By Jeff Foust on 2012 April 27 at 7:00 am ET During a two-hour hearing on Thursday, the House Appropriations Committee debates and then approved by voice vote the Commerce, Justice, and Science (CJS) appropriations bill. The committee made no amendments to the bill that affects NASA, which receives a little less than $17.6 billion in the bill.
In his statement introducing the bill, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) got a little emotional when discussing NASA. “Last week, when the shuttle came over, I bet almost everyone in this room went outside to look at it. That was almost a sign that American people are thirsting for this program to do something great,” he said. The funding for NASA’s exploration programs provided in the bill, along with the “decadal study” of NASA’s human spaceflight plans that is separately getting started, will help “get back to the days whereby people got excited about the program as they did in the days of Alan Shepard and John Glenn.”
Wolf also addressed commercial crew development, which was singled out for attention in the report accompanying the bill. The report, he says, directs NASA “to find the fastest, safest, and most cost-effective means of achieving a US capability” to access the ISS by reducing the number of awards and moving to more traditional contracts. The program’s current path, he warned, “runs a risk of high failure by one or more companies receiving government subsidies similar to what we last saw last year with regard to Solyndra. There’s also been one or two senators that have said that if we continue this current path, you could reach to a Solyndra.”
Wolf included a mention of planetary sciences funding in the bill, adding that at some point after yesterday’s hearing he was “going to meet with Mr. Culberson and Mr. Schiff,” a reference to Reps. John Culberson (R-TX) and Adam Schiff (D-CA), two leading advocates of planetary missions in Congress, “if there’s something different in regards to Mars and Europa” that should be done, without being more specific.
At the end of the hearing, full committee chairman Rep. Hal Rogers (R-KY) announced that the CJS appropriations bill was scheduled to go to the House floor on May 8.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 April 25 at 9:55 pm ET On the eve of the full House Appropriations Committee’s markup of the Commerce, Justice, Science (CJS) appropriations bill, the committee released its draft report accompanying the bill, which includes additional details and policy direction for the agencies funded by the legislation. While the bill itself included no specifics about NASA’s commercial crew program, the report does call for significant changes for the program.
“The Committee supports the goal of achieving independent and redundant access to the International Space Station (ISS) but remains concerned about many aspects of NASA’s approach to the commercial crew development program,” the report states on page 69. Those areas of concern include NASA’s high projected overall costs for the program ($4.868 billion) and “insufficient safeguards” for the government regarding intellectual and physical property that, the report claims, runs the “risk of repeating the government’s experience from last year’s bankruptcy of the solar energy firm Solyndra.” In addition, the committee claims the program’s goal of establishing an American capability to access the ISS as soon as possible is “potentially inconsistent” with the goal of also developing a new industry, and that there’s no detailed plan for the eventual shift from Space Act Agreements to Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) based contracts.
The committee report offers a solution to most of all of those issues: limiting future awards to either a single company or two companies in a “leader-follower” arrangement where one company would get the majority of the funding. Those awards would also be done under FAR-based contracts. Doing this, the report claims, would reduce the total costs of the program and free up money for other NASA priorities. “In a climate of decreasing non-defense discretionary spending, the Committee does not believe that the Administration’s proposed budget runout for commercial crew is sustainable.”
The report is not the first time House appropriators have proposed strictly limiting competition in future phases of the commercial crew program. In a hearing in March, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), chairman of the CJS subcommittee, asked presidential science advisor John Holdren if it made sense to combine the existing commercial crew competitors into a single “star team”. Later last month Wolf also quizzed NASA administrator Charles Bolden on limiting the commercial crew program to no more than two companies.
In response to the report language, the Commercial Spaceflight Federation (CSF) issued a statement praising the funding for the commercial crew program ($500 million) but expressing concern about the limited number of competitors and FAr-based contracts. “It is best to leave decisions on program management to the NASA human spaceflight professionals who have access to all the information and have worked closely with all the competing companies,” said Michael Lopez-Alegria, the former astronaut who became president of the CSF last month. “If the language in the report were applied to the current round of competition, it would result in a significant delay in restoring U.S. human access to orbit.”
The only other part of NASA’s budget where the report goes into the same level of detail is NASA’s planetary sciences program. It directs NASA “to promptly submit its [Mars] Next Decade mission concept to the NRC for evaluation,” a reference to the restructured Mars program included in the budget, in order to see if it complies with the direction in last year’s planetary decadal survey that put a Mars mission as the top flagship priority provided it led to sample return. If the NRC finds it doesn’t the funds would go instead to begin work on a Europa orbiter (the second-ranked flagship in the decadal).
The full House Appropriations Committee will markup the CJS bill at 10 am Thursday.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 April 24 at 1:12 pm ET Reuters reported earlier today that former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich may reassess his presidential candidacy depending on the outcome of today’s primary in Delaware, where he has devoted the most resources among the five states holding primaries today. Gingrich’s odds of winning the nomination are now astronomical, as Mitt Romney has become the presumptive nominee. Gingrich had vowed to stay in the race until the Republican convention in August, but his campaign finances have become a concern.
So it’s timely, then, that Gingrich’s views on space policy are getting attention for what might be the last time as a presidential candidate. In an op-ed published late Monday by Bloomberg, Jeffrey Goldberg recalls Gingrich’s proposals to establish a permanent settlement on the Moon as he sees Discovery and its 747 carrier plane fly over Washington last week. He considers the flyby “elegiac” because “the end of the shuttle program marks the first time since the dawn of the Space Age that the U.S. government has no immediate plan to launch humans into space.” (It’s not clear if Goldberg is unaware of NASA’s ongoing plans to develop human spaceflight capability, or past interruptions in those capabilities, such as the nearly six-year gap after Apollo-Soyuz.)
Goldberg concludes “Newt is right” on space and proceeds to call him. Gingrich, Goldberg says, “seemed happy to talk about space and the terrible mistake the Obama administration made by canceling the Constellation program, which was meant to get Americans back to the moon.” (That assessment seems curious, as Gingrich co-authored an op-ed in February 2010 praising the administration’s plans.)
Ginhrich told Goldberg he regrets not addressing the criticism his January space policy proposals generated from Romney and fellow candidate Rick Santorum: “If I had been clever, I would have said to Romney, ‘You would have fired Christopher Columbus and John F. Kennedy because they were proposing daring and large things. They were proposing to go out and discover entire new worlds, and they did.’†Gingrich still believes there will be a “human colony” on the Moon someday, built if not by Americans then by the Chinese. But any such development now seems extremely unlikely to be done during a Gingrich Administration.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 April 21 at 2:54 pm ET The transfer of the space shuttle Discovery to the National Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles Airport outside Washington this week, complete with a flyover of the DC area, triggered a number of reactions, including some editorials critical of space policy and the current state of the nation’s space program. For example, in an op-ed published by The Hill, Congressman James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), the former chairman (and current vice-chairman) of the House Science Committee, criticized the “poor planning” that he blamed for “the crown jewel of NASA’s human spaceflight history, the Space Shuttle, being relegated to museums.” Sensenbrenner’s criticism, though, was not particularly partisan: after noting the Obama Administration’s cancellation of Constellation, he devoted more attention to why NASA should be “retooled” and that it should “clean up its problems” (Sensenbrenner has been a vocal critic in the past of NASA programs that have gone over budget, such as the James Webb Space Telescope.) “America’s role in space exploration is far from dead,” he concluded. “In fact, it’s possible its best years are yet to come.
Sensenbrenner’s criticism, though, was mild compared to what Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote in a widely-syndicated piece on Friday. Krauthammer likened the arrival of Discovery at the museum to a funeral for America’s space program. “The pity is not Discovery’s retirement — beautiful as it was, the shuttle proved too expensive and risky to operate — but that it died without a successor,” he writes. But what about the Space Launch System (SLS) and Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) and NASA’s plans to use them for a human asteroid mission by 2025? He’s skeptical they’ll survive budgets: “Considering that Constellation did not last even five years between birth and cancellation, don’t hold your breath for the asteroid landing.” He also doubts the ability for commercial providers to transport crews to and from the ISS. Cargo, he says, is reasonable for commercial providers, but “manned flight is infinitely more complex and risky”.
While other commentary about the shuttle and space policy largely went unnoticed, Krauthammer’s funereal tone generated a rebuke from the administration. In a blog post late Friday on the White House website, NASA administrator Charles Bolden and Office of Science and Technology Policy director John Holdren argued that “nothing could be further from the truth” about that characterization. They then pick apart his arguments, mincing few words in the process. For example, when Krauthammer claimed that China landing people on the Moon by 2025 would demonstrate it was overtaking the US in space, they wrote, “How absurd!” They also complain later that Krauthammer “carps” about the Obama Administration canceling Constellation when the program was behind schedule and over budget.
The post by Bolden and Holdren is the second time in recent weeks that the administration has responded via the web to what it considers to be unfair criticism of the agency’s efforts. After an April 1 segment on “60 Minutes” about the aftermath of the retirement of the shuttle program on the shuttle’s workforce that generated some political reaction, Bolden responded in a blog post on the NASA website, saying the CBS newsmagazine “missed an awful lot of important context” about the shuttle’s retirement. It suggests that the administration is perhaps a little sensitive to criticism of this era of transition for human spaceflight, particularly in an election year.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 April 20 at 6:49 am ET The full Senate Appropriations Committee approved its Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies (CJS) appropriations bill Thursday morning, two days after the CJS subcommittee performed its markup of the bill. That spending bill provides a little more than $17.7 billion for NASA and transfers funding for weather satellite programs from NOAA to NASA. There were no reported amendments to the bill.
At almost the same, time, the CJS subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee marked up its version of the appropriations bill, which provides a little less than $17.6 billion for NASA and keeps weather satellites in NOAA. In his opening statement, subcommittee chairman Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) provided some additional details missing in the text of the legislation. Commercial crew would get $500 million in the House bill, but NASA would be directed to “winnow the commercial partners and advance the schedule for moving to traditional government procurement methods.” Both Wolf and ranking member Rep. Chaka Fattah (D-PA), in his separate statement, mentioned restoration of some funding for NASA’s planetary science program, specifically for Mars exploration. “[W]e are going to continue to work in this area as we move toward full Committee markup to make sure we have it correct,” Fattah said of NASA science funding.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 April 20 at 6:23 am ET Congressman Bill Posey (R-FL) introduced legislation Thursday that will make it easier for commercial entities to use and upgrade military launch infrastructure. The text of the “Revitalizing America’s Commercial Entrepreneurs (RACE) for Space Act”, HR 4401, hasn’t been posted yet, but Posey’s office said in a statement that it would allow commercial space companies to use DOD space transportation infrastructure, such as launch pads, without cost to the taxpayer. The bill’s summary states that it would direct the Secretary of Defense to work with, and accept funding from, non-federal entities “to promote efficiencies of the space transportation infrastructure of the Department of Defense in commercial space activities.”
“We have been losing launches to overseas competitors and that is not good for our economic competitiveness or our national security,” Posey said in a statement. “We need to change that direction and my bill will do that. This bill is a win-win.”
At an Aerospace States Association policy forum last month in Washington, Florida lieutenant governor Jennifer Carroll mentioned that Posey was “trying to craft the language with the Air Force” on legislation—presumably this bill—to support public-private partnerships regarding launch activities. She described such partnerships as the most promising direction in space efforts. “It’s the way we have to go” in order to make certain space activities, like delivery of cargo to the ISS, possible in “a more efficient, effective, and cost saving manner.”
By Jeff Foust on 2012 April 18 at 1:23 pm ET The House Appropriations Committee released Wednesday morning its proposed Commerce, Justice, and Science (CJS) appropriations bill, which includes $17.573 billion for NASA, $138 million less than the administration’s budget proposal. This budget includes $1.025 billion for Orion and $1.857 billion for the Space Launch System, of which just over $400 million would go to ground systems development. Commercial crew funding isn’t spelled out in the bill; after accounting for SLS and Orion, there’s $830 million left for commercial crew and exploration R&D (funded at $334 million in the administration’s request) in the exploration account.
The bill does go into some detail about planetary science spending, which would get $1.4 billion, or $200 million more than requested by the administration. The bill specifies that $150 million would be set aside for something called “Mars Next Decade”, which apparently refers to the planetary science decadal survey’s top priority flagship-level mission of a rover to collect samples for eventual return to Earth. The funds would not be released “unless and until the National Research Council has certified to the Committees on Appropriations that the chosen mission concept will lead to the accomplishment of Mars sample return as described in the most recent planetary science decadal survey,” the draft bill states. If the NRC finds that is not possible, the funds would be used instead to begin planning for a Europa orbiter mission, the second-highest priority from the decadal.
Absent from the House version of the bill is the transfer of NOAA satellite programs, as the Senate did this week in its version of the budget.
The CJS subcommittee is scheduled to markup its appropriations bill tomorrow morning at 9:30 am; that hearing will not be webcast.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 April 18 at 7:31 am ET If you looked at only the first sentence of the NASA section of the fiscal year 2013 appropriations bill summary released by the Senate Appropriations Committee after its markup of the bill Tuesday afternoon, you might have jumped for joy. “The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is funded at $19.4 billion, an increase of $1.6 billion over the fiscal year 2012 enacted level,” it reads. Were senators suddenly feeling generous? Well, not really. The increase is due entirely to the transfer of NOAA’s satellite programs to NASA. Without that transfer, NASA’s budget is $41 million less than the agency’s fiscal year 2012 appropriations and just above the $17.71 billion requested by the administration.
The chairwoman of the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies (CJS) appropriations subcommittee, Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), singled out NOAA for criticism in her comments about the budget, explaining the decision to move NOAA’s programs to NASA. “Unfortunately, the Committee has lost confidence in NOAA’s ability to control procurement costs or articulate reliable funding profiles. Therefore, we have taken the unprecedented step of transferring responsibility for building our Nation’s operational weather satellites from NOAA to NASA,” she said in a statement. “While NASA missions have also experienced cost overruns and schedule slippages, NASA has been more responsive and competent in correcting these deficiencies.” The transferred funding would be placed in a separate, new account, called Operational Satellite Acquisition, within the NASA budget.
That move was endorsed by the committee’s ranking member, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX). “NOAA and the Department of Commerce have failed to rein in the life-cycle costs which are now exceeding $1 billion above last year’s revised budget projections,” she said in her opening statement. “NOAA is traveling in the wrong direction, and NASA is the right agency to oversee the procurement of satellites.”
Beyond the shift of NOAA funds, the committee largely made tweaks to the administration’s budget request. The subcommittee restored $100 million to NASA’s Mars science programs, although didn’t allocate that funding to any particular Mars program. The administration’s request for commercial crew was cut by just over $300 million, from $830 million to $525 million, but that reduced level is still above both the program’s 2012 funding of $406 million and the authorized level of $500 million for FY13. The Space Launch System and Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle are funded at effectively the levels in the budget proposal: $1.5 and $1.2 billion, respectively.
The full appropriations committee will take up the CJS appropriations bill in a hearing at 10:30 am Thursday morning.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 April 18 at 7:09 am ET From the “better late than never” department: according to several reports, including Defense News, the Defense Department will release the final so-called “Section 1248″ report about satellite export control reform later today. A press conference at the National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs is scheduled for midday today titled “Update on Space Export Control Reform”, where the release of the final report is the likely topic.
The report, nicknamed after the section of the fiscal year 2010 defense authorization bill that called for it, is intended the analyze the national security implications of moving satellites and related components off the US Munitions List (USML), and thus out of the jurisdiction of the restrictive International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). Congress put those items on the USML in the late 1990s in response to concerns that China acquired sensitive technologies from US-built commercial communications satellites, and this report is seen a major prerequisite to any move by Congress to take the technologies off the USML or otherwise reform export control rules for space items. The report, through, is about two years late, with a due date of April 2010 in the legislation. The Defense Department provided a draft report last spring, but with insufficient detail for Congress to take action.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 April 15 at 7:40 pm ET Congress is returning from spring break this week, and at least in the Senate they’re wasting no time getting down to business. The Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee will be marking up its proposed appropriations bill for FY 2013 on Tuesday afternoon at 2:30 pm EDT. That appropriations bill includes NASA as well as NOAA and NSF. It will be the first chance to see what appropriators will do with the administration’s budget request; things to watch include funding for NASA’s planetary sciences program (cut by 20% in the administration’s request) and commercial crew funding (increased to nearly $830 million in the request).
The markup is taking place far earlier than last year, when the CJS subcommittee did not mark up its FY12 appropriations bill until September 14—the same day that NASA formally unveiled the design of the Space Launch System (SLS) at a press conference on the Senate side of Capitol Hill. In last month’s CJS subcommittee hearing on the NASA budget proposal, subcommittee chairwoman Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) did mention the markup could come as soon as mid to late April.
As Marcia Smith notes, the timing of the markup is a little bit awkward for NASA and the DC space community, as many officials will be in Colorado Springs this week for the National Space Symposium. It’s the second year in a row, though, that Mikulski’s subcommittee has stepped on the symposium’s toes: last year the subcommittee held its hearing on NASA’s FY12 budget proposal the same week as the symposium.
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