By Jeff Foust on 2012 February 15 at 5:37 am ET In a press release yesterday, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) criticized elements of the administration’s FY13 budget proposal, including the funding provided for the Space Launch System (SLS). However, unlike Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), who worried it and Orion were not getting enough money, he argued the “SLS Titanic” was getting too much. “By NASA’s internal estimates, the SLS and other components won’t be ready to launch astronauts to an asteroid until 2028, after we have spent over $130 billion towards the mission,” he said, adding that the same mission could be done faster and less expensively without the SLS. Rohrabacher then channeled his inner Mitt Romney: “If I had someone come to me and say they wanted to spend well over a hundred billion dollars when they knew the task could be done more quickly and less expensively, I’d say, ‘You’re fired.'”
Rohrabacher did praise the request of $830 million for NASA’s commercial crew program, but called the limited funding for technology development, at the expense of the SLS and increased Earth sciences funding, “a travesty”. “Any more of this kind of ‘leadership’ and soon NASA’s entire budget will be consumed by JWST and the SLS, two things that won’t have made it off the launch pad ten years from now,” he concluded. (SLS is currently scheduled to perform two launches through 2021, and JWST is slated for a 2018 launch.)
It should be little surprise that Mars exploration advocate Robert Zubrin is opposed to the proposed cuts in NASA’s Mars program. In an op-ed in National Review, he starts off with a criticism of those cuts, but, never one to shy away from audacious claims, goes well beyond that. He suggests the administration, particularly presidential science advisor John Holdren, demands “constraints on human aspirations” because of limited terrestrial resources, which Zubrin believes is bunk. Mars, Zubrin argues, is “the proper goal for NASA’s human-spaceflight program, and the proper priority for its robotic scouts. But instead of exploring new worlds, NASA’s science budget will now go to providing slush funds for climate-change would-be Jeremiahs.”
A Boston Globe editorial on the NASA budget starts with this question: “WALL-E or Major Tom?” The paper prefers the animated robot over Bowie’s lost astronaut, at least as analogies to space policy, arguing the budget proposal wrongly cuts robotic Mars exploration while preserving funding for human spaceflight programs (it only specifically mentions the Orion capsule). “If the space program has to suffer cuts,” the editorial argues, “it’s far preferable they should come out of manned programs that make nice headlines but don’t generate nearly enough scientific bang for the buck.”
By Jeff Foust on 2012 February 14 at 6:56 am ET The chairman of the space subcommittee of the House Science Committee, freshman Rep. Steven Palazzo (R-MS), cites space as an issue as he prepares for reelection. “Being here has put me in a position to a make sure that our path back to space goes through South Mississippi, which it has always done,” he tells Gannett’s Washington bureau. His district in southern Mississippi includes NASA’s Stennis Space Center, a key site for rocket engine testing. In addition to ensuring a role for Stennis, he said, he wants “to kind of bring focus to NASA’s mission… and work with the administration and NASA to protect our legacy of space leadership.”
Another, more veteran, member of that subcommittee, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), is holding a fundraiser Wednesday night specifically targeting the commercial space industry. That event is timed to coincide with the 15th Annual FAA Commercial Space Transportation Conference, taking place Wednesday and Thursday in Washington. Rohrabacher’s campaign is also hosting an “aviation and space briefing” with Burt Rutan later this month in California.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 February 14 at 6:38 am ET With so much attention devoted to planned cuts in planetary science funding in general, and Mars exploration in particular, much of the reaction to the budget focused on that. “The priorities reflected in this budget would take us down the wrong path,” Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye said in a statement released by the organization. “The country needs more of these robotic space exploration missions, not less.” The organization was critical of NASA’s termination of its participation in the ExoMars program, as well as a lack of funding for flagship-class missions to Mars or elsewhere in the solar system. It proposes that NASA’s budget “be rebalanced among NASA’s directorates to reflect value to the nation”, with science getting at least 30 percent of the overall agency budget.
“The proposed cuts to planetary science are devastating,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), whose district includes JPL, told the Pasadena Star-News. “I’m going to be working to put together a coalition to oppose these draconian cuts and keep the Mars program healthy,” he said. “I expect we’ll have a lot of allies in that fight.” Those allies might include the Star-News itself, which published an editorial critical of the proposed Mars mission cuts. The editorial said it was “strange” to hear that “efficient robotic programs are being targeted while inefficient manned exploration is being promoted.”
The National Space Society also mentioned Mars exploration in its release, but mixed that message in with discussions of human exploration. “The programs of record must come in on schedule and on budget; support for commercial spaceflight must be unwavering; and our Mars program, while undergoing restructuring, must still strive to make upcoming launch windows with relevant missions,” said new NSS executive director Paul Damphousse.
The proposed $830 million for commercial crew development won the support of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. “We are pleased that the Administration is requesting the funding necessary to make that happen,” said CSF executive director Alex Saltman, referring to the goal of restoring a human spaceflight capability for the US. “Now it’s Congress’s job to help put America back in space.” Recall that last year the administration proposed $850 million for the program, but Congress only provided $406 million.
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison was critical, though, of cuts of “hundreds of millions of dollars” for the Space Launch System and Orion. The budget provides $1.88 billion for SLS and $1.03 billion for Orion; the latter program is cut by $175 million from 2012, NASA officials say, to keep it in phase with SLS. “These reductions will slow the development of the SLS and the Orion crew vehicle, making it impossible for them to provide backup capability for supporting the space station,” she said. “The Administration remains insistent on cutting SLS and Orion to pay for commercial crew rather than accommodating both.”
Jim Maser, president of Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, expressed similar concerns in a statement emailed by the company. “The request to increase funding for commercial space transportation development is the right decision to keep our space program balanced, but it also requires appropriate insight and controls to ensure progress toward integrated capability can be confirmed,” he said. “The funding increase in commercial space transportation development shouldn’t come at the expense of other top American priorities, including dedicated, full funding of the Space Launch System launch vehicle development that can’t be siphoned off for other, lower priority programs or uses.”
By Jeff Foust on 2012 February 14 at 5:57 am ET The NASA budget proposal released on Monday came out pretty much as expected, given the information that leaked out in the days and weeks leading up to its release. The agency overall proposes to receive just over $17.7 billion in fiscal year 2013, less than $100 million below what the agency received for 2012. There’s funding at or near 2012 levels for programs like SLS and MPCV, and the request calls for $830 million for commercial crew development, similar to what was requested for 2012 (although the program ultimately received only $406 million).
Most of the attention, though, was focused on the agency’s planetary science program, cut by just over $300 million, or 20 percent, from 2012 levels. The bulk of that cut is absorbed by the Mars exploration program, whose budget will be cut from $587 million in 2012 to $361 million. Lunar Quest, a separate program for lunar exploration, arguably suffers a worse fate: its budget it cut from $140 million to $61.5 million, and the program will end in FY2014 after the end of the LADEE mission.
The Mars program cuts involve the termination of NASA’s participation in the ExoMars program with ESA, which was to feature an orbiter in 2016 and a lander with a rover in 2018. Instead, NASA plans to restructure its Mars program, with an eye towards less expensive Mars missions instead of a flagship-class rover, as the 2018 mission was shaping up to be. Those plans will also include coordination between NASA’s science and human spaceflight mission directorates on those revised Mars missions, which could fly in the 2018 or 2020 launch windows. “We are not talking about evaluating a new mission or a new mission concept,” said NASA administrator Charles Bolden. “We are talking about a fundamental change in the way we do business.”
In a later teleconference, NASA associate administrator for science John Grunsfeld sounded optimistic that NASA would be able to mount some kind of Mars mission in 2018, in order to take advantage of favorable orbital mechanics for that window. “Mars and Earth and beautifully aligned to launch a mission in 2018,” he said. “2018 is a sweet spot, and we are highly motivated to take advantage of that.” Asked if that meant he was betting that there would be a 2018 mission, he said, “I’m not a betting person, but I would certainly plan on it, because that’s what I’m doing here.”
Such a mission, Grunsfeld said, would be a “strategic” mission developed like the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, with support from the Office of the Chief Technologist and the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate. A plan for that mission would be ready by this summer. The overall cost of the mission, counting contributions from the other directorates, would be similar to a New Frontiers class mission. Grunsfeld added that there was a possibility of a Mars mission in 2016, as one of the proposals under consideration for the agency’s Discovery program is a Mars mission, but didn’t disclose additional details because the competition is ongoing.
One reason for the cut in planetary sciences spending was to cover the costs of the James Webb Space Telescope, which will get $628 million in 2013, funding that would keep the space telescope on track for a 2018 launch. That mission, along with the Mars Science Laboratory currently en route to Mars, are the agency’s two major flagship missions for the coming decade, now that the 2018 ExoMars lander is off the books. Bolden said the focus should be on these flagship missons for now. “Let’s eat this pie that we have… nibble on the two flagships that we are trying to work before we bite off another one,” Bolden said.
Earlier, speaking of MSL and JWST, Bolden called them “two flagships that the American public should look forward to with great anticipation and angst”. That curious choice of words was, in part, designed to describe the risks associated with MSL’s landing in early August. The budget implications of such flagship missions, though, have caused a completely different kind of angst among the science community.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 February 10 at 1:22 pm ET The FY13 budget isn’t officially released until Monday morning, but Aviation Week has news about what it will contain for NASA: an overall request of $17.711 billion, or $89 million (0.5%) less than the agency’s final FY12 budget. As expected, the proposal cuts $300 million from planetary sciences, and kills the US role in the joint ExoMars program with ESA. The budget requests for SLS ($1.8 billion) and MPCV ($1.0 billion) are similar to 2012 levels; MPCV’s request is “tweaked downward” so keeps pace with SLS. Commercial crew gets a request of $830 million, similar to the request in FY12 ($850 million) but far more than the $406 million it got. Space technology would also get nearly $700 million in the proposal, a bit above its 2012 levels.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 February 10 at 6:48 am ET “The Mars program is one of the crown jewels of NASA. In what irrational, Homer Simpson world would we single it out for disproportionate cuts?” So asks Ed Weiler, who retired from NASA last year after serving as the agency’s associate administrator for science, in an interview with ScienceInsider. Weiler said he decided to leave NASA after tiring of “debilitating” fights with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) about the budget. According to Weiler, OMB had targeted the ExoMars program—the joint program with Europe for orbiters and landers—for cuts even when NASA proposed alternatives, such as smaller across-the-board cuts in the planetary program. “I was dealing with officials in OMB who were three, four grade levels below me who did not have any technical background,” he complained. Weiler is now in retirement in Florida, “a thousand miles away from the irrationality zone.” (Others have argued that Weiler is not exactly free of blame for the current situation, since he ran NASA’s science program as the James Webb Space Telescope’s costs grew, causing budget pressures that led to the current situation.)
Congressman Adam Schiff (D-CA), whose district includes JPL, said Thursday he will also fight the proposed budget cut to NASA’s planetary program. Schiff, who serves on the appropriations subcommittee whose jurisdiction includes NASA, told the Pasadena Star-News that he had a “tense” meeting Thursday with NASA administrator Charles Bolden. “What I’m hearing that they’re proposing will be absolutely devastating to planetary science and the Mars program,” Schiff said. “If this is what they have in mind, I’m going to be fighting them tooth and nail.” He said he anticipates working with another subcommittee member, Rep. John Culberson (R-TX), who has also spoken out against the proposed cuts, to fight the cut.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 February 9 at 6:47 am ET Earlier this week, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich spoke out against the criticism he received from fellow candidates about his lunar base proposal, chastising Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum for calling his proposal “really stupid” and expensive. “I mean, why did my two Republican competitors instinctively decide we couldn’t go into space? Because they’re cheap,” he said in a Tuesday speech in Dayton, Ohio. Yesterday, the Romney campaign pushed back.
“Our staggering national debt and recurring deficits are jeopardizing America’s fiscal future – yet he attacks critics of his moon base proposal for being ‘cheap’ and ‘stingy,'” Romney campaign spokesperson Amanda Henneberg said in a statement released Wednesday by the campaign. The statement made the case that Gingrich’s lunar base proposal—which the Romney campaign again said would cost up to “half a trillion dollars”—was the latest evidence that Gingrich was not serious about cutting federal spending. Given that record, said Henneberg, “it’s not surprising that his campaign hasn’t left the launch pad.”
By Jeff Foust on 2012 February 9 at 6:33 am ET On Monday the Obama Administration will release its fiscal year 2013 budget proposal, and NASA has its traditional budget briefing scheduled for Monday afternoon, which this year will include a “tweetup” with a handful of the agency’s Twitter followers (you can sign up through 5 pm EST today). The details about the budget are embargoed until Monday, but some details are starting to leak out, and offer some bad news for planetary exploration in particular.
The Washington Post reports the agency’s planetary science program would get a 20-percent cut in the FY13 proposal: from $1.5 billion in 2012 to $1.2 billion in 2013, with additional reductions through 2017. While significant, that cut is not surprising: a combination of overall fiscal pressures on the agency coupled with a replan of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) meant that it was likely the agency’s planetary science program would be cut. To put the cut in perspective, just two years ago in the administration’s FY11 request NASA’s planetary science program was looking at gradually increasing budgets, to about $1.59 billion in FY13 and $1.65 billion in FY15.
Those cuts may target in particular NASA’s Mars exploration efforts, including plans to cooperate with the European Space Agency on a 2016 orbiter and 2018 lander/rover mission. Those plans, in limbo for months after the agency said it could not commit to launching ESA’s 2016 ExoMars orbiter as previously planned, may be canceled altogether now. The BBC reported earlier this week those plans are “near collapse” after NASA officials quietly informed their European counterparts about their situation.
The administration’s rumored plans are already facing criticism from the planetary science community and even a key member of Congress, the Post notes. Rep. John Culberson (R-TX), a senior member of the Commerce, Justice, and Science subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, as well as someone personally interested in planetary exploration, said the proposed cuts in NASA’s planetary programs “absolutely will not fly” in his committee. But where the money would come from to restore those cuts is unclear.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 February 8 at 7:01 am ET While Colorado, Minnesota, and Missouri held Republican primaries or caucuses on Tuesday, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was not in any of those three states. Instead, he was on the campaign trail in Ohio, looking ahead to that state’s primary on Super Tuesday next month. In an appearance in Dayton yesterday, he mentioned space, sticking to his plans he laid out in a speech in Florida two weeks ago. “Immediately two of my opponents rushed into to say that’s really stupid,” the Wall Street Journal reported Gingrich as saying, referring to fellow candidates Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum. He defended his support for space exploration, according to POLITICO, citing the potential for job creation and technological spinoffs. “When we talk about job creation, just remember the iPhone you’re using, the iPad you’re using, the BlackBerry you’re using, the home computer you’re using, all those have components that were developed from the space program,” he said.
This is not the first time in recent days that the campaign has pushed back against criticism of his space policy from fellow candidates. “I am deeply concerned that Senator Santorum so easily relinquishes space development to the Chinese and Russians,” Gingrich national security advisor Stephen Yates said in a statement released by the campaign on Saturday. He was apparently referring to a radio ad released by the Santorum campaign Friday which dismissed Gingrich’s lunar base plans as “fiscal insanity”. “American success in space is not only about being the first to develop a station on the moon,” Yates said, citing an “explosion of math, science, engineering and national security technology” that would benefit the nation.
Commentators outside the Gingrich campaign are also coming to the candidate’s defense in recent days. In an op-ed in The American Spectator, former Reagan White House official Jeffrey Lord criticizes Santorum in particular for his attacks on Gingrich’s space policy. Lord calls Gingrich’s plan an “obvious intent to carry forward with the Reagan space legacy”, and thus attacks on Gingrich’s policy are, by Lord’s extension, an attack on Reagan’s legacy. “If Rick Santorum is going to try and become The Conservative Alternative at the expense of the Reagan space legacy — he should stop and get out of the campaign right now before he inflicts any more damage to himself and the conservative cause,” he writes. (Romney doesn’t escape Lord’s criticism: “his remark that he would fire anybody who came to him with a suggestion to continue Reagan’s space legacy with a program to colonize the moon was stunningly telling of exactly the problems a Romney nomination will bring.”)
Others have also defended the idea of a lunar base, although perhaps not the same level of rhetoric as The American Spectator piece. “Whatever misgivings you might have about Gingrich, in this case he is right,” former NASA official and longtime space advocate Charles Miller writes in a CNN commentary. He describes how the technology is there to allow a return to the Moon in 10 years for $40 billion, while also supporting development of commercial reusable vehicles that could lower the cost and increase the frequency of space access. “It’s time to go back to the moon — and, this time, to stay,” concludes Univ. of Colorado professor Jack Burns in a Denver Post op-ed today. He doesn’t explicitly endorse the Gingrich plan but lays out why a human return to the Moon in general “is not a loony idea”.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 February 7 at 6:30 am ET A report expected to be released today could address one of the major obstacles to export control reform. The Wall Street Journal reports that an Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) report will quantify the effects that strict export control reforms have had on the aerospace industry since the late 1990s. According to the article, the move of satellites and related components to the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) export control regime cost the industry up to $21 billion in lost sales and more than 4,000 jobs in satellite manufacturing alone. That report is scheduled to be provided at a hearing on export control reform by the House Foreign Affairs Committee scheduled for this morning.
The report would answer one of the criticisms of export control reform efforts: the lack of solid evidence that ITAR had, in fact, directly hurt the American satellite manufacturing industry. Congressional staffers had previously noted the lack of specific data on the adverse impacts of ITAR as one reason why export control reforms had stalled: while there were plenty of anecdotes and horror stories about the effects of ITAR, it was difficult to separate ITAR from other factors as the cause of effects such as the a drop in US share of the commercial satellite manufacturing market. Whether this new AIA report will create Congressional support for potential reforms to aid the industry, though, remains to be seen, especially in an election year.
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