By Jeff Foust on 2012 August 3 at 5:32 pm ET Friday morning NASA announced the winners of the Commercial Crew Integrated Capability (CCiCap) funded Space Act Agreements, with Boeing, SpaceX, and Sierra Nevada Corporation receiving agreements valued at $460 million, $440 million, and $212.5 million, respectively. Given all the political attention that the program has received, particularly in recent months in the debate about how many companies should receive such awards, the reaction from Capitol Hill has largely been positive.
“Today’s announcement shows that NASA has put together a thoughtful selection of companies and capabilities that we anticipate will culminate in a domestic capability to launch astronauts to the International Space Station,” Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) said in a statement. “This is consistent with the approach several of us in the Congress urged NASA to take, to ensure that the limited funds available are spent on developments that have a strong probability of success.” She added that the CCiCap awards “should keep development of commercial crew capability on a schedule to launch as soon and as safely as possible while on a realistic budget.”
“Today’s exciting news is the next step toward launching our U.S. astronauts to the space station on an American vehicle safely, and doing it as quickly as possible,” Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) said in a statement distributed by email. “Congratulations to the winners and all of the companies willing to invest in American space exploration and making this new industry a reality.”
Rep. Chaka Fattah (D-PA), the ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee’s Commerce, Justice, and Science subcommittee, went the senators one further: he said he plans to visit Boeing and SpaceX facilities on the West Coast on an upcoming trip. “The new spacecraft will end the outsourcing of human spaceflight with the added bonus of creating high paying American jobs,” he said in support of the awards. Fattah added he will also be at JPL for the Mars Science Laboratory landing Sunday night.
Not every is as happy as Sens. Hutchison and Mikulski and Rep. Fattah. “I am disappointed and disheartened by the news that NASA has excluded ATK from the companies” selected for CCiCap awards, Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT) said in a statement. Bishop said he understood that Liberty ranked “very high” in technical merit and was the “lowest-risk option.” (NASA has not yet released a source selection statement with details about its decision-making process, but indicated this morning it would do so in the next week to week and a half.) “I will be joining with Senator [Orrin] Hatch, Senator [Mike] Lee as well as the rest of the [Utah] delegation to further investigate every detail of how NASA arrived at today’s disappointing decision.” ATK, of course, has a major presence in Utah, including the manufacturing of the solid rocket motors that would serve as the first stage of Liberty.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 August 2 at 11:29 pm ET A group established by NASA earlier this year to develop options for future exploration of the Red Planet will deliver its final report to NASA by month’s end, the head of NASA’s overall Mars exploration program said Thursday.
Doug McCuistion, director of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, said at a press conference at JPL that the Mars Program Planning Group would deliver a final report to NASA in “viewgraph” form this month, after which it will be released to the public. “We are putting together a schedule for when we go public with report. It will be a public report,” he said. That release will also be coordinated with briefings of people at the White House, on Capitol Hill, and in the Mars science community, he said.
The group, established earlier this year by NASA in response to a decision by the Obama Administration to terminate NASA participation in ESA’s ExoMars program, has been evaluating options for missions in the 2018 and 2020 launch opportunities. One challenge has been the constrained budgets in the current projections by the administration. “The budget in ’18 is thin,” McCuistion said. “It probably can’t support a rover or a lander. However, a rover is the next logical step after MSL,” a reference to the Mars Science Laboratory mission arriving at Mars Sunday night. On the other hand, he said an orbiter could help maintain the communications infrastructure around Mars needed to provide detailed telemetry for future lander/rover missions during their critical entry, descent, and landing phases.
A presentation by the group to the NASA Advisory Council last month offers some additional insights into what the group is considering. “Current Rover options not credible for 2018 within budget constraints,” the presentation notes (page 7). On the next slide, it shows a pathway of mission options, with a recommendation to pursue one titled “Seeking Signs of Ancient Life”, which does call for some kind of sample return mission. The presentation includes several concepts for future rover mission, derived from both MSL and the earlier Mars Exploration Rovers (better known as Spirit and Opportunity) to cache samples and perform other science in advance of future sample return missions.
Once NASA gets the group’s report, McCuistion said, it will make decisions about future missions. “When we are public with that will depend on how it takes us to come up with that as well as the discussion internally, within the agency and within the Executive Office of the President, since it will all fit into 2014 budget process.”
By Jeff Foust on 2012 August 2 at 10:11 am ET The full House Science Committee was scheduled to hold a markup session on two pieces of legislation Thursday morning, including HR 4158, a bill that would allow pre-Shuttle-era astronauts to retain ownership of some items from the missions they flew on that are in their possession. However, the committee has postponed the markup, with no new date announced. With Congress going on summer recess at the end of this week until the second week of September, it will likely be a while before the committee has another opportunity to consider it.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 August 1 at 9:07 am ET When Nick Lampson, a former congressman who once chaired the space subcommittee of the House Science Committee, won the Democratic primary for the 14th congressional district south of Houston in May, he didn’t know who his Republican opponent would be, since no candidate won a majority of the vote. Now he knows who he’ll be running against: Randy Weber defeated Felicia Harris in the Republican primary runoff Tuesday night. Weber had the support of Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), who currently holds the seat but is retiring. Weber’s campaign website is silent on space issues, at least so far.
Every fiscal year there is one certainty: much, if not all, of the federal government will operate under stopgap funding bill, or continuing resolution (CR), for weeks or months. That will be true as fiscal year 2013 starts, as congressional leaders announced Tuesday plans for a six-month CR. The deal avoids the risk of a government shutdown during the final weeks of the 2012 campaign, but also takes off any pressure to complete specific FY13 appropriations bills until perhaps the new Congress takes office in January. (Of course, the threat of sequestration, which would go into effect in January, is the wild card in all of this.) The House passed its version of a Commerce, Justice, and Science appropriations bill, which includes NASA, in May; the full Senate has yet to act on its version, which cleared the Senate Appropriations Committee in April.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 July 31 at 10:16 am ET NASA’s Glenn Research Center is already losing a strong supporter in Congress with the departure of Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), who lost the Democratic primary for his redrawn district against another incumbent, Rep. Marcy Kaptur. Now it appears the center will lose another advocate: according to multiple reports, including the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Rep. Steven Latourette (R-OH) is expected to announce today that he will retire at the end of his term, ending what was expected to be a relatively easy reelection bid. His decision to retire “is related to displeasure with his role in Congress,” the Plain Dealer reported.
LaTourette, while not active in general on space issues, has spoken out when it has affected NASA’s Glenn Research Center, near his district, or elsewhere in the state. He opposed the NASA Authorization Act of 2010, along with a large number of other members of the Ohio delegation, concerned that it could lead to job cuts at Glenn. He sought a GAO review of NASA’s shuttle site selection process in 2011 after the National Museum of the Air Force in Dayton failed in its bid to secure a shuttle orbiter. He also criticized some of his Alabama colleagues in 2010, including Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), for allegedly diverting funding from Glenn to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. “The biggest pigs were the guys down in Alabama,†he said at the time. “They were always trying to take stuff away from NASA Glenn, and it was because of Sen. [Richard] Shelby.â€
By Jeff Foust on 2012 July 27 at 8:51 am ET A top NASA official said Thursday that the agency remained confident that budget sequestration could be avoided, even though they were starting to think about the potential effects should those automatic budget cuts take effect. “If you talk to the leadership in the administration or Congress, most people believe it’s not going to happen,” said NASA chief of staff David Radzanowski in response to a question on the subject after his keynote address at the NewSpace 2012 Conference in Santa Clara, California, Thursday morning. “They’re confident because the alternative is not good policy.”
He did say, though, that the agency was starting to examine what might happen if those across-the-board cuts did take effect in January. “We’ve started thinking about what it woud mean, in general,” he said, adding that he expected at some point there would be some guidance from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on planning for sequestration. “A lot of the significant planning is going to be happening in maybe September or October.”
On one other NASA hot topic, the impending awards for the agency’s Commercial Crew Integrated Capability (CCiCap) program, Radzanowski said that announcement would come “real soon” but didn’t offer more specifics. “I’m not going to make any news by saying when,” he said. The announcement is widely expected for any time between now and the end of August.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 July 26 at 8:57 am ET Next week, just before the House is scheduled to recess until after the nominating conventions, the House Science Committee is planning to take up a couple of space-related issues. On Wednesday, August 1, the committee’s space subcommittee will hold a hearing on “The Emerging Commercial Suborbital Reusable Launch Vehicle Market”. Representatives of three suborbital vehicles developers—Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, and XCOR Aerospace—and others will testify about the industry. It’s not clear if this is tied to any planned legislation or is instead more of a fact-funding hearing.
The following day, the full committee will markup up legislation regarding ownership of astronaut artifacts. The bill, HR 4158, would confer onto astronauts of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs ownership of any “expendable item” used on those missions that are now in the possession of the astronauts, as well as “other expendable, disposable, or personal-use items” they used. (Lunar material is specifically excluded from the bill.) The chairman of the House Science Committee, Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX), introduced the legislation in March after a couple of incidents where former astronauts tried to sell such items but were stopped by NASA, which argued that those items were still federal property.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 July 26 at 8:40 am ET With each passing day, people in both government and industry are becoming increasingly concerned about the prospect of sequestration, the automatic, across-the-board budget cuts that would go into effect at the beginning of calendar year 2013 unless Congress comes up with an alternative deficit reduction strategy (or otherwise overrides those planned cuts.) This has been particular true in the defense industry, where companies have warned of major layoffs should programs be cut by up to 10 percent. Last week, for example, the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) warned of “widespread” job losses: in excess of two million overall in the US economy.
Less has been said, though, about specific effects of sequestration on the space industry due to cuts in both military and civil programs. While NASA administrator Charles Bolden has said on multiple occasions he wasn’t worried about sequestration, that optimistic attitude is not widely shared. On Thursday afternoon, the Marshall Institute and the Space Enterprise Council are hosting a panel on the impact of sequestration on the space industrial base on Capitol Hill. The event, according to the announcement, “will consider the impact on the space industrial base and the implications for the short- and long-term health of U.S. space programs and priorities.” Given the panel’s members, the focus may be more on military than civil space activities, though.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 July 25 at 6:48 am ET The Senate Commerce Committee is holding a hearing this morning at 10 am EDT on “The International Space Station: A Platform for Research, Collaboration, and Discovery”. The purpose of the hearing, according to the brief description, is to “examine research progress, the potential for scientific breakthroughs, and any impediments to maximizing the utilization of this orbiting national laboratory.” That’s likely to include a review of the status of the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS), the nonprofit organization selected by NASA a year ago to manage the portion of the ISS designated a US national lab. CASIS has attracted criticism for moving too slowly in the eyes of some, including members of Congress.
James Royston, the interim executive director of CASIS, will be among the witnesses testifying at the hearing. Also appearing are Bill Gerstenmaier of NASA, Thomas Reiter of ESA, and NASA astronaut Don Pettit, who recently returned from six months on the ISS.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 July 24 at 6:21 am ET On Monday, Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, passed away after a 17-month battle with pancreatic cancer. Her death, which came as a surprise to many, led to an outpouring of reaction, including from the White House and members of Congress.
“Michelle and I were deeply saddened to hear about the passing of Sally Ride,” President Obama said in a brief statement issued late Monday. “Sally’s life showed us that there are no limits to what we can achieve and I have no doubt that her legacy will endure for years to come. Our thoughts and prayers go out to Sally’s family and friends.”
“Dr. Sally Ride was a true American pioneer who sparked the imagination of a generation of women and girls,” said Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) in a statement. “I’ll never forget the day when as a Member of Congress I traveled to the Kennedy Space Center to watch the first American woman blast into space. On that day, Dr. Ride launched into the history books and broke down the barriers that said women weren’t good enough, smart enough or strong enough.”
“I have always greatly admired her spirit and perseverance in accomplishing her goals and I know her legacy will live on in the millions of girls and women she inspired,” said Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX). She adds that she interviewed Ride for her 2004 book American Heroines. In that interview, “Sally Ride noted that one of her favorite childhood memories was of advice given to her by her father after a particularly discouraging day at school. His advice was to ‘reach for the stars.’ And so she did.”
“She was inspiration to all of us, especially young women,” said Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), ranking member of the House Science Committee. “Beyond her work at NASA, she provided distinguished service on a number of important national advisory commissions. At the same time, I believe one of her most lasting influences was through the work she did to interest our young girls in science and technology.”
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