By Jeff Foust on 2012 October 19 at 10:20 am ET During a town hall-style campaign stop Thursday in Ocala, Florida, Republican vice presidential candidate Rep. Paul Ryan was asked what a Romney administration would do for NASA. As reported by The Hill, Ryan used the question to criticize the Obama Administration’s space policy—or, in his view, the lack thereof:
“The Obama administration came in and they inherited a plan for NASA from the Bush administration. They had a plan for space. They jettisoned that plan,†Ryan said. “They put it on, basically got rid of that plan. Now we have effectively no plan. We are not putting people in space anymore.â€
Ryan noted that NASA now sends astronauts to space aboard Russian spacecraft, and transitioned into an attack on the looming sequestration deal that could cut defense spending.
“This administration, in my judgment, misunderstands the critical national security value that a space program has for our national security as part of our defense of our nation,†Ryan said.
It’s worth noting that while “NASA now sends astronauts to space aboard Russian spacecraft”, that situation would have existed under the Bush Administration’s Vision for Space Exploration, which originally projected a gap of up to four years between the retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2010 and the introduction of a new system by 2014.
As for what Romney and Ryan would do in space policy, Ryan repeated earlier plans to bring together a panel of experts to determine a plan for NASA, WMFE-FM reported:
“Our plan is to put together a plan for NASA, so that they have a plan,†said Ryan. “Bring the stakeholders in – the private sector, the Pentagon, NASA – and, like the last administration, put together a plan for NASA, and that plan is part of our vital national security interests.â€
By Jeff Foust on 2012 October 17 at 5:29 pm ET  Dining Martians? Not exactly what NASA is doing. (The illustration is taken from the Waste Book 2012 report.) Ask different people in the space community to identify wasteful spending at NASA and you’re likely to get a range of answers. Some will argue that NASA is wasting money by supporting three commercial crew competitors when it should downselect to a single company. Others decry the cost increases and schedule delays on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) that have hurt other science programs. And, of course, the Space Launch System (aka the “monster rocket”) has its share of detractors.
None of those programs, though, made it this week into Sen. Tom Coburn’s (R-OK) “Waste Book 2012″, a compendium of generally obscure government programs that the senator deems a waste of taxpayers’ money. One program that has attracted a considerable share of media attention is a NASA effort: “Out-of-this-world Martian food tasting”. It’s a reference to a $947,000 program to develop and test foods that could be enjoyed by crews on future Mars expeditions. To Coburn, studying that now, at least a couple decades before any such human mission to Mars, is a waste: “You do not need to be a rocket scientist to realize the millions of dollars being spent to taste test Martian meals that may never be served is lost in a black hole.”
That, however, is neither the only nor even the biggest NASA program included in Coburn’s report. The report cited “NASA Entertainment, Inc.”, what it calls the $1.6 million the agency has spent on various interactive projects, including games and the “Third Rock Radio” online radio station. A $771,000 lessons learned database that is “outdated and poorly utilized” (citing a report by NASA’s Office of the Inspector General) also made the report. The biggest NASA program in the report is the $12.4 million spent by federal agencies ($10 million by NASA) to develop a new visitors center for the Stennis Space Center; the report complained it was less cost effective that making upgrades to the original visitors center there.
The report also cited one DARPA space-related project: its funding for the “100-Year Starship” effort, which awarded a $500,000 grant to a group earlier this year as seed funding to continue the effort in the private sector. “Is this project a priority while we have over a $16 trillion debt?” the report asks. (Disclosure: this section in the report relies heavily on an article I wrote for The Space Review last month about the recent 100-Year Starship Symposium in Houston.)
The combined value of the NASA programs cited in Coburn’s report is about $13.3 million, or less than 0.1% of NASA’s overall budget. (The total value of all the programs is about $18 billion, slightly more than NASA’s entire budget but less than 2% of the federal budget deficit for fiscal year 2012.) Coburn argues in the report’s introduction that while this might seem like small change, it can still seem like a big difference to the average person: “How many of our friends, families and neighbors could be fed with the nearly $1 million the government spent taste testing foods to be served on the planet Mars?” One imagines, though, that some people still believe there are bigger sources of waste in their pet programs in the space agency.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 October 14 at 7:35 pm ET The question of extending launch indemnification isn’t the only space policy issue that Congress will be facing when they return for their lame-duck session next month. Also on their plates will be the ongoing export control reform effort, in the form of legislation returning to the president the authority to remove satellites and related components off the US Munitions List (USML) and thus out of the purview of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). The space industry has sought to get such reforms passed for years, and now they’re closer to success than ever before—but with no guarantee they’ll make it past the finish line before Congress adjourns at the end of the year.
The most likely way export control reform would make it into law is through the defense authorization bill, formally known as the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The House version of the NDAA, HR 4310, included a provision returning authority for determining export controls for satellites and related components to the president, reversing the language in the 1999 version of the NDAA that explicitly placed them on the USML. There is a standalone bill in the Senate, introduced in May by Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO), that would do the same, but including the language in the NDAA is considered a better path to passage. (There is no requirement that there be a defense authorization bill passed every year, but congressional observers note it’s been decades since a year went by without one.)
The Senate has scheduled a week to take up its version of the NDAA during the lame-duck session after the election, participants at a meeting of the Export Control Working Group of the Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC) on Tuesday in Washington said. There are a range of scenarios, from one where the Senate “pre-conferences” its version of the legislation with the House before passing it (allowing the House to then pass that version without a formal conference committee) to those where the Senate passes a separate version and a conference committee works out the differences between the two, including any differences in export control language.
Adding to the challenges of the legislative hurdles associated with getting the export control reform provision incorporated into the final version of the NDAA is a dispute between the Obama Administration and Congress about the language of that provision. At the COMSTAC working group meeting, Eric Hirschhorn, Under Secretary of the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), said the administration had issues with the language in the House version of the NDAA. “Unfortunately, the House bill also included some unacceptable positions that, in their current form, would cripple the broader export control reform initiative, including the satellite portion,” he said. “We oppose the other provisions in their current form. We are open to compromise, and we hope to find a compromise.”
Hirschhorn said that the administration’s specific concern with the House language was the requirement to “enumerate to the extent practicable” everything that the administration seeks to transfer from the USML to the Commerce Control List (CCL). (That’s a reference to Section 1243 of the NDAA, which requires a notice to Congress “to the extent practicable, an enumeration of the item or items to be removed and describe the nature of any controls to be imposed on the item or items under any other provision of law”.) Hirschhorn said the administration was concerned about the potential paperwork burden that provision might create. He said the administration was also concerned the bill would limit the administration’s ability to use waivers to the Tiananmen sanctions in place since 1990, which have never been used for satellite exports to China.
Later at the same working group meeting, though, Tom Moore, a Republican member of the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, fired back. “They will not compromise,” he said of the administration. “There will be time for improvement [of the House bill]. But I just have to be very frank: the administration has done a very poor job of explaining the particulars to me and to other people who care a lot about this.” The administration, he concluded, “needs to do a better job in terms of negotiating with us and asking us, rather than telling us, and to date they have not done that.”
That lack of communication is perhaps the biggest obstacle to passage of export control reform. “I have dire concerns relative to the communication, or lack thereof, between the administration and Congress, between the two branches, as well as between the Armed Services Committee, which handles the NDAA, and the Foreign Affairs/Foreign Relations Committees, who actually have purview over the export control issue,” said Mike Gold, chairman of the export control working group, at the full COMSTAC meeting on Wednesday.
Still, Gold sounded optimistic about the prospects for export control reform, even while emphasizing the high stakes involved. “If there was ever a time to get behind the reform effort—call your senator, call your congressman—now is it,” he said. “I am told by congressional staff that if we don’t succeed with this NDAA effort, it will be at least another two to three years before we can rally another serious go at the legislation.”
“It is all down to this one last shot,” he concluded.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 October 14 at 12:36 pm ET An obscure, yet important, provision in federal law that supports the commercial space transportation industry is launch indemnification. As previously noted here, the law requires commercial launch companies to be financially responsible—usually through insurance—for third-party losses in the event of a launch accident up to a “maximum probable loss” (MPL) amount determined in the launch licensing process. Losses above that, up to about $2.7 billion in current-year dollars, would be covered by the federal government before reverting back to the launch provider. In practice, there’s never been an accident with third-party losses that have exceeded the MPL, but the industry feels having indemnification in place is important to protect the industry and keep it competitive with launch service providers in other nations.
The indemnification provision needs to be renewed through legislation on a regular basis, and it’s set to expire at the end of the year unless renewed. However, with two and a half months to go, legislation to extend indemnification has not been introduced in either the
House or Senate, let alone passed. Since Congress has a full slate of work ahead of it when it returns for a lame-duck session after the November elections, there is a risk that the provision could expire, although people in industry as well as on Capitol Hill believe that some kind of extension will pass before year’s end.
Congress’s focus last month on big issues, like a continuing resolution to keep the government funded into next year, meant they didn’t get to “smaller, parochial bills” like launch indemnification, said Greg Rasnake, who handles legislative and media issues for the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation. He was speaking at a meeting of the Business and Legal Working Group of the Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC) on Tuesday in Washington. He noted that launch indemnification is not the only legal provision in this situation: “there are other programs that always face sort of an end-of-the-year extension that needs to occur.” He added that committees in the House and Senate are both looking at some kind of indemnification legislation, but nothing so far has been introduced.
At the meeting of the full COMSTAC the next day, Ed Feddeman, staff director of the space subcommittee of the House Science Committee, sounded optimistic that some kind of indemnification extension will get through Congress before the end of the year. “We’re all keenly aware the indemnification needs to be renewed before the end of this year,” he said, adding that he has been discussing the issue both with Democratic staff on the committee as well as his counterparts in the Senate. “I am optimistic that we will have a bill through before Congress adjourns at the end of this year.”
While the specifics of the indemnification bill are still being negotiated, Feddeman said it would likely be a “simple extension with perhaps a couple of minor bells and whistles hung on the side.” Those “bells and whistles” would likely involve studies on indemnification and whether it’s needed, something freshman Republican members of his committee have been asking, he said. (It’s a question that has been asked before and examined, such as in this 2006 study by The Aerospace Corporation, with the conclusion that it is needed.) The extension, he said, could be as short as one year, and probably no longer than three years.
One sticking point, he suggested, might be in the Senate. “They have some other provisions that I think they want to hang on the bill,” he said, adding that he wasn’t familiar with exactly what they might be proposing. One possibility that has raised concerns in the industry is that the Senate may seek to revisit the extension of the so-called “learning period” that limits the FAA’s ability to enact regulations regarding the safety of commercial spaceflight participants. That period (sometimes called a moratorium, although there are exceptions in the event of a serious accident) was included in the 2004 Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act and would have expired this December, but the FAA reauthorization bill passed earlier this year extended it to October 2015.
“I know there are some who see a nexus between the issues” of launch indemnification and the extension of the learning period, Feddeman said. “Our members perhaps do not.” However, discussion at a hearing earlier this year of a potential backlash in the event of an commercial human spaceflight accident may have raised a concern among some in Congress, he suggested. “Some others also heard that same note, though, and I think we’re having to talk through that between now and the end of this year.”
By Jeff Foust on 2012 October 13 at 6:47 pm ET The space advocacy organization The Planetary Society has been pushing for months to try and undo the proposed cuts in NASA’s planetary science program in the 2013 budget proposal the administration released earlier this year. While the results of those efforts are yet to be determined—Congress has yet to pass a final 2013 appropriations bill for NASA or other agencies, as it debates big-picture concerns like sequestration—the organization is already laying the groundwork for the fight for the following year’s budget.
In a call to action earlier this week, The Planetary Society called upon its members and others to write to President Obama and ask him to restore funding in the fiscal year 2014 budget proposal currently under development. “I respectfully urge you to direct your budget planners to rebalance and restore NASA’s planetary allocation to the FY12 level, $1.5B for each of the next five years so that NASA can move forward with the visionary priorities recommended by the National Academy,” the sample text of the letter provided by the organization reads, referring at the end to the decadal survey of planetary science missions released by the National Research Council last year.
There is, though, a wild card in this advocacy effort: what if President Obama loses in November? The 2014 budget proposal will then be released by the new Romney Administration. The Planetary Society admits that this is a “tricky” issue, bud argues that it’s unlikely a new administration would scrap the work done to date by the Office of Management and Budget on the 2014 proposal. (The proposal would almost certainly be delayed for a few months, though, to allow the new administration to reshape it; in 2009 the FY2010 budget proposal didn’t come out until early May.) As has been the case on most other aspects of space policy, the Romney campaign has not offered specifics on how it would approach, or fund, planetary science missions; the space policy white paper the campaign released last month, though, was critical of “international opportunities to cooperate in robotic explorations of Mars [that] have been squandered” by the Obama Administration, a reference to the administration’s decision to withdraw from the ExoMars program with Europe.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 October 12 at 12:30 pm ET This week marked a major milestone for utilization of the International Space Station and for commercial spaceflight: the (largely) successful Falcon 9 launch of a Dragon cargo spacecraft, which berthed with the station on Wednesday. (The successful launch is caveated because of the failure of one of the nine engines on the Falcon 9’s first stage during ascent, which did not affect the Dragon but led to the rocket’s secondary payload, an ORBCOMM OG2 demonstration satellite, being placed in a low orbit; the spacecraft lasted there only a few days before deorbiting.) The political reaction to the launch was limited: among the few statements about the launch was a press release Wednesday by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), who called the Dragon mission “a triumph of America’s ingenuity and the free market system.”
Shortly after liftoff Sunday night, President Obama’s Florida campaign issued a statement about the launch, tying it to the administration’s space policy. “Tonight’s launch of the Space X, [sic] Falcon 9 rocket and the autonomous Dragon spacecraft marks another extraordinary new milestone in space, further demonstrating the advances we have seen in just four short years on Florida’s Space Coast,” it reads. Claiming that the president “inherited a program in crisis” when he took office, now “the International Space Station has an extended life, there is growth in the country’s commercial space industry, and a promise to continue a commitment of human exploration, science, and other aeronautic programs.”
Contrast that with an article Thursday published by the Washington Examiner that attempts to tie the mission to SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s political contributions to the Obama campaign. The article makes some odd claims (including suggesting that because the Falcon lost an engine it “only delivered 882 of the promised 1,800 pounds of resupply cargo for the space station”; Dragon delivered all 400 kilograms of cargo it was loaded with to the ISS) and then goes on mention Musk’s contributions to the Obama campaign and perceived flaws in the use of Space Act Agreements (“a carte blanche handover of public money without litmus tests”) to support such efforts.
The problem with both the Obama campaign release and the Examiner article is that the Obama Administration had little to do with the Dragon cargo mission to the ISS. The Dragon and Falcon 9 were developed under a COTS award made in August 2006, during the Bush Administration. That, too, was a Space Act Agreement, which makes former NASA administrator Mike Griffin’s criticism of such agreements, mentioned in the Examiner article, look odd, since the administrator at the time of the COTS award was… Mike Griffin. In addition, the Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract, which this Dragon mission is the first of twelve, was awarded by NASA to SpaceX in December 2008, a month before President Obama took office.
While the success of this mission helps validate the commercial crew approach that this administration has championed (especially since SpaceX is one of the companies developing such systems, based on the Falcon 9 and Dragon), the role the administration played—either good or bad, depending on your point of view—of enabling the mission itself appears to be overstated.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 October 4 at 12:15 pm ET Thanks to redistricting, Florida’s Space Coast region will be within a single House district in the next Congress, currently represented by Republican Rep. Bill Posey (for the last decade it had been split into two districts, with Posey representing the southern half and, most recently, Sandy Adams (R-FL) representing the northern part.) So it’s not surprising that Florida Today asked Posey and his Democratic challenger, Shannon Roberts, as well as independent candidate Richard Gillmor, what specifically they would do to “help the stability and strength of the U.S. Space program.”
However, none of the three offer much in the way of detail about achieving “stability and strength” for NASA, and for KSC in particular. Posey notes he would continue the work he has already done at NASA, citing legislation he has co-sponsored with Democratic members. However, one example, a bill he and Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) introduced to allow for a “seamless” transition from the Space Shuttle to Orion, (the “American Space Access Act”), did not advance out of the House Science Committee after its April 2009 introduction. Similarly, another bill he mentions he co-sponsored with Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) to direct NASA to return humans to the Moon by 2022 (the “REAL Space Act”), went nowhere after its introduction in May 2011. The “RACE for Space” act he mentions, though, was incorporated into the defense authorization bill earlier this year.
Roberts, beyond correcting a claim by Posey that the administration cancelled the Orion spacecraft (the administration’s original plans in February 2010 did call for ending Orion, a decision reversed two months later), doesn’t offer much of a contrast. “We’ve got a major role here: the lead for deep-space exploration, commercialization of space and also research, development and testing,” she said of KSC. “I would be a strong advocate on behalf of that.” Gillmor indicates he would see KSC taking a leading role in something very different: alternative energy. “With implementation of my national energy policy, part of Kennedy Space Center would become home to the National Energy Resources Development Center,” he said, something that would reemploy “thousands” of engineers in the area.
On his campaign website, Posey does include a few paragraphs about space among other issues, saying he’s working to “restore American leadership” in space and that he supports commercial cargo and crew programs. Roberts says much less about space on her site, with a single bullet point (“Keep our Space Program #1 in the World”) on her issues page. Gillmor, the independent, devotes a paragraph to space, specifically calling for Cape Canaveral to be “overhauled into a bustling Spaceport that serves both commercial as well as national defense needs.”
By Jeff Foust on 2012 October 3 at 12:00 pm ET Members of Congressional delegations from Alabama and Colorado have written to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta about their concerns regarding potential competition for Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) missions, Space News reported this week. Those launches are currently performed by the Atlas 5 and Delta 4 vehicles from United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin headquartered in Colorado that builds those rockets in Decatur, Alabama. Although those vehicles have been highly successful in launching primarily US government (civil and military) payloads, concerns about increasing EELV launch costs have led to efforts to open up the EELV program to new entrants, in particular SpaceX.
The members whose signed the letter (specific names aren’t mentioned in the article, and the full text of the letter isn’t available) are concerned that bringing in companies that have shorter track records than ULA could jeopardize national security. “Newly developed space launch systems do not yet meet most government mission needs, have not flown any significant complex payloads, and are still aspiring to launch vehicles at a rate of one or more per year,” a portion of the letter quoted in the Space News article states. “While new entrants may someday possess such a capability to compete, we must not put the payload and schedule of our national security space assets in jeopardy in a process that also requires the taxpayer to underwrite the development of rockets and engines which have not yet flown.â€
The alternative to new entrants would be for a “block buy” of EELV rockets from ULA spanning several years, which would lower per-unit costs over buying them on a year-by-year basis but could also lock out new entrants during the course of that contract. ULA received a $1.17-billion contract from the Air Force last Friday to cover EELV activities for fiscal year 2013.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 October 2 at 9:47 am ET The Syracuse Post-Standard published an interview Monday with former NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe that touched upon a variety of issues, including his thoughts about NASA. O’Keefe reflected on the highs (landing Spirit and Opportunity on Mars) and lows (the Columbia accident) during his three-year tenure at the agency. O’Keefe then fielded a question about NASA’s current status and its future somewhat gingerly:
Q: What’s your view on what’s happening at NASA today? How do you see the agency’s future?
A: The most diplomatic way to say this is the president is still defining what the mission of the agency should be. Right now, it’s combination of things that doesn’t really resonate with trying to describe it in a bumper sticker or a sound bite. They’re pursuing many different paths and I’m hoping that will clarify itself in the next term, whether that’s (President Obama’s) or someone else’s.
Also, on broader policy issues, O’Keefe warned of “a real wreck” coming on January 1 with sequestration, the debt limit, and other looming budget issues. “This is unbelievable,” he said of the situation. “To have all of them together is nitro in a bottle.”
By Jeff Foust on 2012 September 28 at 7:17 am ET For all the partisan divides in Washington, some legislation can still easily become law. Last week the House approved by voice vote HR 4158, legislation that would give pre-Shuttle era astronauts ownerships of various artifacts they may have collected from their missions (with the exception to lunar samples). That bill then passed the Senate by unanimous consent late Friday, before Congress recessed until after the elections. On Tuesday, President Obama signed the bill into law.
“I am pleased we were able to work in a bipartisan, bicameral way to clear up any ambiguity regarding small mementos kept by our nation’s early space pioneers,” Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX), chairman of the House Science Committee and sponsor of the bill, said in a statement Thursday. “As I said on the House Floor, these men are heroes who took extraordinary risks to establish American preeminence in space, and by doing so helped our country become a world leader.”
While the bill had “bipartisan, bicameral” support, the legislation is a minor rebuke to NASA. It was recent NASA actions to block the planned sale or auction of such artifacts, including a camera by Apollo 14’s Edgar Mitchell and a checklist by Apollo 13’s Jim Lovell, on the basis that those items were still government property, that prompted the legislation.
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