By Jeff Foust on 2012 June 12 at 9:50 pm ET After a couple of years of tumult and turmoil, one of the few members of the US Senate who is active on space issues says she’ll leave the institution this year “excited” about the future of NASA.
“I am just very excited that we are now going forward, I think, with NASA in a good position,” said Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) at a Women in Aerospace breakfast at the US Capitol Tuesday morning. Hutchison, who serves as the ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee and the Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, is retiring when her term ends this year. “I feel like I will now be able to leave Congress at the end of this year knowing that we are going to have a commercial operation that is sound, with competition.”
That’s a reference to NASA’s commercial crew effort, which will make at least two full awards, and perhaps a partial or “half” award to a third company, later this summer. “What Congress is trying to shape is that we have at least two competitors, not no more than two and a half, because we want to have full funding of competition while at the same time we are not neglecting the next generation of space exploration that is going to propel us to places we haven’t been,” she said, referring to NASA’s work on the Space Launch System heavy-lift rocket and Orion spacecraft. “That is the essence of American superiority, that we will always be looking to that next future.”
Later, in response to a question about international cooperation, Hutchison cited the need for NASA to be both a leader and a reliable partner. “We have to show that we are leading the world in the vision for space exploration and the benefits the world economic situation will gain. But, number two, we have to keep our word,” she said. “We can’t do this alone. We have to have an international consortium.” NASA, she said, wavered on its commitment to the ISS for a time. “We’ve got this investment [in the ISS] and yet we let the shuttle lapse, instead of building up the capability to have a follow-on shuttle immediately.”
While she was optimistic about what she termed NASA’s two key areas, commercial spaceflight to support the ISS and the development of next-generation exploration vehicles, she expressed some uncertainty when asked about export control reform for the space industry, something that has been a hot topic of late after the House included reform language in its version of the defense authorization bill last month. “We certainly need to work with the industry to determine where they are being constrained,” she said. There have been, in fact, several studies that have examined the effect that ITAR is having on the US space industrial base, as well as the recent “Section 1248″ report by administration that concluded that many satellites and related components could be moved to the less-restrictive Commerce Control List. “Yes, we’re not going to sell national security secrets, but we certainly want our commercial capabilities to be competitive, and if there is a problem, I know Congress will work with the industry. The industry needs to bring the problems to Congress so we can do that.”
As she leaves Congress, she said she hopes to see some progress, and compromise, on policy issues in general after the November election, as the current highly partisan atmosphere subsides. “We have to see how the elections turn out,” she said. “I would hope that we can move forward, I hope in the direction that I think is right, even if it’s less than I want it to be.”
By Jeff Foust on 2012 June 8 at 7:08 am ET So far, the campaign of expected Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney has been quiet on space policy, and President Obama’s reelection campaign—or, at least, one person in that campaign—is trying to take advantage of that silence. “This week, Mitt Romney’s Republican allies in Congress finally dropped their effort to eliminate the competition among the private space industry after the successful launch of SpaceX’s Dragon,” said Obama for America Florida press secretary Eric Jotkoff in a statement released by the campaign on Thursday. He was referring to comments by several members of Congress approving a deal between key House appropriator Frank Wolf (R-VA) and NASA on the future of the agency’s commercial crew program. “While this is a step in the right direction, Floridians still deserve to know where Mitt Romney stands on space issues.”
Jotkoff went on to note in the statement that both during after after the Dragon test flight to the ISS, “Romney’s campaign refused to say if he supported President Obama’s efforts to support and grow America’s commercial space industry.” And, for good measure, he threw in comments a couple weeks ago by former NASA administrator Mike Griffin, who is one of several advisors to the Romney campaign on space, endorsing a human return to the Moon—supposedly anathema to Romney, based on a line by Romney in a Florida primary debate in January.
“So, as Floridians see Romney refusing to answer questions on some of the most basic issues surrounding space policy, it has become clear that Mitt Romney has no clear vision for NASA,” Jotkoff concluded in the statement. How many Floridians have actually noticed that lack of comment by Romney on space, and make that a factor in their decision on which candidate to support, is unclear, though.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 June 7 at 7:14 am ET Several key members of Congress have expressed their support for a deal announced Tuesday between NASA and Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) on the agency’s commercial crew program. That deal will allow NASA to make at least two awards in the next round of the competition and use Space Act Agreements, as the agency had sought to do, while agreeing to vet the financial viability of companies before giving them awards and securing a “first right of refusal” for any property developed under those awards.
“I am pleased that NASA has laid out a cost-effective plan to continue development of a commercial crew capability that maintains strong reliance on industry competition during the upcoming integrated design phase,” said Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX), chairman of the House Science Committee, in a release by the committee. “This approach answers many lingering concerns voiced by Members of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology about uncertainties plaguing the program’s cost, and its ability to mandate crew safety design features.” Hall added that the committee will hold a hearing later this summer on the progress NASA has made on its commercial crew efforts, although it’s not clear if this will take place before or after NASA makes the Commercial Crew Integrated Capability (CCiCap) awards in July or August.
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a strong supporter of the agency’s commercial crew program, said he was “pleased” with the agreement between NASA and Rep. Wolf. That agreement, he said, ensures “that the Commercial Crew Program will move forward quickly while preserving competition in the program.” When the full House debated the appropriations bill that funds NASA—which included report language by Wolf calling for a downselect to one major awardee and the use of conventional FAR-based contracts—Rohrabacher expressed his concerns about that report language in a colloquy with Wolf.
The agreement also has the support of Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), who said the deal matched ear earlier calls to downselect to two providers in the next round. (The deal does allow for a “partial” award to a third company as well.) “This is an important turning point that should keep development of commercial crew capability on schedule and on budget, and assure that NASA will also have the financial and human resources it needs to move forward with developing heavy launch capabilities for deep space exploration,” she said. (Hutchison, incidentally, is speaking at a Women in Aerospace breakfast this Tuesday, June 12, in Washington, which will give her the opportunity to expand on those comments.)
By Jeff Foust on 2012 June 6 at 8:22 pm ET We noted here earlier this week that, in a speech last week, Office of Science and Technology Policy director John Holdren may have gone a little too far in taking credit for the recent successful SpaceX Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) test flight. “This represents an entirely new model for the American space program,†Holdren said, “one initiated by this administration.” COTS, of course, got its start in the previous administration, although the current administration has doubled down with its support for commercial crew in addition to commercial cargo.
That comment also got the attention of Rep. Steven Palazzo (R-MS), chairman of the space subcommittee of the House Science Committee. In his opening statement at a hearing Wednesday morning about the commercial launch indemnification regime, he took a tangent to bring up Holdren’s comment. “Mr. Holdren’s statement is, at best, misleading,” Palazzo said, citing COTS’s origins in 2005 and the SpaceX COTS award a year later. “Let the record be clear.”
Palazzo also emphasized that point in a separate press release from the committee, which included that portion of his opening statement. A bit of irony, though: the release makes multiple references to “Space-X”. The diminutive form of Space Exploration Technologies Corp. is formally spelled by the company as “SpaceX”, not “Space-X”, “Space X”, or even, on one occasion recently in the media, “Space 10″. Let the record be clear.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 June 6 at 7:18 am ET A former NASA astronaut seeking to represent a central California district in Congress will advance to the general election, but may face an uphill battle to win. In the primary election in California’s 10th District, Jose Hernandez, a Democrat and former NASA astronaut, finished second to incumbent Republican Jeff Denham. (Under California’s new open primary system, all candidates compete in the primary, rather than have separate party primaries; the top two-vote getters move on to the general election, regardless of their party affiliation.) Hernandez and Denham will square off in the November election. Denham won the primary handily, getting 48.3% to Hernandez’s 28.7%, with an independent candidate, Chad Condit, getting most of the rest. The Los Angeles Times notes, though, that Democrats have a slight edge over Republicans in voter registration in the district.
One other race of interest was in 30th District in Los Angeles, which pitted two Democratic incumbents, Howard Berman and Brad Sherman, against one another. Sherman beat Berman by eight percentage points, although the two will face off against each other in the general election. Both Berman and Sherman have supported export control reform for the space industry: Berman introduced legislation that was incorporated into the House version of the defense authorization bill last month, while Sherman sponsored earlier reform efforts as a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 June 6 at 7:01 am ET The space subcommittee of the House Science Committee is holding a hearing at 10 am Eastern today on the launch indemnification program, which is due for renewal this year. The program requires commercial launch providers to take financial responsibility (typically through insurance) for any third-party damages from a launch up to the “Maximum Probable Loss”, or MPL, calculated by the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation when it awards the launch license. Any damages that exceed the MPL by up to approximately $2.7 billion would be indemnified by the government; damages above that level would revert to the launch provider. In practice, there has never been a third-party claim in over 20 years of US commercial launch activity that has required a government payment (I’m hard-pressed to think of any third-party claim from an FAA-licensed commercial launch.)
This indemnification regime comes up for debate every three to five years, as industry lobbies for it to be made permanent in order to remain competitive with launch providers in other nations, while Congress debates whether it should expose the government to any liability, however slim (the hearing charter notes that the FAA estimates the odds of an accident resulting in third-party losses above the MPL at less than 1 in 10 million.) The outcome, in the past, has been a short-term extension, usually done at close to the last minute: in 2009 the indemnification regime was extended by a bill signed into law on December 28th, just three days before it was set to expire, after passing the Senate by unanimous consent the previous week.
Today’s hearing includes George Nield, the associate administrator for commercial space transportation at the FAA; an official from GAO; and representatives from industry who will likely advocate for an extension of the indemnification regime. The hearing, according to the charter, will examine whether the indemnification regime should be continued and if any changes should be made regarding what it covers and the balance of risk-sharing between the industry and government.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 June 5 at 5:55 pm ET Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), chairman of the Commerce, Justice, and Science subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, has been critical of NASA’s commercial crew program, expressing his concerns about the program during hearings about the administration’s fiscal year 2013 budget proposal. In his role as subcommittee chairman, he incorporated language into the report accompanying the House version of his spending bill that would require NASA to use FAR-based contracts for future awards, rather than the Space Act Agreements (SAAs) NASA was planning to use for the next phase, called Commercial Crew Integrated Capability (CCiCap), and also require NASA to select either a single company in that next phase or two companies in a “leader-follower” relationship where one company got the bulk of the funding. That language was criticized by both industry and the Obama Administration as being too limiting.
However, Wolf is now backing away from those provisions, announcing on Tuesday an agreement with NASA on the future administration of the commercial crew program. Wolf said NASA agreed to make no more than “2.5” awards under CCiCap (two “full” awards and one “partial” one), which can be done as SAAs. NASA agreed to vet the companies’ “financial health and viability” before making the CCiCap awards, and to ensure it has a “first right of refusal” for property developed under those awards. Future phases of the commercial crew program would be done as FAR-based contracts and not SAAs. Funding for the program would be “at or near” the $525 million in the current Senate version of the appropriations bill, up from the $500 million in the House bill.
Wolf said he reached this understanding with NASA administrator Charles Bolden “to prevent any disruption in the development of crew vehicles to return U.S. astronauts to ISS as quickly as possible”. However, this deal is clearly a win for NASA: it seemed unlikely NASA would make more than three CCiCap awards regardless of report language given the available funding, and it had already planned to transition from SAAs to FAR-based contracts in future phases of the program. The additional funding is also helpful, but as Bolden notes in a letter to Wolf on Monday confirming their understanding, funding for the program should be “as robust as possible” and closer to the administration’s request of nearly $830 million for FY13.
Bolden added a handwritten note to the end of his letter to Wolf: “Thanks for your willingness to take a risk in trusting our team. We have to maintain open lines of communication to move the nation forward. Your staff has been superb!” Those lines will likely remain open: Wolf says in his statement he will “continue to follow up with NASA to monitor the implementation of these understandings” for the remainder of this fiscal year and beyond.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 June 5 at 7:05 am ET Unlike the launch of Dragon two weeks ago, or its berthing with the International Space Station three days later, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) did not issue a statement about the successful splashdown of the Dragon last Thursday. However, speaking last Thursday morning at the World Science Festival in New York—a few hours after Dragon left the ISS and a few hours before its reentry and splashdown—OSTP director John Holdren did mention the mission as an example of innovation and public-private partnerships that the administration is trying to support. “This represents an entirely new model for the American space program,” he said in comments starting at the 15:15 mark of the video, “one initiated by this administration and one that, despite the handwringing of naysayers who said it would never work, now promises to change forever the nature of US space exploration and human spaceflight.”
Although one can quibble with Holdren’s claim that this model was initiated by the current administration—the SpaceX mission is part of the COTS program, which NASA started in 2005 during the George W. Bush Administration—the mission did appear to disprove Holdren’s unnamed “naysayers” who may have been skeptical about the capabilities of commercial operators. Then, on Sunday, CBS’s “60 Minutes” reaired a segment about SpaceX that the show first broadcast in March. “60 Minutes” did include an update about the Dragon flight to the ISS, but the core of the segment was the same, including an interview with Elon Musk where he regretted that “American heroes” had been critical of the company. “You know, those guys are heroes of mine, so it’s really tough. You know, I wish they would come and visit, and see the hard work that we’re doing here. And I think that would change their mind,” Musk said.
One of “those guys”, former NASA flight director and JSC director Chris Kraft, objected to the characterization of himself as well as former astronauts Neil Armstrong and Gene Cernan in the “60 Minutes” segment. In a statement Kraft provided to the Houston Chronicle on the behalf of all three, Kraft said that “60 Minutes” presented “a distortion of the facts and the truth regarding SpaceX and people such as Neil Armstrong, Eugene Cernan and those of us that have been criticizing the present game plan of the U.S. Space Program.” Kraft said they “commend” SpaceX on their recent achievement and their concerns are instead “the lack of recognition that unless the U.S. continues to advance the state of the art and invest the taxpayers money in a rational and affordable Space Program we will become a second rate nation and be left behind by those who recognize what is required.” The statement doesn’t indicate why they waited until the second airing of the “60 Minutes” segment—after the SpaceX flight—to complain about that mischaracterization.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 June 5 at 5:52 am ET At the Global Space Exploration Conference, or GLEX, in Washington two weeks ago, one of the conference’s organizers, the AIAA, issued a press release stating that its new president, former NASA administrator Mike Griffin, would hold a press conference where the organization “will call on Congress to establish space exploration policy goals which transcend partisan political differences, enhancing the future of the US space program and its ability to cooperate more fully with its international partners.” That made it sound like Griffin and AIAA would announce some specific goals it believed the nation should pursue.
At the press conference, though, Griffin announced no specific goals, prompting one reporter to ask just what those goals should be. “Our central theme… is that the purpose of the human spaceflight program is to move human activity off the surface of the Earth,” he said, citing the final report of the 2009 Augustine Committee. “That does not seem to me to be a Democratic or a Republican goal. I believe it’s a human goal.” He said human space exploration was inherently international in nature, and not something accomplished in the short term. “We will not reach long-term goals without a stable, coherent, sensible plan that transcends elections and leaders,” he said. “We must have plans and intermediate goals that transcend elections or largely we will just waste money.”
But how do you develop the consensus to enable those plans and achieve those goals? Griffin said conferences like GLEX could help achieve that by bringing together experts to help create such a consensus. “And when we can take an active role in doing that, it can have political influence in our various countries,” he said. He did not elaborate on the details on how to transfer that consensus from a small group of experts—GLEX had “over 630 representatives” in attendance—to a broader political base.
Griffin, though, did have some of his own ideas of what those long-term plans should be. “We had, in my view, an extremely good [NASA] authorization in 2008, that was even a little bit better than the 2005 act, which I thought was excellent,” he said. He cited provisions in the act that endorsed a human return to the Moon and utilization of the ISS. “That’s the kind of thing that we need. All of the goals espoused by that act were long-term, generational, and strategic in scope.”
As I noted in an article in The Space Review this week, Griffin—speaking only for himself and not the AIAA—also endorsed comments made by Roscosmos head Vladimir Popovkin earlier in the day at GLEX that called for a human return to the Moon as the next step for human space exploration, as opposed to NASA’s current plans for a human asteroid mission by 2025. “I think General Popovkin’s comments this morning were on target,†Griffin said. “I think the starting point beyond space station is the Moon for a host of engineering and operational reasons that, to me, make sense.â€
“The next learning step, the next outward step, is the Moon,†Griffin said. “I think in the longer, broader reach of space policy, that is the path to which we will return.â€
By Jeff Foust on 2012 June 1 at 6:25 am ET Some members of Congress cheered when SpaceX successfully launched its Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Dragon spacecraft last Tuesday. Some members offered congratulations when the Dragon berthed with the station last Friday. And, yesterday, some praised SpaceX and NASA when the Dragon splashed down successfully in the Pacific off the California coast, completing a test flight widely regarded as a major success for the company as well as for commercial spaceflight.
One member who had not commented on earlier phases of the flight was Rep. Sandy Adams (R-FL), whose district currently includes the Kennedy Space Center. “I want to congratulate SpaceX on their leap into the history books today,” she said in a statement issued by her office just minutes after the splashdown. Adams saw the mission as an endorsement of the commercial crew model as well. “With the completion of this demonstration mission, we can once again look forward to American astronauts launching on American rockets built by an American workforce.”
In the district adjacent to Adams, Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL) also praised the flight, adding to comments he made after both the launch and berthing. “This is an important achievement for both SpaceX and the commercial space industry and I’m excited about what the future will hold for space flight.”
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), a staunch proponent of commercial spaceflight, called the flight a “victory for SpaceX, NASA and America” in a statement. “SpaceX’s success represents a bold step toward a future where the free market is unleashed to move humanity beyond the constraints of gravity away from government owned and operated vehicles.”
Rep. Pete Olson (R-TX) emphasized NASA’s role in the mission in his congratulatory statement, referring to the “NASA/SpaceX Team” in it. “NASA’s support was essential for this mission. I look forward to watching SpaceX complete future missions as a part of its contract with NASA to deliver cargo to the International Space Station.”
The chairman of the House Science Committee, Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX), also issued a statement about the successful conclusion of the mission. “This was a complex mission and represents an important milestone for NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program that will hopefully result in a reliable capability to deliver supplies to our space station.”
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