By Jeff Foust on 2012 March 23 at 7:04 am ET While NASA administrator Charles Bolden was defending the administration’s budget request before House appropriators earlier this week, other NASA officials were left to explain the consequences of those cuts to an audience even less pleased with the proposal: the planetary sciences community.
“I wish I had a good succinct answer” for why NASA’s planetary science budget received a 20% cut in the fiscal year 2013 budget proposal, said John Grunsfeld, NASA’s associate administrator for science, at the “NASA Night” forum at the Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conference (LPSC) Monday night in The Woodlands, Texas. Grunsfeld, who took the job after the FY2013 budget decisions had been made, said that the cut was not intended to be “punitive” for overruns on missions like the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) or the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). “It really comes down to a lot of tough trades,” he explained. With MSL on its way, he said, administration officials decided “planetary would have, I think the words I’ve heard are, a ‘paced development.'”
Grunsfeld acknowledged that the decision to withdraw from the joint ExoMars program with ESA was a “huge disappointment”, but he was hopeful that there will be a way to restore some kind of Mars mission for NASA by the 2018 launch opportunity. A planning group led by Orlando Figueroa to examine potential long-term exploration architectures is ramping up its work. A website for the group will be up soon, he said, along with town hall meetings, with a goal of completing its study by late summer.
Many in the audience at the event, which was also webcast, wanted more information on why planetary got cut. Some wondered if planetary was, in effect, being raided to pay for JWST. “As far as I know, there were no specific trades between programs,” Grunsfeld said. JWST is funded in the budget proposal for FY13 and later years at the levels needed to support a 2018 launch, reflecting its status as an agency priority, “and other programs were adjusted up and down to maintain a flat topline.” He cautioned against infighting within the scientific community over funding. “We will all lose,” he said, if that were to happen. “There is no doubt about that.”
During the Q&A period, Jim Bell, president of the Planetary Society, gave an extended and impassioned plea for Grunsfeld and Jim Green, the head of NASA’s planetary science division, to fight the proposed cuts—even if it cost them their jobs. “What we’re asking you to do is what we are all doing, and that is to fight back,” Bell said. “And even if you lose your jobs over opposition to this misplaced budget agenda, it would have been the right thing to do.” That line generated a mixture of laughter and applause from the audience.
Grunsfeld recalled that he was in a similar position before, working at NASA Headquarters as chief scientist in January 2004, when the agency decided to cancel the final planned servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. “I had a really tough night,” he said after hearing the news, trying to decide whether he should resign in protest. He said he talked with astronomer John Bahcall, who told him he would have the support of the astronomy community if he left, but if he did that, “there will be nobody inside of NASA to help to save Hubble.” Grunsfeld stayed, and, of course, that servicing mission was ultimately restored and flown.
At a “community forum” the next day at LPSC, also webcast, members of the planetary science community tried to rally their forces to fight the proposed budget cut. “One of the reasons that planetary got whacked” in the budget proposal, said author Andrew Chaikin, who moderated the session, “is because the planetary community is perceived in certain powerful circles as being weak. We have to have to come together and show that we are not weak.”
That coming together process, though, appeared to be very much a work in progress at the forum, as representatives of several professional organizations talked about their planned outreach efforts, ranging from informing their members to organizing visits to Capitol Hill. “I want to stress the crucial importance of responding as a united community,” said planetary scientist Steve Squyres, who chaired the most recent planetary sciences decadal survey. “And I do not mean as a community of Mars fans and a community of Europa fans. I don’t even mean responding as a community of planetary scientists. I mean responding as a community of space scientists.”
Squyres warned that, as bad as these cuts are for the planetary science community, it could get worse. He said he has talked with “various decisionmakers” in Washington who “are looking for ways to cut even further” in budgets. “What we must not do is give anybody a reason for cutting planetary even further. There’s going pressure to do that.” That, he argued, requires a united front by planetary scientists. “There is no surer way to give budgetcutters—and there’s lots of them out there—a reason to go after the planetary program than to project an appearance of disunity, disarray, disagreement as to what we should be doing. We must speak as one voice.”
By Jeff Foust on 2012 March 22 at 7:51 am ET NASA administrator Charles Bolden’s two-and-a-half-hour appearance before the Commerce, Justice, and Science subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee covered some expected ground, including some heated discussions about the agency’s planetary science program as well as questions about its commercial crew program. But a hearing that long also allowed members to delve into other topics, from cybersecurity to China to an issue that’s still a sore point for some members: the disposition of the retired shuttle orbiters.
The big issue, though, was planetary science, and in particular the future of the agency’s Mars exploration program after NASA withdrew from the joint ExoMars program with Europe. “I understand that the budget pressures require you to make cuts to your science programs, but I don’t understand why those cuts are overwhelmingly in planetary science,” subcommittee chairman Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) said to Bolden immediately after the administrator finished his opening statement. “The area that seemed to be actually in the best shape was our Mars exploration, contrary to popular belief,” Bolden responded, citing the missions currently at Mars, as well as Mars Science Lab (en route to Mars) and the MAVEN orbiter, slated for launch in 2013.
He said the “smaller, focused” missions expected to emerge from the agency’s restructuring of its Mars exploration program would still be able to support an eventual Mars sample return mission, a top goal of planetary scientists. “We never had a Mars sample return mission within our budgets,” he claimed. “People think that, by stepping away from ExoMars, we are stepping away from Mars sample return. There was no Mars sample return in the two missions being planned for ExoMars.” In fact, the 2018 ExoMars mission was designed to cache samples as the first step of a multi-mission sample return effort, with future missions to take the sample and return it to Earth—something Bolden did acknowledge.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), who has been the most outspoken congressional critic of the proposed planetary science budget cuts, got into an impassioned debate with Bolden later in the hearing about Mars. The cut in the Mars program, he said, “is a major step backwards for NASA and the nation” because, with human space exploration and the launch of JWST still years off, “the Mars program is the key driver of public support for the space program.”
Schiff pressed Bolden on who made the decision to terminate NASA’s participation in ExoMars, trying to determine if the decision came from within NASA or from the White House. “Congressman, the decision came from me,” Bolden said, refusing to put any of the blame on the White House or the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in particular. “I asked, how are we going to do a Mars sample return based on the budget we have currently,” he said. He later admitted that he was initially under the impression that ExoMars was was a sample return mission, and thus had doubts when he found it was only the first step in a multi-mission strategy. “It was a successive understanding of our posture fiscally, and a successive understanding on my part of our technical capability, that told me that I could not, and as I told [ESA Director-General] Jean-Jacques Dordain, that I can not in good conscience allow them to continue to think that the United States is going to be there for them on a sample return mission in 2028 that we cannot support, we cannot afford.”
That explanation did not mollify Schiff. “Mr. Administrator, I can’t in good conscience support a budget that says that America’s days of leadership in space science are limited,” he said. Rep. John Culberson (R-TX) was similarly critical of the planetary budget. “The budget that the president has put forward is clearly putting the best days of planetary exploration behind us,” he said. “It’s visionless. It’s just really—I just grieve for my country, I grieve for NASA.”
Later in the hearing, Wolf addressed commercial crew, in particular questioning, as other have in the past, whether it would be more expedient, and less expensive, for NASA to downselect to a smaller number of companies now. “The administration believes that maximizing competition is a cost control measure, however, it also ensures that we will spend hundreds of millions of dollars on companies who will never take crew to the International Space Station” because of technical issues or a lack of demand for crew transportation services, Wolf said, asking if it made sense to downselect to two companies.
Bolden said, as he has previously, that it made little sense to downselect to one or two companies at this stage of development. “So there’s no effort of making this basically a wartime proposal, bringing together the best minds in the four companies or the three companies or the two companies now, knowing that everyone would get something and be a participant,” Wolf said. Bolden said companies have been encouraged to collaborate, but “I can’t mandate that the companies come together.”
Wolf pondered the priority of commercial crew versus other programs, like Mars exploration. Referring to comments by Schiff and Culberson, “I tend to feel their concern, because I want America to be number one. So if we are even reasonably concerned that the commercial crew program may not deliver in time to serve the International Space Station, then I guess the question somebody would have to ask—and I’m not saying that I’m opposed to it—but why should taxpayers spend an additional four billion dollars subsidizing companies to develop these systems when other programs that are meritorious have to be cut. Is it time to revisit some of the assumptions about the commercial crew program?”
While members spent a lot of time discussing Mars, commercial crew, and related issues, one member was interested in a past topic: NASA’s decision nearly a year ago to award shuttle orbiters to sites in California, Florida, New York, and Virginia. Rep. Steve Austria (R-OH) spent about ten minutes questioning Bolden on the shuttle site selection process, concerned that the National Museum of the US Air Force in Dayton—in his current district—had been slighted. Citing a scoring error in the rating process found after the fact in a NASA Inspector General report, Austria said it “raises concerns on my part as to the integrity and how accurate this process was.” Bolden defended the choice, noting there were “significant shortcomings on the proposal” from the Air Force museum, “not the least of which was funding.” He also said that NASA was providing quarterly reports on the disposition of the orbiters to Congress, as required in the FY12 appropriations bill, and that NASA may soon be relieved of the responsibility of providing additional such reports.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 March 22 at 6:17 am ET Last May the White House started development of an updated national space transportation policy as part of a review of “sectoral” policies after the mid-2010 release of the broader National Space Policy. At the time officials said they hoped to complete the review of the policy in four to five months, but cautioned that timeline was subject to change. Ten months later, the policy has not been released—but it is coming.
Speaking at a public forum Tuesday morning organized by the Aerospace States Association (ASA), Peter Marquez, the former director for space policy at the White House who coordinated the development of the 2010 national space policy, said he understood that an initial draft of the policy was now complete and undergoing review. “It has now entered the blackout period” where the White House will no longer be seeking outside inputs, as it had during earlier stages of its development. (Marquez, who now works for Orbital Sciences, said he was speaking only for himself at the ASA event.) “The next time you hear or see of it is when it pops out of the Oval Office with the president’s signature on it.”
And when might that happen? Marquez expects that the policy will go through several rounds of reviews based on his own experience there: the 2010 policy, he said, went through four revisions. “So hopefully by—guessing—the fall timeframe, a new space transportation policy may pop out.”
Marquez also offered his best guesses as to the contents of the policy, cautioning he had no insight into the specific details it might contain. Based on the themes of the overall national space policy, he said he expects the space transportation policy to cover topics such as reliance on commercial capabilities, resilience and mission assurance, STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education, technology risk reduction, and international cooperation. Of those, education might seem out of place, but he said it would be tied to the need of having an educated workforce to support space transportation operations. “I would place good money on the national space transportation policy having some very directive language about STEM.”
By Jeff Foust on 2012 March 21 at 6:35 am ET For several years Indian officials have talked up the development of an indigenous human spaceflight capability that could be ready by the middle of this decade, with some even suggesting a human mission to the Moon by 2020. While the latter goal has generally been treated with a heavy dose of skepticism, India’s plans for at least putting people into orbit have come in space policy discussions here in the US, as evidence that other nations were moving ahead in human spaceflight while America’s ambitions seemed stalled.
The new Indian budget for the 2012-2013 fiscal year, released late last week, paints a different picture. The budget for India’s Department of Space, which is primarily the Indian space agency ISRO, includes about 600 million rupees (US$12 million) for its “Manned Mission Initiatives/Human Space Flight Programme”. That’s significantly more than the 132 million rupees ($2.6 million) the program got in the 2011-2012 fiscal year, although the original request was far higher: nearly 1 billion rupees ($20 million). The program description in the budget documents offers only a few details, with no timetable for such a mission. “The programme envisages development of a fully autonomous orbital vehicle carrying two or three crew-members to about 275 km low earth orbit and their safe return,” it states. “Currently, the critical technologies required for human spaceflight pragramme [sic] are being developed as pre-project activities.”
By comparison, India is accelerating its plans for launching its first Mars orbiter. The budget includes 1.25 billion rupees ($25 million) for the Mars Orbiter Mission, compared to 100 million rupees ($2 million) in 2011-2012, the first year the project received funding. The program would permit the launch of at least a small orbiter perhaps as soon as November 2013, the next launch window in the 26-month phasing of launch opportunities. The spacecraft would go into a highly elliptical orbit with “nearly 25 kg” available for scientific instruments.
The overall ISRO budget seeks 67.2 billion rupees ($1.34 billion) for 2012-2013, up from the 44.3 billion rupees ($890 million) from its revised 2011-2012 budget, but about the same as its original request for that year.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 March 19 at 5:49 am ET This Tuesday and Wednesday the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) will be holding its annual Congressional Visits Day, where members meet with various congressional offices to discuss aerospace-related issues. Those topics are listed in its Key Issues document, and include “Facilitating Assured, Cost-Effective Human Access to Space” alongside others ranging from air traffic management to cybersecurity.
“Means for the U.S. to independently control placement of its citizens into space is at stake, including for continued utilization of the ISS, for expanded human activities in Earth orbit, and for revival of human space exploration,” the document notes in its section on human spaceflight. Its recommendations to policymakers, though, are rather general. “Make development of a sustainable means for transport of humans to/from Earth orbit a high priority,” they recommend, without indicating a preference for either the SLS and MPCV or commercially-operated systems. Another recommendation: “Base the development plan on a schedule consistent with a realizable budgetary authority.” Who would be opposed to that? (Actually developing such a schedule, though, is another story.)
Elsewhere in the document, the AIAA endorses NASA’s space technology development efforts, recommending that Congress provide “adequate resources for NASA to pursue the highest priority technologies in the space technology development roadmaps,” referring to the technology development plans recently reviewed by the National Research Council. AIAA also supports export control reform efforts, calling on Congress to “overhaul and amend the export control regime” that could remove many space-related items from the jurisdiction of ITAR.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 March 15 at 1:12 pm ET The Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee has scheduled a hearing on the NASA budget proposal for 2013 for this coming Wednesday, March 21, at 9 am Eastern time. The hearing will be webcast for those not able to attend in person. It’s like the proposed cuts in NASA’s planetary science programs, including termination of NASA’s participation in ExoMars, will come us, as well as the agency’s proposed $830 million for commercial crew development, based on the NASA-related topics that came up in a hearing with presidential science advisor John Holdren two weeks ago.
At the same time, space activists are rallying to support commercial crew as well as space technology, two parts of the NASA budget proposal perceived to be particularly vulnerable to cuts. The Space Frontier Foundation issued a legislative alert Thursday, asking people to contact their members of Congress to support a request for “full funding” for those two programs. (The Space Access Society issued a similar call for legislative action on Wednesday.) Because the deadline for members to submit specific funding requests is Tuesday the 20th, the organizations are asking people to contact their members by Monday.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 March 15 at 7:55 am ET Some discussion in yesterday’s post about an Alabama congressional race looked at whether Newt Gingrich’s comments on space in Huntsville last week helped or hurt him there. Below are the results from the state’s GOP primary and in three northern Alabama counties, including Madison, where Huntsville is located (data via CNN:
| Candidate |
State |
Madison |
Morgan |
Limestone |
| Santorum |
35% |
33% |
40% |
40% |
| Gingrich |
29% |
27% |
28% |
28% |
| Romney |
29% |
31% |
25% |
24% |
| Paul |
5% |
7% |
5% |
5% |
In those counties Gingrich polled one to two percentage points below his statewide total, a difference that is probably not statistically significant. (Rick Santorum, who said little about space in a Huntsville visit two days after Gingrich’s, did worse in Madison County than he did statewide or in the other two north Alabama counties, with Mitt Romney doing better there.) Gingrich’s comments on space, in Huntsville or earlier, certainly did not help him there, but they may not have hurt him either: keep in mind that his disdain for NASA bureaucracy may have been, for some, a liability in a place that’s home to a major NASA center.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 March 14 at 5:44 am ET Congressman Mo Brooks (R-AL), a member of the House Science Committee whose district includes NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, easily won his primary election Tuesday night. Brooks defeated former Congressman Parker Griffith by over 40 percentage points, 71 to 29 percent, according to nearly-complete returns. The primary was a rematch of the 2010 Republican primary, when Brooks defeated Griffith, who won the seat in 2008 as a Democrat but switched parties in late 2009. The two candidates discussed space during a televised debate earlier this month, with both expressing doubts about NASA’s commercial space initiatives. “I am very much concerned about the privatization of the NASA space program,” Brooks said in the debate.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 March 13 at 6:09 am ET Last week the chairman of the House Science Committee, Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX), introduced H.R. 4158, a bill design to “confirm full ownership rights for certain United States astronauts to artifacts from the astronauts’ space missions.” The bill simply confers full ownership rights of any artifacts that had been given to astronauts who flew on Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions, with an exception for lunar rocks “and other lunar material”. The legislation is designed to address recent events where NASA challenged the ownership of several artifacts that Apollo-era astronauts were planning to sell. The legislation has 18 cosponsors, primarily fellow members of the science committee, and since the legislation has been referred to that committee, it’s likely to be favorably reported out.
Also last week, Sens. Bill Nelson (D-FL) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) introduced S. 2157, the Shuttle Workforce Revitalization Act of 2012. The bill designates Brevard County, Florida, as a Historically Underutilized Business Zone (HUBZone) through at least the end of 2019, giving businesses there preferential treatment in some federal procurements. The legislation is designed to help the area recover from the retirement of the shuttle and resulting economic impact on the Space Coast. The bill is the Senate’s version of a similar House bill introduced last July by Rep. Sandy Adams (R-FL). The House has yet to take action on that bill, H.R. 2712.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 March 10 at 8:52 am ET Aviation Week reports that House appropriators have rejected a request by NASA to reprogram fiscal year 2012 funding for planetary science that would have taken money away from Mars and other flagship mission work. The request, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), chairman of the appropriations subcommittee with oversight of NASA, would “drastically scale back spending on Outer Planets Flagship missions, discontinue work on the joint 2016 and 2018 Mars missions being explored with the European Space Agency and allocate a reduced amount to the study of a potential new future Mars mission.” Wolf said he blocked the requested funding shift since the proposed changes there, and in the administration’s FY2013 budget request, “deserves to be fully considered by a process that is more rigorous and more inclusive”. (It was not clear from the report to what projects the reprogrammed funds would have been shifted.)
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), a member of that appropriations subcommittee and a staunch advocate for Mars exploration, “applauded” the decision in a statement on Friday. “NASA’s effort to mothball the Mars program is a disaster for America’s leadership in planetary science, and I’m glad this first step has been rejected by the committee,” he said. “While today’s decision by Chairman Wolf is enormously positive, we still have a lot of work to do to put the Mars program back on track.”
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