. Gen. Ronald Sega, USAF (Ret), Vice Chair, National Research Council Committee on NASA’s Strategic Direction
- Ms. Marion C. Blakey, President & CEO, Aerospace Industries Association
- Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen Ph.D, Professor for Space Science and Aerospace Engineering, Associate Dean for Entrepreneurial Programs, University of Michigan
- Dr. Scott Pace, Ph.D, Director, Space Policy Institute, The George Washington University
Most of those names are pretty familiar to the space community; Walker, in fact, is a former chairman of the House Science Committee. An exception may be Zurbuchen, whose areas of interest as listed on his university website include not just space science studies but also, among others, “Developing and analyzing space mission architectures for various exploration and commercial applications.” In August he wrote a blog post expressing concern about the future of NASA’s Mars exploration program given the lack of missions in the pipeline (a situation at least partially remedied by NASA’s later selection of the InSight lander in 2016 and a Curiosity-like rover for 2020). He criticizes “bean-counters” for making decisions for short-term benefit but “long-term severe consequences” and suggests now is the time to start thinking about human Mars missions. “Needless to say, I would make a condition to fire a lot of NASA so-called managers, bureaucrats and bean counters before making such massive investments” in a Mars program, he writes.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 December 6 at 6:52 am ET The National Research Council released on Wednesday its report on NASA’s strategic direction, as requested by Congress. The report was not an evaluation of what NASA’s goals should be, but instead an evaluation of NASA’s current strategy, as outlined in its strategic plan and related documents. And the committee found those plans lacking.
“There is no national consensus on strategic goals and objectives for NASA,” the report states. “Absent such a consensus, NASA cannot reasonably be expected to develop enduring strategic priorities for the purpose of resource allocation and planning.”
“The 2011 NASA strategic plan and associated documents do not, in our view, constitute a strategy,” study chairman Albert Carnesale, a professor and former chancellor of UCLA, said in a telecon with reporters on Wednesday. The documents list NASA’s goals and programs, he said, “but there are no sense of priorities and no guidance for resource allocation, both of which would be essential to anything that would be called a strategy.”
One of the report’s biggest findings was that one of NASA’s biggest goals, sending a human mission to an asteroid by 2025, does not have widespread acceptance, even within NASA itself. “Despite isolated pockets of support for a human asteroid mission, the committee did not detect broad support for an asteroid mission inside NASA, in the nation as a whole, or from the international community,” the report stated.
“If you ask people in the bowels of NASA, in the field offices—and we spoke with everybody from the directors of each of the field offices to college interns and everybody in between—this is not generally accepted,” Carnesale said of the asteroid mission goal. “It hasn’t been explained to them why this is the goal.”
That lack of acceptance is for several reasons, he said. Some see a lack of a budget line item for such a mission, while others note no specific asteroid has been selected, and some others question wonder an asteroid is the most logical next step towards the long-term goal of a human mission to Mars. “It’s not generally accepted for those reasons, which is quite different from being refuted,” he added. “People don’t see it as, ‘Gee, it’s clear that’s where we’re headed.'”
“I do not want to imply that there was uniform belief that the asteroid mission was a bad idea,” he said later. “Rather, there was not a consensus that that really is the next step on the way to Mars.”
Other aspects of the report largely confirmed existing perceptions about NASA, including that there’s a mismatch between the programs assigned to the agency and its budget. The report offered several options to address this mismatch, including increasing NASA’s budget, reducing the number and size of its programs, performing “aggressive” restructuring of the agency’s infrastructure, and doing more international cooperation.
None of those options, though, are easy to accomplish. For example, Carnesale said there’s a widespread belief that NASA has too much infrastructure in the form of its ten field centers, but any major changes, such as closing one or more centers, would be politically difficult. He said the committee asked former NASA administrators if the current center structure made sense. Most, he noted, “decided relatively early in their tenure that it would take all of the political capital they had, and then some, to deal with that question, so they decided it was better to spend their time on something else.”
By Jeff Foust on 2012 December 5 at 7:02 am ET “NASA is an exceptional institution in a tremendous predicament.” So begins the latest report to try and guide the space agency’s future. “Pioneering: Sustaining U.S. Leadership in Space”, released Tuesday by the Space Foundation, argues that NASA should be refocused on those activities on the leading edge of space, turning over other civil space functions either to other government agencies or the commercial sector.
What exactly is “pioneering”? The report describes pioneering as being the first to enter a region and developing infrastructure to open it up for others, and divides it into four phases: access, the logistics of getting someplace new; exploration, finding out what is there; utilization, making use of what is there for other purposes; and transition, handing over those activities to others and starting the process over again.
“A pioneering paradigm for a space program leads to the idea that the purpose of the space program is to incorporate the rest of the Solar System into the human sphere of influence,” the report states. “Pioneering is fundamentally an enabling and capacity-building activity.”
This approach is ultimately designed to give NASA a focus it has lacked for decades, Space Foundation CEO Elliot Pulham said at a Capitol Hill event Tuesday to roll out the report. “The fundamentals of managing a good organization don’t change from government to private enterprise,” he said. “Any world-class organization has certain attributes.” Specifically, he said such organizations have focused purposes, clear short- and long-term plans, and management controls and discipline.
The report includes a number of recommendations to give those NASA those attributes and make it a “pioneering” organization. Those recommendations include amending the Space Act to make pioneering the agency’s primary purpose, and to eliminate other, less relevant purposes. It also calls on streamlining the agency by divesting roles and associated infrastructure that no longer fit into that pioneering role, transferring them to other agencies or the private sector.
The report, though, stops short of identifying specific missions that should be divested, such as Earth sciences or aeronautics, two areas that some in the past have suggested be taken out of NASA. “We tried to avoid commenting on specific existing programs or specific destinations,” Pulham said when asked about that. “We think that once you’re focused on pioneering, it will become evident” what programs to focus on what what should be transferred.
The report also makes some managerial recommendations for NASA that have parallels to a recently introduced bill. The report calls on giving the NASA administrator a five-year term that can be renewed, and allowing the administrator to select his or her deputy administrator. It also calls for the creation of a “NASA commission” with members selected by the White House and Congress that would approve long-term plans that NASA would develop for submission to Congress. That’s somewhat similar to provisions of the Space Leadership Act introduced in September. In that legislation, a board of directors similar to the report’s commission would select three finalists for the positions of NASA administrator and deputy administrator for selection by the president; the administrator would then serve a ten-year term.
The report makes various other, more tactical, recommendations, including the development of a position of “chief executive” for space within the federal government separate from the position of NASA administrator. This person would be responsible for interagency coordination for various space issues, including the space industrial base. Pulham said they explicitly avoided calling this person a “space czar,” but joked he liked the title “Secretary of the Exterior.”
“What would we like to see as a result of this report?” Pulham asked. “I think we’d like to see a national dialogue that leads to NASA becoming a more successful agency than it already is.” That includes plans to brief members of Congress on the report and its recommendations.
This isn’t the only advice NASA and policymakers are getting, even this week. On Wednesday the National Research Council will be releasing its Congressionally-directed report on NASA’s strategic direction. “We are aware of other efforts looking into this. We have spoken to some of the people involved in those efforts,” Pulham said. It remains to be seen, though, whether any of the advice being offered to NASA will make a difference for the agency’s long-term future.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 December 4 at 8:00 am ET On Monday, a panel of experts discussed the space policy issues that will be at the forefront of the Obama Administration’s second term at an event organized by the Secure World Foundation. There are, as one might expect, no shortage of challenges facing NASA, the White House, Congress, and other players in space policy, from budgets to strategy to international cooperation. A few key items that emerged from the discussion:
Budgets and strategy: A key near-term concern is what will happen to the budgets for NASA and other federal agencies with space activities, given the looming “fiscal cliff” and future budgets that are likely to be, at best, constrained. “The one certainty is that the budget situation is going to be pretty grim going forward,” said Marcia Smith of SpacePolicyOnline.com. In particular, she warned NASA’s current plans, put into place by the 2010 authorization act, to develop both the Space Launch System/Orion and commercial crew vehicles is not affordable over the long term. “I don’t know if we’re looking at a train wreck that’s going to happen in the next year or two, or if we’re just going to end up stretching out programs.”
Such decisions will require better relations between the administration and Congress, Smith said. “The most important thing the Obama Administration is going to have to do is to continue working to reestablish trust with Congress,” she said. Relations have improved since 2010, “but I still sense that there is a little bit of nervousness on the part of Congress as to whether or not NASA is really committed to SLS and Orion, and whether or not they’re going to proceed with that program with the same vigor that they want to pursue commercial crew.” She added there’s still “a sense of unease” about NASA’s strategic direction, such as whether a human asteroid mission should remain a long-term space exploration goal.
Culture changes needed: Another key issue in a resource-constrained era is a willingness to adopt alternative approaches to doing business. One example is hosted payloads, where government agencies place payloads (communications transponders, scientific instruments, and so on) on commercial spacecraft. “Almost everyone agrees that hosted payloads… is a good idea,” said Patricia Cooper of the Satellite Industry Association. But hosted payloads pose challenges to the conventional way of doing business. “The administrative and programmatic bureaucracy and structure” of government agencies remain a barrier to more widespread use of hosted payloads, she said.
Similarly, Brian Weeden of the Secure World Foundation noted that the military has made considerable investments in new capabilities in the area of space situational awareness (SSA), but is lagging in the “backend” of processing the data coming from various SSA sensors to identify potential collisions. The data processing challenges of SSA are minor compared to what’s in use already in the private sector by major Internet firms, but the military doesn’t appar open to alternative approaches from the commercial sector. “The institution and the culture are not able to deal with this kind of challenge,” he said of the military’s approach to SSA data analysis. “If you gave that problem to Google or Facebook, their interns could do it over the summer for a couple million dollars.”
Dealing with China: China is often considered the US’s biggest threat in space, but some panelists tried to play down a Sino-American space rivalry. “There is probably an overemphasis when we look at China to really think it’s about us, and and it’s not about us. It’s about them, and it’s about them in the region,” said Scott Pace of the Space Policy Institute. China’s growing space capabilities are a bigger issue in the Asia-Pacific region, including for countries like Japan and India.
China, Pace added, is seeking greater international cooperation, which others suggested could open new opportunities for cooperation with the US. “I would see forthcoming, maybe in the next four years of the Obama Administration, an opening on a government-to-government cooperative basis for space cooperation between the US and China,” said Eligar Sadeh of Astroconsulting International. “China really is looking for the United States to take the initiative and lead” on space cooperation between the two nations.
No code: Broader international cooperation, in the form of a code of conduct for outer space activities, is looking unlikely in the near future despite the support of the Obama Administration, panelists suggested. “It’s a good idea in principle,” Pace said. “However, I believe it’s largely dead.” Pace said the proposed code suffered from a lack of trust among developing space powers. “The diplomatic aspect of that has been so badly fumbled that I don’t really think there’s a prospect right now for how to move forward with it.” Another issue, Pace added, was domestic concerns about the code being the basis of a broader space arms control accord.
Weeden wasn’t quite as willing to write off the proposed code, calling it only “mostly dead,” but agreed its prospects weren’t good. “The problem is that the US isn’t driving the train on this, the European Union is,” he said. “There’s not a lot that the US can do to address some of the issues” with it. Even if there isn’t a code, he added, there is value in having international discussions on topics related to it to exchange various perspectives.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 December 3 at 6:15 am ET Much of the space community has its attention focused this week on the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco. Although NASA has tamped down the wild speculation in the last couple of weeks about a major discovery by the Curiosity Mars rover, there will still be news coming out of the conference on Curiosity, as well as missions as varied as the GRAIL lunar orbiters and the Voyager spacecraft on the outskirts of the solar system. On the other side of the country, it will also be a busy week in Washington on space policy, with a focus on what the future direction of the nation’s space program will, or should, be.
That discussion starts Monday with a panel discussion titled “Space Policy Challenges Facing the Second Obama Administration”, organized by the Secure World Foundation. The event will examine issues ranging from budgets to export control reform to better overall coordination of space activities. The panel will be moderated by Scott Pace of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, who, ironically, worked on space policy issues for the Mitt Romney campaign earlier this year.
On Tuesday, the Space Foundation is hosting an event on Capitol Hill tied to the release of a report titled “PIONEERING: Sustaining U.S. Leadership in Space”. The 70-page report, whose research included interviews with “nearly 100 space leaders”, contains “recommendations for redefining and restructuring the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and strengthening the U.S. civil space program,” according to the advisory about the event.
On Wednesday the National Research Council is scheduled to release its final report on “NASA’s Strategic Direction”, a study commissioned by Congress that the NRC performed over the last several months. (One meeting in late June featured testimony from three former NASA administrators: Richard Truly, James Beggs, and Sean O’Keefe.) There’s been no formal announcement from the NRC about the report’s impending release, although committee member Marcia Smith of noted the release on her site, SpacePolicyOnline.com, with the NRC’s permission.
On Thursday, the full House Science Committee was scheduled to hold a hearing titled “The Future of NASA: Perspectives on Strategic Vision for America’s Space Program”. However, no witnesses have been announced for the hearing, and it has reportedly been postponed as the House doesn’t plan to be in session that day.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 November 30 at 12:04 pm ET The Senate is debating this week S. 3254, its version of the fiscal year 2013 defense authorization bill, including handling a mountain of proposed amendments to the bill: more than 360 as of this writing. A couple have space policy implications, as Space News reported yesterday. One amendment deals with export control, while the other is a grabbag of provisions dealing with NASA and commercial launch.
One amendment (S.Amdt.3179), introduced by Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO), is essentially the text of a standalone bill he introduced in May to return to the President the authority to remove satellites and related items from the US Munitions List. The language is slightly different from what is included in the House version of the defense authorization bill (which has some provisions that the administration is opposed to) that would need to be reconciled in conference. Bennet’s amendment has four co-sponsors: Mark Warner (D-VA), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Ben Cardin (D-MD), and Mark Udall (D-CO).
The other amendment, (S.Admt.3078), was introduced by retiring Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX). It contains three provisions lagrely unrelated to both each other and the general defense authorization bill. The first would extend the commercial launch indemnification system by two years, similar to what the House passed earlier this month. The second would extend NASA’s waiver from the Iran North Korea Syria Non-Proliferation Act (INKSNA) from July 2016 through December 2020, allowing it to continue to purchase goods and services from Russia to support the ISS.
The third, and perhaps most interesting provision, would attempt to fix the proportional spending levels on NASA’s Orion spacecraft, Space Launch System heavy-lift rocket, and associated ground systems in the next two fiscal years:
(e) Level of Effort Assurance.–
(1) IN GENERAL.–To ensure sufficient resources for the development of Federal and commercial launch capabilities under titles III and IV of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Act of 2010 (42 U.S.C. 18301 et seq.; 124 Stat. 2805), for fiscal years 2014 and 2015 the proportionate funding levels for the Space Launch System, the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, known as Orion, and related Ground Systems and technology developments, shall be no less than the proportion as provided in the aggregate within the Exploration account for fiscal year 2013.
(2) EXCEPTION.–Paragraph (1) shall not apply if the amounts provided for the activities under paragraph (1) for fiscal year 2014 or fiscal year 2015 are equal to or greater than the aggregate amounts provided for each of those activities for fiscal year 2012 or 2013, whichever is greater, by an Act of Congress.
It should be noted that SLS, Orion, and Ground Systems account for the majority of the Exploration account already, combined in one subsection called “Exploration Systems Development”. The other two main elements of the Exploration account are Commercial Spaceflight (i.e., commercial crew), and Exploration Research and Development. Thus, this provision could be seen as an attempt to make sure that, should NASA’s budget be cut in the next Congress, NASA would not be able to shift funding from those Exploration Systems programs to commercial crew or technology development.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 November 29 at 8:09 pm ET Marc Garneau’s place in Canadian history books is already assured: in 1984 he became the first Canadian in space. Garneau flew on three Space Shuttle missions and, after retiring as an astronaut, went on to become head of the Canadian Space Agency. He left the CSA to pursue a career in politics, winning election to Parliament in 2008 as a member of the Liberal party. Now, he’s seeking higher office.
On Wednesday, Garneau formally declared his candidacy to lead the Liberal party, a position that would put him in line to become prime minister should the party regain control of the House of Commons in a future election. In his bilingual “launch speech”, Garneau cited his space background, but also his desire to move beyond it. “Yes, I was an astronaut,” he said. “But I don’t want to be defined by what I did up there, but rather who I am. I am proud to have had the singular honor of being Canada’s first astronaut. But I am more than that.”
However, being a former astronaut also provides plenty of fodder for campaign speeches—and jokes. After describing his desire to “focus on what we care about — the economy, jobs, a fairer society,” he added, “Ladies and Gentlemen, believe me, this is not rocket science. And, I know a little bit about rocket science!”
Achieving his desire of becoming Canada’s next prime minister, though, may have a level of difficulty similar to rocket science. Garneau is entering what the CBC calls a “crowded” race for the party leadership, which won’t be decided until April. Garneau is also not considered the frontrunner: that title belongs to Justin Trudeau, son of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau. Moreover, the Liberal Party is far behind both the ruling Conservative and the New Democratic parties for control of Parliament, with only 35 of 308 seats in the House of Commons.
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