By Jeff Foust on 2012 March 9 at 6:46 am ET It was a case of good timing: a day after commercial crew was a centerpiece of a pair of hearings on the NASA 2013 budget proposal in the Senate and the House, the Commercial Spaceflight Federation held a forum on the topic on Capitol Hill Thursday morning. The event gave representatives of four companies a chance to talk about their companies’ efforts, while a key member of Congress offered some qualified support for the program.
“Commercial crew is a high priority for me, and a high priority for the administration,” said Rep. Chaka Fattah (D-PA), the ranking member of the Commerce, Justice, and Science subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, said in brief opening remarks at the Thursday morning event. However, he warned that it will be “a challenging environment, given the overall fiscal circumstances relative to NASA” this year, with a final appropriations bill likely to come only after the November elections.
At that point, he said, “it will be an opportunity for the country to think clearly about when it is that we want to have the capacity, an American capacity,” to send astronauts to the ISS. “The quickest way for us to get there is through commercial crew, and the worst way to proceed along that line is by undercutting the funding.”
Industry representatives echoed the need for full funding for commercial crew during their presentations and Q&A session that followed. “We need to get Americans into space on American spacecraft, and the quickest way you can do that is the path we’re on now,” said Mike Leinbach, a former NASA shuttle launch director who joined United Launch Alliance earlier this year. Progress, he said, will be “fully dependent on the funding levels going forward”, and getting the requested funding of nearly $830 million in 2013 “would be a real boost to the system.”
“We don’t see any issue of flying crew by the end of 2015, assuming we’re fully funded,” said Boeing’s Keith Reiley, discussing his company’s CST-100 vehicle concept, “which is why the funding coming out Congress is very important, not only for us but everybody at the table here.”
Industry participants were also skeptical of some calls in Congress to downselect now to two teams, or even one, to save money for the program. “This next round of commercial crew development is really a development contract,” said Adam Harris of SpaceX. “It makes sense to let a number of teams go forward and develop those concepts, and then when you’re getting to flights to the International Space Station, you’ll have a lot more data to make that decision.” Sierra Nevada’s John Roth said a better time to make a downselect to one or two providers would come in a later FAR-based contract (as opposed to the Space Act Agreements currently used) to handle vehicle certification work.
Leinbach said NASA needs to decide what level of redundancy it wants in crew transportation: “Whether NASA needs redundancy among American providers, or is redundancy with the Russians sufficient with a single American provider.” (In Wednesday’s hearings, NASA administrator Charles Bolden said his goal was the former, that is, having at least two American companies able to transport crews.) Whether the funding will be there to support multiple companies over the next several years, though, is an open question given this week’s debate about the program.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 March 8 at 10:24 pm ET On Tuesday, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich visited the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville for a speech, which included a brief discussion about space policy. Two days later another GOP candidate, Rick Santorum, visited the very same venue. This time, though, beyond a nod to the historical backdrop to his talk, there was virtually no mention of space.
“This is—what a venue,” he remarked early in his speech, which was webcast live by local TV stations. “It just takes me back to my childhood, growing up in the Mercury and Apollo time in our country in the ’60s and ’70s.” He recalled staying up late at night to watch the Apollo 11 “lunar spacewalk”, among other recollections of that era. “Just as an American, I just want to say thank you, Huntsville, thank you for the great work that you’ve done for our country.”
After that trip down memory lane, though, he went on to other topics, and didn’t return to space during the rest of the approximately 40-minute speech. The closest he came was in a discussion of defense spending, where he noted that “a very important part of our defense is space,” without going into greater detail. Advocates of NASA, though, might be disappointed in a statement he made a little earlier in his speech. “I will not cut the defense budget while I’m president of the United States,” he said to cheers from the several hundred people in attendance. “In fact, it is the only area of the budget that will grow under my administration.” NASA, it seems, would have to make do with, at best, a flat budget in a Santorum Administration.
Local TV station WHNT claimed to be the only media outlet to get a one-on-one interview with Santorum after his speech, but even then space did not come up: Santorum talked on topics from gas prices to missile defense.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 March 8 at 6:59 am ET A few hours after NASA administrator Charles Bolden defended the agency’s fiscal year 2013 budget request before the Senate Commerce Committee on Wednesday, he did the same on other side of Capitol Hill at a hearing of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee. The rhetoric at the House hearing wasn’t nearly as heated as the Senate hearing, where Bolden and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison engaged in an extended debate, but commercial crew and SLS/Orion funding was again a key theme, with a number of committee members expressing skepticism about the administration’s proposal of nearly $830M for commercial crew.
“I look at every program in your budget and it seems to take a hit, except for the commercial crew,” Rep. Donna Edwards (D-MD) said to Bolden at one point in the nearly two-hour hearing. “I wonder if you can tell me how we can expect support on this committee for an 104% increase when you have yet to provide to us, despite being asked numerous times, frankly, General, a credible cost and schedule estimate that justifies an annual funding stream.”
“We basically have to take it on faith that your budget requests are neither too small or too large,” Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), the ranking member of the committee, said in her opening statement in regards to commercial crew, “and that these vehicles will show up before it is too late for them to provide more than a year or two of support for the International Space Station.” She was also skeptical that these vehicles would be able to provide crew transportation services less expensively than Soyuz vehicles, or open up new markets beyond space tourism. “I can’t justify to my constituents the expenditure of their tax dollars so that the super-rich can have a joyride.”
Bolden made a number of the same comments about commercial crew as he did in the Senate in the morning, including that the requested funding was vital to keep the program on schedule for beginning transportation services in 2017 and that safety was not being compromised by using Space Act Agreements (SAAs) versus FAR-based contracts. In response to another question about the use of SAAs from Rep. Brad Miller (D-NC), Bolden said that if NASA had stuck to the agency’s original plan to use more conventional contracts for the third round of the program, NASA would have been able to select only one contractor given the limited funding available in FY2012, and “the subsequent costs on that contract would, I think, have been—I would not have been able to afford it.”
While commercial crew got considerable attention at the hearing, the proposed cuts to NASA’s planetary science programs cut only a modest amount of attention, but even that was more than what the Senate devoted to the topic earlier in the day. “NASA, seemingly in good faith, agreed in 2009 to join forces with the European Space Agency [on ExoMars], but with the unveiling of the 2013 budget, NASA has reneged on its commitment,” Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX), the committee’s chairman, said in his opening statement. “There’s no doubt in my mind that NASA’s decision to withdraw from ExoMars seriously imperils the ability of ESA to keep moving forward with this program and also imperils NASA’s ability to be viewed as a trustworthy partner on any future collaborations.”
Beyond statements by Hall and Johnson in their opening statements, the topic of NASA’s withdrawal in ExoMars came up only rarely in the hearing. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) mentioned it late in the hearing, expressing concerns about international cooperation. “What’s this going to do to our ability to be reliable partners?” he asked Bolden. The administrator responded that international cooperation remained important. “We have not stepped away from our European friends,” he said, discussing the ongoing restructuring of the agency’s Mars exploration program.
On one other topic, China, Bolden revealed in the hearing that he has already talked with Rep. Frank Wolf about his concerns regarding potential Chinese participation in the ISS that he expressed in a letter to the administrator earlier this week. “Congressman Wolf and I had a long conversation yesterday,” he said in response to a question from Rep. Sandy Adams (R-FL). “That meeting has been had and he considered that adequate response to his letter.”
By Jeff Foust on 2012 March 7 at 1:32 pm ET This morning’s hearing of the Senate Commerce Committee on “Priorities, Plans, and Progress of the Nation’s Space Program” was slow to get started: it took over half an hour before the hearing’s primary witness, NASA administrator Charles Bolden, got to start his opening statement. However, it quickly ratcheted up in intensity as Bolden and committee ranking member Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) got into an extended debate—bordering on a heated argument—about spending on commercial crew versus the Space Launch System (SLS) and the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV).
Hutchison first raised her concerns about proposed spending levels for those programs in her opening statement. “Reviewing that budget… gives me great concern,” she said, citing a reduction in the administration’s FY13 budget proposal of $326 million for SLS and Orion and what she argued was a “corresponding increase of $330 million for commercial crew”. (That amount of increase is apparently with respect to the authorized level of $500 million; commercial crew got $406 million in FY12 and the agency is requesting nearly $830 million in FY13.) “I was frankly floored, as you know from our conversation,” she told Bolden after he completed his opening statement, “that it would be so blatant to take it right out of Orion and SLS and put it into commercial crew, rather than trying to accomplish the joint goals that we have of putting forward both.”
Bolden responded that he had to cut funding from programs across the agency. “We had to make very difficult choices because we were $2 billion below where we thought we would be for a fiscal year ’13 budget” based on authorized levels, he said. The budget, he said, would keep SLS and Orion on track for an initial, uncrewed test flight in 2017 and a crewed mission by 2021, a date which he said was conservative based on the current budget runouts. Accelerating the 2017 date, he said, was not possible even if the program got additional funding.
Hutchison was not satisfied with that answer, though. “You said everybody had to be cut some to make the priorities, but in fact, the commercial crew vehicle approach that you’re taking was not cut, it was plussed up from last year’s spending levels,” she argued. “You are over-prioritizing the commercial and not being as concerned about keeping the people at NASA who would be able to stay involved” for future exploration programs. Bolden countered that “our workforce is stable.”
Hutchison later introduced a proposal that she said would resolve her concerns about funding for SLS/Orion while keeping commercial crew on track. She suggested that NASA downselect now to a smaller number of companies to make better use of funding. “Some of them are not going to be able to function if they don’t have these subsidies once you make a decision about who is going to do the vehicle,” she claimed of the companies that currently have commercial crew awards from NASA. “Isn’t there an overspending at this point in the proliferating of companies that are getting the federal subsidies?” she asked. By reducing the number of companies to perhaps two, and going back to more typical contracts instead of Space Act Agreements (which, she added, would address concerns about companies meeting NASA safety standards), she argued the program would be more efficient and free up money that could support SLS and Orion: “a win on both sides.”
Bolden disagreed, saying that while he was reluctant to switch the acquisition strategy for the latest round of the commercial crew program, from a contract to an SAA, it was recommended to him based on the available funding. He also noted that “requirements and specifications” for safety are available so that companies involved in the program know what they will eventually be required to meet. “There is no problem of safety with Space Act Agreements,” he said. “I am responsible for safety, and as I have said from the day that I became the administrator, I will not jeopardize safety for crews.”
As the back-and-forth continued, both Bolden and Hutchison seemed to harden in their positions, and the language got sharper. Bolden said that the 2017 date for beginning commercial crew transportation services is supported by the budget proposal, but would be if that funding was reduced. “We are not taking money away from SLS/MPCV,” he said.
“But you are!” Hutchison interrupted. “It’s clear, it’s in the numbers, and it’s irrefutable. If you had the passion ands the concern for the SLS and the Orion that you have for protecting whatever number of commercial companies that you want to put out there…”
“Senator, not to get personal,” Bolden interrupted in turn, “but my passion for SLS/MPCV exceeds anybody’s in this room.”
“Well, it’s not shown in the numbers, Mr. Administrator. That’s the problem.”
“Senator, I fight for SLS/MPCV just as much as I do for every other of the three priorities we have agreed to.” [A reference to ISS cargo/crew and JWST.]
Hutchison later said she was simply trying to suggest to Bolden that if he was willing to “cut down the number, but not the amount of emphasis that you have, in the commercial sector, we could do both.”
“If we cut down the number of competitors,” Bolden said, “we will probably drive up the cost” through a change to standard contracts without the cost-sharing that currently exists under SAAs.
Sen. Bill Nelson, chairman of the committee’s space subcommittee, largely stayed on the sidelines during this extended back-and-forth between Bolden and Hutchison. Later, he said he supported increasing commercial crew funding, provided it didn’t come at the expense of SLS and Orion. “With a limited amount of money, we know we’re asking you do an awful lot,” he told Bolden. “What we need to do is work with you at coming up with a number for commercial and not, at the same time, sacrifice anything on the big rocket and Orion.”
It’s notable that this debate was the key issue in the hearing: the rest of the questions focused on issues like spaceport upgrades at the Kennedy Space Center and cybersecurity concerns at NASA. Other than brief mentions in their opening statements, there was no debate about the proposed cuts in planetary science funding, including NASA’s withdrawal from the ExoMars program, that have angered many in the scientific community.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 March 7 at 6:57 am ET At last week’s meeting of the heads of the space agencies involved in the ISS, in Quebec City, Canada, the subject of potential future Chinese participation in the station apparently came up. “I am in favor of seeing how we can work together with China,” ESA director general Jean-Jacques Dordain told reporters, as the Canadian Press reported, but admitting that it will take “some time” to include China or other new partners. NASA administrator Charles Bolden reminded the news agency, though, that NASA is prohibited by law from cooperation with China, but added “he hopes the space partners will continue their conversations with the Chinese”.
The author of that legal provision that prohibits NASA (and the Office of Science and Technology Policy) from cooperating with China is not happy that there’s even discussion of possible cooperation. In a letter to Bolden that was first reported by SpacePolicyOnline.com, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) said he was “concerned” to read about that discussion of Chinese participation in the ISS program mentioned in the Canadian Press report. “NASA should make clear that the U.S. will not accept Chinese participation in any station-related activities,” Wolf wrote, later asking for a “detailed report” on those discussions in last week’s meeting regarding China.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 March 6 at 9:01 pm ET Feeling confident about a likely victory in Georgia’s Republican presidential primary (which indeed happened), former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich paid a visit Tuesday to Alabama, which holds its primary in a week. And not just anywhere in Alabama: he went to Huntsville, speaking before a few hundred people at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center there, leading to headlines like “Newt Gingrich goes to space camp”. (While the center is home to Space Camp, Gingrich spoke in the main part of the museum, so apparently he skipped a chance to ride in the multi-axis trainer.)
In that setting, Gingrich did talk about space, although not at the same length or with the same level of detail as he did in Florida in January. “I want to restate, far from backing off, I want to restate, America has a destiny in space,” he said, as reported by CNN.com. “It is a part of who we are. We are not going to back off from John Kennedy’s challenge and we are not going to go timidly into the night allowing the Chinese to dominate the future of space.”
“I said we should have an aggressive space program and got blasted for it,” he said, in another account of his speech by local TV station WAFF, a reference to that Florida speech. “This isn’t the last phase of the space program. This is the launching pad for the future.” Gingrich didn’t go into the same level of detail as his Florida speech, such as creating a permanent base on the Moon by 2020, but did emphasize the need for taking non-traditional approaches. “I was proposing that we find a public-private partnership”, he said, local station WHNT reported. “That we use prizes and that we encourage every entrepreneurial talent in America to become excited and be involved.”
The strongest rhetoric, though, may have come not from Gingrich himself but campaign press secretary R. C. Hammond, as reported by POLITICO. “Here’s my comment to all those naysayers and critics out there, okay: The same folks who mock Newt Gingrich for having vision in science are the same people who don’t want to cure cancer, the same people who are content to live with Alzheimer’s, the same people who don’t want to fix our public school systems,” he told reporters.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 March 6 at 6:37 am ET The National Space Society (NSS) declared success in its latest Legislative Blitz it held on Capitol Hill last week with fellow member organizations of the Space Exploration Alliance (SEA). Blitz participants (about two dozen are included in a photo in the release) visited over 100 congressional offices over two days to discuss a range of issues. Their talking points included full funding for commercial crew and cargo transportation as well as restoring NASA’s participation in the 2016 and 2018 ExoMars missions. Participants also want NASA’s human space exploration program accelerated, with a crewed mission to an asteroid or Mars within the next ten years and a human landing on Mars “no later than 2030.”
The Blitz materials don’t make any specific statements about NASA funding, but it’s likely that to do all of those things, including an accelerated schedule for human space exploration, would require significant additional funding. One person who has recently been in the media calling for a boosted NASA budget is Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist and author of the new book Space Chronicles. In various media interviews for the book, he’s called for doubling NASA’s budget (although, as I note in the review of the book linked to above, that proposal is not a major theme of the book, which instead is a collection of his essays, speeches, and interviews on the importance of space exploration.) Tyson will get to make that argument to a very different audience on Wednesday: he’ll appear at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing titled “Priorities, Plans, and Progress of the Nation’s Space Program” after NASA administrator Charles Bolden (who is also appearing, sans Tyson, at a House Science Committee hearing Wednesday afternoon). We’ll see how well that argument for doubling NASA’s budget goes over with senators.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 March 4 at 11:22 am ET In 2008, Parker Griffith won the election for Alabama’s 5th Congressional district—which includes Huntsville and NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center—as a Democrat, succeeding longtime member Bud Cramer. In late 2009, though, Griffith switched parties, citing a perceived lack of support among other Congressional Democrats for NASA as one of the reasons for joining the Republicans. Griffith, though, lost in the GOP primary in June 2010 to Mo Brooks, who won the general election in November.
Griffith is back, though, running in the Republican primary for that House seat as the major challenger to Brooks. Saturday night the two squared off in a televised debate in advance of the primary election a week from Tuesday. While the two disagreed on a number of issues in the debate, on space—specifically, whether there should be a greater role for commercial providers in the space program—the two were largely in agreement.
“Should the nation start to privatize more of the space effort or keep it primarily as a government-controlled endeavor under NASA?” asked one of the moderators. Griffith was the first to respond, citing what he considered to be the national security importance of NASA and human spaceflight. “Space exploration is now a matter of national defense,” he said. “And although I’m a free market, private enterprise kind of guy, I really believe that we have to be careful about how much we do allow our commercial space effort to supplant what we’re going to need for national security.”
Griffith in particular was worried about the implications of a accident involving a commercial crew provider. “If we go to private enterprise and private enterprise has a ‘Columbia accident’, and bankrupts or cannot continue, and we’re depending on that space program for our national security, I think we’ve made a mistake.” He added that “free enterprise in space is going to be wonderful, but we cannot we cannot jeopardize our national security.” (He also curiously claimed that “there are three astronauts in orbit right now, Chinese, building their own space station.” While China is expected to launch a three-person Shenzhou 9 mission this summer to its Tiangong-1 module, a prototype of future Chinese space station efforts, there are no Chinese astronauts, or taikonauts, in orbit today.)
Brooks started off his response by taking a dig at Griffith for deciding to “quit” the House Science Committee during is one term in Congress (Griffith had to give up the seat when he switched parties and the Republican leadership appointed him to other committees). The rest of his comments, though, were in tune with Griffith. “I am very much concerned about the privatization of the NASA space program,” he said. National security was one of those reasons, saying that the military and NASA work “hand-in-glove” on rockets and other related technologies. “To the extent that we cut NASA out of it, you’re driving up the cost of our national defense.” He also cited the accident and bankruptcy concerns of private providers that Griffith mentioned. “That’s one of the reasons why I think Marshall Space Flight Center, NASA, has a pivotal role,” he concluded.
Brooks mentioned space later in the debate as an example of how he can reach across the aisle and work with Democrats. “I worked with a bipartisan group of senators and congressmen to get the Space Launch System adequately funded and help force or encourage the White House to reverse their position that would have stripped Marshall Space Flight Center of any adequate role,” he said.
Portions of the debate are available on the WHNT-TV website in the video section; the question about commercialization starts a little over two minutes into Part 4, while Brooks’s comments on funding SLS are in the last half-minute of Part 6.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 March 3 at 2:50 pm ET On Wednesday Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) director John Holdren appeared at a hearing of the Commerce, Justice, and Science subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee. The hearing was held in a location without webcasting capabilities, so there was limited coverage of the event. Those reports, though, suggest that a battle may be brewing in Congress between preserving the administration’s requested funding for NASA’s commercial crew program and restoring funding for the agency’s Mars exploration program.
ScienceInsider reported that Holdren himself brought up that connection in his testimony regarding the decision to terminate NASA’s participation in the joint ExoMars program with the European Space Agency:
Holdren said the decision was one of many “tough choices” in the president’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2013, which begins on 1 October. He said that NASA realized it needed $450 million more than Congress gave it this year to maintain progress on building a commercial crew vehicle that would replace the space shuttle in ferrying U.S. astronauts to the international space station. That money, Holdren said, had to come from somewhere else within NASA’s $17.8 billion budget, which would remain flat under the president’s request.
Holdren, as expected, faced stiff questioning about the Mars program and overall planetary science cuts from two subcommittee members, Reps. John Culberson (R-TX) and Adam Schiff (D-CA), who have previously been very outspoken in their criticism of the cuts in the 2013 budget proposal. “I think that what this budget does to planetary science is deplorable,” Culberson said, as quoted by ScienceInsider.
The article also notes at the end that the subcommittee chairman, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), “asked repeatedly if NASA could find ways to reduce the cost of its commercial crew program.” A separate Space News account goes into more detail on this, with Wolf asking Holdren if the administration had considered consolidating the current effort, featuring four funded and three unfunded Space Act Agreements, “into a star team in order to eliminate the cost that would be incurred as they dropped out and to expedite this some”. The subcommittee’s ranking member, Rep. Chaka Fattah (D-PA), agreed with Wolf, saying “there may be more to be gained by collaboration amongst some of the commercial crew companies than by pure competition.”
The ScienceInsider account suggests that Holdren is blaming the commercial crew program for the decision to cut funding for Mars exploration. Yet, the request from the administration for the program in FY2013, approximately $830 million, is nearly the same as the $850 million the administration requested in FY2012 (with similar, if notional, values in the outyears of the budget projection.) And in the Space News account, he blamed Congress for funding the program at less than half the requested level in FY12. “Congress gave us too little money to keep commercial crew on a fast track,” he said.
With no apparently support for increasing NASA’s overall budget in order to fund planetary science, any effort to restore funding will have to come at the expense of some other agency program, Holdren warned. “If you’re going to fix planetary science, you’re going to have to figure out where it will come from,” Holdren told Schiff, as quoted by ScienceInsider. “And somebody’s ox is going to get gored.” Will it be the commercial crew program’s ox, or someone else’s?
By Jeff Foust on 2012 March 1 at 8:38 am ET When Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) director John Holdren testified before the House Science Committee four days after the release of the administration’s FY2013 budget, the first question he was asked by committee chairman Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX) was about NASA’s ability, or lack thereof, to require Commercial Crew Program companies to meet NASA safety requirements. The Space Act Agreements used under the first two rounds of the program, as well as for the new third round announced last month, prevent NASA from strictly requiring companies to meet those standards. However, NASA argues, it’s in the best interest of companies to meet those standards in order to be eligible for later contract awards where compliance with them will be required. (Holdren, clearly unfamiliar with that level of detail about the program, simply said that “if there is a problem in the agreements that would jeopardize that, I am sure we will fix it.”)
Several members of Congress are now asking Holden and the Obama Administration to do just that. Seven members of the House—Pete Olson (R-TX), Steven Palazzo (R-MS), Lamar Smith (R-TX), Randy Hultgren (R-IL), Steven LaTourette (R-OH), Mo Brooks (R-AL), and Ted Poe (R-TX)—signed a letter submitted to Holdren on Wednesday on this topic. “We have serious concerns about the Administration’s course of action with the commercial crew program,” they write, after summarizing the exchange in the February 17 hearing. “It is inexcusable for the Administration to spend hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer funds on these nascent systems without the ability to define and impose the necessary requirements to ensure the health and safety of astronaut crews.” They ask Holdren to take “immediate action” if crew safety is, in fact, being jeopardized.
The letter also separately asks Holdren to expedite any request for the extension of NASA’s current waiver from the Iran North Korea Syria Nonproliferation Act (INKSNA) so that it can continue to purchase Soyuz seats and obtain other services from Russia to support the ISS. NASA officials indicated last month that such a request would be forthcoming in the near future, but the congressmen asked for the proposed extension as soon as possible “in order to ensure that Congress has the time to take the necessary action on this important request this year.”
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