Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) appears to side with the administration regarding when NASA should select a commercial crew provider. Nelson told Florida Today he opposed language in the report accompanying the CJS appropriations bill that would direct NASA to make an immediate downselection to one or, at most, two companies. “Why should we not have competition for commercial crew and bring down the cost?” Nelson asked. He’s also quoted in the article as calling the House plan “silliness” and “anti-competitive.” The Senate version of the same appropriations bill, yet to be considered by the full Senate, does not contain similar provisions; Nelson said that Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), who chairs the relevant appropriations subcommittee, “knows the situation” and would fight to block adoption of the House language when the two versions are eventually reconciled in conference.
Even before the House took up the Commerce, Justice, and Science appropriations bill last week, the administration warned that it considered the bill unacceptable, citing in a statement of administration policy concerns about the bill’s provisions, including the reduced funding levels and “restrictive report language” for NASA’s commercial crew program. This was widely communicated as a veto threat against the bill based on that language, although that is something of an oversimplification, since the NASA language was just one paragraph in a four-page document outlining the various issues the administration had with the bill.
During the debate of the bill in the House on Wednesday, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) raised his own concerns about the program and the report language regarding it accompanying the bill. “I believe it makes a flawed comparison between commercial crew program partners and the energy firm of Solyndra,” he said, referring to the report, in a colloquy with Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), the chairman of the appropriations CJS subcommittee, during the debate on the bill Wednesday afternoon. “In addition, it requires an immediate downselect to a single program partner, which I do not believe is the best path to move forward.”
Rohrabacher went on to say he did share some concerns Wolf has with the program. “NASA has not shared a clear, comprehensive management plan for the program, despite repeated requests,” he said. “Instead, they have made inconsistent and confusing statements abut the program’s purpose, timeline, design, cost, and procurement methods.” He said he hoped there would be the opportunity to discuss “some alternative approaches” that address those concerns while achieving the program’s goals. “With that in mind, I am willing to work with NASA to help come up with a new plan that will do just that.”
Wolf offered a sympathetic response. “I believe that despite our differences—and there may not really be that much of a difference—we share a common goal of providing reliable domestic access to the space station in the fastest, most cost-effective manner,” he said, adding that if Rohrabacher believes that he can work with NASA to come up with a improved plan, “we want to work with him.”
In a statement issued after the colloquy, Rohrabacher expressed his frustration with both NASA and Congress about the state of the program. “NASA and this Administration have not been able to sell this basic idea” of the benefits of commercial crew, he said. “Congress has embraced a measured approach to this idea; too slowly and timidly from my point of view. It seems NASA is itself confused, or maybe suffers from internal conflicts over the specific goals and approaches. The agency has not told a clear and convincing story to win this initiative the funding and freedom of action it requires.”
“As a champion of Commercial Crew, I am no longer willing to give NASA the benefit of every doubt on this program. NASA must do better,” Rohrabacher said later in the statement. “NASA must get behind a more effective and transparent commercial crew strategy and program plan. We’ve made a lot of progress in recent years, but we cannot move forward simply on momentum.”
The next day, NASA administrator Charles Bolden spoke out against any effort to limit competition in the commercial crew program. “Despite a bi-partisan agreement to ensure American astronauts are traveling into space on U.S. built spacecraft as soon as possible, some want to short-change this job-creating initiative and limit competition in the commercial space arena,” he said in remarks prepared for a meeting Thursday of the FAA’s Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC) in Washington. (Emphasis in original.)
“Ending competition by down-selecting to a sole commercial space company could double the cost of developing a privately built human spaceflight system and it will leave us in the same position we find ourselves today — having only one option for getting our astronauts to the space station,” Bolden said. “We are hopeful we can work to resolve these issues and keep this important initiative on track.”
Florida Today, meanwhile, has taken an aggressive stance on the issue, with two of its columnists criticizing the Space Coast’s two members of Congress, Reps. Sandy Adams (R) and Bill Posey (R), for voting in favor of the overall appropriations bill despite the commercial crew funding levels and language. Posey told the newspaper’s John Kelly that limited funds force NASA to make an earlier downselect: “In a perfect world, with unlimited funds, you wouldn’t have to do that, but that is not the world we live in today.”
“What I can’t understand is why House members” like Adams and Posey “would vote to halt the only bargain NASA has going,” Florida Today’s Matt Reed said in his own column. “Today, NASA’s budget represents .48 percent of federal spending. The commercial crew competition accounts for 1/18th of that. And Congress is concerned… why?”
If you’re interested in funding levels beyond the top-level accounts listed above, SpacePolicyOnline.com has a detailed fact sheet about the NASA budget that includes breakouts within the major accounts.
As expected, the House passed on Thursday the Commerce, Justice, and Science (CJS) appropriations bill largely along party lines, 247-163. After the series of amendments on Tuesday, including one that was approved that cut $126 million from NASA’s cross-agency support account, the remainder of the debate largely focused on other areas of the bill. Reps. John Tierney (D-MA) and Trey Gowdy (R-SC) did introduce an amendment Wednesday that would have transferred $10 million from the “Mars Next Decade” line in the budget (for NASA’s restructured Mars exploration program) to a loan repayment program for state prosecutors and public defenders, but the amendment was defeated 260-160. The full Senate has yet to act on its own version of the CJS appropriations bill, and a final funding bill may not come until after the November election.
Last month the Defense Department released the final version of the so-called “Section 1248″ report describing the national security implications of moving satellites and related components off the US Munitions List (USML) and thus out of the restrictive jurisdiction of ITAR. The report found that most items can, in fact, be moved off the USML to the less restrictive Commerce Control List (CCL), with the exception of purely military and intelligence satellites and component unique to them as well as remote sensing satellites with “high performance parameters”.
The report, named after the section of the 2010 defense authorization bill that called for it, was due two years ago; administration officials said at a briefing about the report at the National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs that the effort got caught up in broader export control reform efforts, although an interim report was provided by the Pentagon to Congress a year ago. The final report, officials hope, will help efforts in Congress to move the identified space-related items off the USML, something that can only be done through legislation since those items were added to the USML by law in the late 1990s.
Members of the House of Representatives narrowly accepted an amendment late Tuesday night cutting NASA’s budget by $126 million. The amendment, sponsored by Rep. Michael Grimm (R-NY), transferred $126 million from NASA’s Cross-Agency Support account to the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program in the Department of Justice. The amendment passed 206-204, with 61 Republicans joining 145 Democrats in support of the amendment.
The amendment was one of several debated on the House floor during the day and evening Tuesday that sought to transfer money from NASA, particularly the Cross-Agency Support account, to other programs in the Commerce, Justice, and Science (CJS) appropriations bill. It was, though, the only one to pass. Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), chairman of the CJS appropriations subcommittee, was clearly exasperated by those proposed amendments, noting the Cross-Agency Support account supports many critical NASA activities and is not, as it might appear, to be some kind of slush fund. “I think they need to change the name” of that account, he said at one point in the debate Tuesday evening.
The House is scheduled to start debate today on HR 5326, the Commerce, Justice, and Science appropriations bill. (Depending on the number of amendments proposed, the bill may not be up for a final vote until Wednesday or Thursday.) Late yesterday, the White House issued a statement of administration policy (SAP) on the bill, outlining the issues the administration has with the bill and warning that the president’s senior advisors would recommend that he veto the bill if it remained unchanged.
The only concern that the SAP raised about the portion of the bill funding NASA is with the language in the bill and accompanying report about NASA’s commercial crew program. “The Administration strongly opposes the level of funding provided for the commercial crew program,” it states, noting that the House funds the program at $500 million, $330 million below the administration’s request, “as well as restrictive report language that would eliminate competition in the program.” That is a reference to report language that calls on NASA to downselecting to one or, at most, two companies, and using conventional contracts versus Space Act Agreements. “This would increase the time the United States will be required to rely solely on foreign providers to transport American astronauts to and from the space station,” it warns.
The SAP goes on to state that while the administration “appreciates” the funding appropriated to NASA overall in the bill—a little under $17.6 billion, compared to the $17.71 billion requested—unspecified programs received “unnecessary increases at the expense of other important initiatives.”
While not explicitly stated in the announcement, a key factor driving the proposed deal are cuts in the Defense Department’s budget to acquire commercial satellite imagery. Both companies have “EnhancedView” contracts with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). The contracts, awarded in August 2010, are valued at a combined $7.3 billion over 10 years. However, the proposed fiscal year 2013 budget would cut spending on those contracts significantly: from $540 million to $250 million, according to a recent Reuters report. (The details of the NGA budget request are classified.)
“Given this uncertain political and fiscal climate, we believe it is in our mutual interest to provide our customers with creative solutions to problems rather than passively speculate on one or another outcome,” GeoEye president CEO Matt O’Connell wrote to his counterpart at DigitalGlobe, Jeffrey Tarr, in a letter proposing the acquisition.
A week before the proposed merger, executives in the commercial remote sensing industry, along with some of its commercial customers and even government officials, raised concerns about the proposed EnhancedView cuts during a forum on Capitol Hill organized by the Space Enterprise Council. Their concern was that the proposed cuts were putting industry in a corner, since they were already making large investments in developing new satellites to meet the demand of the EnhancedView contracts, only to have that major source of revenue threatened.
“You can’t tell industry that we need you to bring these novel approaches forward, we need you to invest along with us, we need you to share the risk with us, and then, six months into a ten-year program, propose cuts,” said Kyle Schmackpfeffer of ITT Exelis, a company that has developed imaging systems for both DigitalGlobe and GeoEye. (The “six months” he cited referred to an earlier, smaller budget cut in EnhancedView proposed for fiscal year 2012.)
Others warned that the proposed cuts could sour the financial community on this industry, jeopardizing future private investment at a time when other countries are closing the gap in the capabilities currently offered by US commercial satellites. “EnhancedView was a really good idea at the time by having a public private partnership. Wall Street was involved, and there was a lot of support,” said Eve Douglas of the Department of Commerce’s Office of Space Commercialization. If the proposed cuts go through, she warned, Wall Street was unlikely to invest in this industry again.
What wasn’t discussed during that earlier forum was the possibility that the two companies might merge, combining their resources and consolidating their contracts. That, though, may be the solution the companies have to adopt in response to reduced spending from their biggest customer.
On Wednesday, a little over three months after he briefly, if somewhat bizarrely, catapulted space policy to the front lines of the Republican presidential campaign, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich formally suspended his campaign for the White House. In a speech lasting over 20 minutes in a Washington, DC-area hotel, Gingrich suggested he is still interested, and may in some way still be involved, in shaping the space policy debate.
“I am cheerfully going to take back up the issue of space,” he said about 15 minutes into the speech, a line that appeared to generate a few laughs in the room. “My wife has pointed out to me approximately 219 times, give or take three, that ‘moon colony’ was probably not my most clever comment in this campaign. I thought, frankly, in my role as providing material for Saturday Night Live that it was helpful, but the underlying key point is real. The fact is, if we’re going to be the leading country in the world, we have to be the leading country in space. The fact is, our bureaucratic red-tape-ridden system doesn’t work.”
“What I called for is beginning to happen,” he argued. He cited last week’s announcement of Planetary Resources, the company that seeks to mine asteroids, as well as Space Adventures’ circumlunar mission project and Virgin Galactic (which he called a “low Earth orbit project”; it’s actually, for now, suborbital), as well as the upcoming SpaceX cargo demonstration mission to the ISS. “Next week, NASA, building on something George W. Bush started and Obama has expanded on, NASA will actually be launching a private-sector rocket that Elon Musk has invested a great deal in.”
“This is not a trivial area,” he said, saying it was a fundamental question of whether America can still do big things that can inspire the nation’s youth. “I’m going to argue for a romantic American future of doing things that matter.”
“I think, in the Reagan tradition, there’s a shining future ahead,” he said near the close of the speech, one that includes those now-infamous lunar colonies, particularly for his two grandchildren who joined him on the stage. “I am not totally certain that I will get to the Moon colony. I am certain Maggie and Robert will have that opportunity if they want to take it.”
In a conversation a few days ago with Florida Today, Florida Republican Senate candidate George LeMieux offered support for a mix of government and commercial space efforts. LeMieux called SpaceX’s efforts in particular “very exciting” and that “you’re going to see these people reach the International Space Station on a regular basis.” However, exploration beyond Earth orbit should be done by NASA, he added. “I want to see some leadership, to say we’re going to a certain place by a certain time. And then we need to go and fund it.” LeMieux, who served in the Senate in 2009 and 2010 to fill out the remainder of Mel Martinez’s term, is seeking the Republican nomination to run against incumbent Democrat Bill Nelson this fall.
In Texas, another Republican congressional candidate has his own idea for supporting NASA. Chuck Meyer, a former business executive running in the new 36th district in southeastern Texas that includes portions of the Houston area, is proposing special-purpose savings bonds, or “Space Bonds”, to fund NASA’s human spaceflight program. Meyer is short on details about how this plan would work, something he admits in the release. “When I am on the campaign trail, I find voters aren’t that interested in the fine details of my plans,” he says in the release. “What does excite our citizens is the fact that there is one candidate with a plan to save human space flight before it is too late and with a passion to get the job done. I am that candidate.” Meyer is asking current members of the stat’s congressional delegation, and other members, to support this concept now.
