By Jeff Foust on 2011 November 9 at 7:19 am ET With Congress expected to complete work next week on a FY2012 appropriations bill that includes NASA (the goal is to complete the bill before the current continuing resolution expires next Friday), supporters of NASA’s commercial crew program are making another, perhaps final, push to win full funding for the program. In an op-ed published Monday in The Space Review, Alan Stern, the new director of the Florida Space Institute, and Frank DiBello, president of Space Florida, argued that NASA, Congress, and the White House all should work to “expedite” the program. For Congress, that means funding the program at $850 million, the level requested by the administration in its FY12 request. NASA, meanwhile, should “streamline the business and technical processes” for commercial crew providers, while the Obama Administration should push NASA to make commercial crew a top priority for the agency.
Stern and DiBello are also signatories on an open letter to Congress and the White House released Tuesday on the topic of commercial crew funding. The letter, like the earlier op-ed, calls for expediting commercial crew through increased funding and streamlined processes. The letter is signed by over 40 people, ranging from executives of entrepreneurial space companies to former astronauts and NASA officials.
The day before that letter, nearly two dozen former astronauts submitted a similar letter to key House and Senate appropriators, also in support of commercial crew. This letter also calls for full funding of commercial crew, although the signatories appear willing to accept the $500 million the Senate approved in its version of the appropriations legislation. “Funding Commercial Crew at least at the Authorization Act level of $500 million will mean less reliance on Russia and a stronger space program here at home, and funding Commercial Crew at NASA’s requested level of $850 million will enable these commercial vehicles to be developed on an even more expeditious basis,” they write.
It’s noteworthy that commercial crew has been the one NASA program that has received significant lobbying attention as the appropriations process reaches its conclusion. NASA’s Space Technology program, for example, had its requested budget cut significantly in both the House and Senate, but hasn’t received nearly the same attention as commercial crew. (There has been concern about planetary exploration, but that has focused more on the long-term prospects beyond the FY12 budget.) Of course, commercial crew has a clear constituency—those companies involved or seeking to be involved in the program, as well as those companies and organizations that would benefit from commercial crew systems—while the constituency for technology programs is more diffuse. Whether this press of attention will have any affect on the appropriations process, though, remains to be seen.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 November 8 at 7:00 am ET There was a flurry of media attention over the weekend and on Monday to the official White House response to a petition to “formally acknowledge an extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race”. In what doesn’t exactly qualify as breaking news, the White House stated, “The U.S. government has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race.” At least we have that issue settled. Whew!
But are people using the White House’s new “We the People” online petition tool for more serious space policy topics? Not much, it seems. Of the 118 open, visible petitions on the site (as of early Tuesday morning), only two deal directly with space issues, but both have met the threshold—originally 5,000 signatures, but raised for newer petitions to 25,000—for an official response. One, “Reallocate Defense funds to NASA”, seeks to divert defense funding to NASA, specifically for human spaceflight. “America and Humanity require a permanent presence in Space and no amount of telescopes or rovers are going to meet that requirement. Manned Missions are the only answer but NASA does not the have funds to make this vision a reality,” the petition states (capitalization in original). “America needs to wind down these wars and reallocate all that money into our space program.”
The second petition seeks to give the shuttle Enterprise to Ohio, reversing NASA’s controversial award of the orbiter to New York’s Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum. “New York City is unprepared to house the Enterprise Shuttle while the National Museum of the USAF at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is the ideal location,” the petition argues. “Please help boost the Ohio economy!”
The odds of success of either petition—in terms of changing policy, not attracting signatures—appear long. Transferring “all that money” that funded wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to NASA would be a political nonstarter in the current era of cutting overall federal spending. And would the White House wade in and override NASA’s decision to award Enterprise to New York City, making NASA look bad and agitating New Yorkers, without some other precipitating event (such as the failure of the Intrepid museum to raise funding for its planned shuttle museum)?
Notably, there are no open, visible petitions on what the space community considers hot topics: nothing about the Space Launch System, commercial crew, space technology funding, and so on. The key here, though, is visible: in order for a petition to show up in a search on the “We the People” site, it must already have at least 150 signatures, requiring sponsors to rely on word of (electronic) mouth when starting their petition drive. For example, in addition to the petition giving Dayton the shuttle Enterprise, there’s a similar one to give Enterprise to Houston. However, that petition, created just over a week ago, has attracted only 37 signatures as of Tuesday morning, and thus doesn’t show up in public searches.
Perhaps, though, the space community has decided that the petition site is little more than a stunt, and that there are more traditional, effective means to shape policy. Or, as one recent petition states, “We demand a vapid, condescending, meaningless, politically safe response to this petition.”.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 November 4 at 8:34 pm ET Rep. Sandy Adams (R-FL) doesn’t see eye to eye with the White House on very many issues, including much of the administration’s space policy. However, recently she has become a more outspoken supporter of one element of that policy, development of commercial vehicles to transport crews to and from the ISS. “As America takes steps towards the next chapter of space exploration, it is imperative that Congress remains vigilant in its support of the efforts of the Commercial Crew and COTS program,” she said Monday at a ceremony at the Kennedy Space Center announcing a deal to bring Boeing’s commercial crew effort, the CST-100, into a former shuttle hangar. “It is imperative that Congress ensure that they have the tools they need to be ready to carry crew to station as soon as is practically possible without sacrificing safety.”
Adams is backing those words with, well, more words, but targeted at two key fellow House members. The Orlando Sentinel reports that Adams has written the chairman and rank member of the House Appropriations Committee, asking them to, among other issues, fund NASA’s commercial crew effort at $500 million, the level the Senate approved earlier this week. “To me, the choice seems clear,” she writes in the letter, dated Thursday and addressed to House Appropriations Committee chairman Hal Rogers (R-KY) and ranking member Norm Dicks (D-WA). “Either we continue spending taxpayer money on seats for the Russian Soyouz [sic], or we invest in our own American companies for the long-term future of human space flight.” Adams chooses the latter, calling the commercial crew program “a vital piece of the future of human space flight” and saying she supports the $500 million in the Senate bill. The House version, approved by appropriators this summer but not taken up by the full House, offered only $312 million for the program.
Adams spoke out in the letter on two more KSC-specific programs funded in the Senate bill: $103 million for shuttle closeout and transition work and $168 million for the 21st Century Launch Complex program, which she calls a “a vital piece of the testing phase for the SLS and MPCV.” However, maintaining her fiscal conservative credentials, she offers to help appropriators “make responsible reductions” to other programs to offset the additional spending she requests. She does not indicate if those reductions should come from other NASA programs or elsewhere within the overall Commerce, Justice, and Science appropriation.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 November 4 at 6:32 am ET Earlier this week President Obama did a series of short interviews with local television stations around the country. These interviews included stations in Houston and Tampa, and in both cases the topic of space came up, particularly in relation to the economy and jobs in Texas and Florida.
Houston’s KTRK, not surprisingly, brought up the issue of space in connection to employment and the local economy. “I’m hugely committed to manned spaceflight, but I want to make sure that we’re doing it right and that we’re not wasting taxpayer money,” the president said. “What we’ve said with NASA is we need to retool to take that next big leap forward in space. The shuttle program had a wonderful run, but the truth of the matter is that the next phase, including the Orion project, was way behind schedule and didn’t seem to be meeting its budget objectives. So what we’ve done is tried to say let’s take a step back, let’s figure out how do we retool.”
President Obama also made a brief, but unsolicited, discussion of space during a separate interview with Tampa’s WTVT. “We are, for example, working with NASA and the private sector to bring additional jobs into central Florida,” he said in response to a question about improving Florida’s economy. “Boeing just made an announcement that we’re very happy about.” That was a reference to a deal announced Monday where Boeing would set up CST-100 operations at the Kennedy Space Center, employing up to 550 people by mid-decade.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 November 3 at 6:06 am ET A bipartisan group of House members announced Wednesday that they have introduced legislation to reform satellite export controls. The legislation, HR 3288, would restore to the White House the ability to determine what satellite components should be on the US Munitions List (USML), while maintaining a prohibition on exports of such items to China and several other nations (Iran, North Korea, Syria, Sudan, and Cuba). Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-CA), the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, introduced the bill with eight co-sponsors, four Republicans and four Democrats.
The legislation is welcomed by the satellite industry, unsurprisingly; the Satellite Industry Association endorsed the bill Wednesday in a statement calling it critical for “updating an outmoded and overly-restrictive regulation instituted more than a decade ago”. That’s a reference to the late-1990s legislation that moved satellites and related components onto the USML, and thus falling under the umbrella of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR).
While the bill is welcome, what are the prospects of it actually becoming law? At a meeting of a export control working group of the Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC) last month, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), an advocate of export control reform but also a China hawk, said he would support such legislation provided it had exceptions prohibiting exports to nations like China. However, that same meeting suggested that satellite-related export control reform still has an uphill battle, as Congress awaits the administration’s export control reform proposals as well as delivery of a final version of a report looking at the national security implications of moving satellite export control reform.
It’s also worth nothing that this is not the first time such legislation has been introduced. In the previous Congress, the State Department authorization act included a provision (Section 826 of HR 2410) that also returned to the President the ability to take satellites and their components off the USML, while continuing a prohibition against such exports to China. That bill passed the House but died in the Senate.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 November 2 at 1:20 pm ET The Oversight and Investigations subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, chaired by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), is holding a hearing titled “Efforts to Transfer America’s Leading Edge Science to China” at 3 pm EDT today. (The hearing will be webcast on the committee’s site and also carried on NASA TV.) The witnesses at the hearing include NASA administrator Charles Bolden, who will likely be asked about the agency’s adherence to a provision in the final FY2011 spending bill that prohibits the use of NASA funds for any sort of cooperation with China. He will be testifying on the same panel as White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) director John Holdren. OSTP is subject to the same prohibition but ran afoul of the law when hosted meetings with Chinese officials in May at a cost of $3,500, money members of Congress, backed by a GAO report, argue should not have been spent. Thus, Holdren is likely to get far more attention (and also take fire) from members of the committee than Bolden.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 November 2 at 7:08 am ET On Tuesday the Senate, as expected, passed a “minibus” appropriations bill that combined three separate appropriations bills, including the Commerce, Justice, and Science bill that funds NASA and NOAA. The Senate made no material changes to those sections of the bill, leaving NASA’s overall funding at $17.9 billion, including full funding of the Orion MPCV, the Space Launch System, and over $500 million for the James Webb Space Telescope, while trimming funding for some programs, including commercial crew development and space technology, below the administration’s request.
The bill goes to the House, where appropriations committee chairman Rep. Hal Rogers (R-KY) promised “a quick turnaround” of the bill, according to the POLITICO report, wrapping up the legislation before the current continuing resolution expires on November 18. That implies limited time for debate and amendment of the bill on the House floor, a sore point for some members.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 November 1 at 6:29 am ET It was all smiles yesterday morning at the Kennedy Space Center as officials from NASA, Boeing, and Space Florida, along with various elected officials, announced that Boeing would set up operations at KSC’s Orbiter Processing Facility 3 for the eventually assembly of its CST-100 commercial crew vehicles. The focus of the attention was, by and large, the economic impact of that decision, including the creation of up to 550 jobs at the center by mid-decade.
There is one catch to that deal, though, which Boeing hinted at in its own press release with this caveat: “Pending the continued selection of Boeing for future Commercial Crew development and service contracts, and sufficient NASA funding…”. Boeing, of course, has to be competitive enough to win funding in future rounds of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program against competitors like Blue Origin, Sierra Nevada Corporation, and SpaceX. But, as Boeing hints, the NASA funding has to be there in the first place, and the battle over the 2012 budget—where NASA requested $850 million, but the House and Senate have offered only $312 million and $500 million, respectively—is not an optimistic sign.
Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL), one of the speakers at the hour-long ceremony, mentioned the funding discrepancy. “The House has cut it to $312 million,” he said of the administration’s FY2012 request of $850 million, “and the Senate, along with Kay [Bailey Hutchison], Barbara Mikulski, and a number of others, has gotten it up to $500 million.” He stopped short, though, of calling for full funding for the program. “It’s almost a minor miracle that NASA has not been cut more in its overall funding level,” he said. “Compared to other agencies NASA has fared very well in what we have produced out of the Senate Appropriations Committee.”
Rep. Sandy Adams (R-FL), whose district includes KSC, also spoke in support of commercial crew at the event, calling it “the best near-term hope we have for getting American astronauts, on American rockets, built by an American aerospace workforce, to the International Space Station” in her remarks. “As America takes steps towards the next chapter of space exploration, it is imperative that Congress remains vigilant in its support of the efforts of the Commercial Crew and COTS program,” she said, but was silent on specific funding levels.
The only person to go on the record for full funding for the program in FY2012 was Space Florida president Frank DiBello. “We believe that the president’s request should be fully funded,” he told the Orlando Sentinel. But with the Senate expected to wrap up work as soon as tonight on the “minibus” FY12 appropriations bill that includes NASA, time is running out to add funding for this program.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 October 29 at 9:57 am ET National Journal reports that Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain blamed Obama on Friday for cuts to the space program and vowed to make the US the “leader of the space program again”. Speaking before more than 1,000 at a campaign stop in Montgomery, Alabama, Cain touched on space policy briefly:
Playing to residents of a state long central to the U.S. space program, Cain praised former President John F. Kennedy for his “inspirational leadership†in advancing space exploration.
By contrast, Cain said that President Obama “has cut our space program to the point that we now have to bum a ride with the Russians in order to get to outer space,†he continued to hoots and applause Friday. “That’s not what the United States wants to happen! We’re used to being a leader in the space program, and … we’re gonna be leader of the space program again!â€
The report didn’t indicate if Cain described what he would do differently to restore US leadership in space, although he revisit the issue Saturday when he speaks at the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville. Earlier this month Cain said in a TV interview that he wants to “relaunch” the US space program, but also did not offer specifics.
What neither Cain nor the National Journal report note, though, is that the current state of having to “bum a ride with the Russians” predates the Obama Administration: even under the Constellation Program, there would have been a gap of at least several years between the shuttle’s retirement and the introduction of Constellation’s Ares 1 rocket and Orion spacecraft.
Cain’s comments may be part of a theme seeking to blame President Obama for effectively terminating US human access to space. In addition to Cain’s stump speech, PolitiFact reported Friday on a “chain email” that claimed that Obama is the “First President to terminate America’s ability to put a man in space”. As PolitiFact notes, “it would be unfair to blame only Obama” since the decision to retire the shuttle predates his administration; moreover, the claim in that chain email ignores the Apollo-Shuttle interregnum in the 1970s. That led PolitiFact to grade them claim, quite bluntly, as “Pants on Fire”.
President Obama and his administration can be praised or blamed for a number of space policy decisions, including the cancellation of Constellation, resetting the long-term goals of human space exploration, and a greater emphasis on commercial entities to provide access to LEO, but forcing the US to fly its astronauts on Russian spacecraft isn’t one of them.
Update 10/30: Cain did discuss space policy during his stop Saturday in Huntsville, but largely repeated the points he made Friday, according to a Huntsville Times report. “I was disappointed when President Obama decided to cut a significant part of the space program,” Cain said, apparently referring to the administration’s decision to cancel Constellation. “The space program inspires other technological advances to business and the economy. In the Cain presidency, it will be reversed back to where it should be.” He did not indicate how he would accomplish that.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 October 28 at 7:45 am ET In a letter this week to President Obama, the mayors of Houston and Huntsville ask for immediate action on contracts related to the Space Launch System (SLS) and Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) programs. Specifically, they ask that NASA “move forward as expeditiously as possible” on converting contracts for the Constellation program to SLS and MPCV. “Speed is imperative to protect the workforce and to ensure our nation’s global leadership in spaceand in technological advancement,” Houston mayor Annise Parker and Huntsville mayor Tommy Battle write.
They add that those programs are at least as important, if not more so, than commercial crew development efforts at the agency. “While we all agree that commercial space ventures are critical to the future of human space flight, they cannot come at the expense of NASA’s role in ensuring access to space. They cannot come at the expense of seeing all the amazing, cutting edge expertise gathered together at MSFC and JSC being dispersed around the world – lost to this country and our own space efforts.”
Meanwhile, Mars Society president Robert Zubrin raised alarm bells when he claimed in an op-ed published Thursday in the Washington Times that the White House was planning to “terminate” NASA’s planetary science program in its FY2013 budget proposal. After the 2013 launch of the MAVEN Mars orbiter, he said, “No further missions to anywhere are planned.”
There’s one problem with his piece, though: that fantastic claim appears to be incorrect. “It is not true the planetary program is being killed,” Jim Green, head of NASA’s planetary science program, told the NASA Advisory Council Thursday during a telecon, Space News reported. The planetary program does face some problems with funding in future years, he acknowledged, but termination is not in the cards. “I’m here to say the future doesn’t look as healthy as it has been, but it is still the best program in the world,” Green said, SpacePolicyOnline.com reported.
Zubrin, incidentally, will be appearing at a Capitol Hill forum next Thursday jointly organized by The Planetary Society and The Mars Society, titled, “NASA at a Turning Point: Vibrant Future or Close Shop”.
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