By Jeff Foust on 2011 September 14 at 9:06 pm ET The Commerce, Justice, and Science (CJS) subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee held a brief markup session Wednesday afternoon for its 2012 funding bill. The committee released only a summary of its appropriations bill, which features $17.9 billion for NASA in 2012, less than the $18.7 billion sought by the administration but more than the $16.8 billion House appropriators approved in July.
The summary doesn’t provide any other numbers about the NASA, instead stating that the “bill preserves NASA portfolio balanced among science, aeronautics, technology and
human space flight investments” and that it “provides funds to enable a 2018 launch of the James Webb Space Telescope” (JWST). On the latter point, the subcommittee’s chair, Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), said that the bill provides $530 million for JWST, above the administration’s request for $373.7 million (House appropriators, infamously, provided no funding for JWST in their bill.) She also includes that figure in her press release about the bill, which adds that NASA science programs overall will get $5.1 billion, just above the administration’s request for $5.02 billion. In her remarks at the markup, though, she added that “we included stringent bill language limiting development costs” without elaborating.
Beyond that, there are no hard numbers about NASA’s budget in the summary. The brief markup, though, provided a few more hints. “We are going to fund the priorities that our authorizing committees in the Senate and House passed last year,” said Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), ranking member of the subcommittee. “We are going to fully fund the priorities according to the authorizing levels.” However, since the 2010 authorization act authorized a total of $19.45 billion in 2012—$1.55 billion above what Senate appropriations are proposing—not every program can be funded at authorized levels. What are those priorities? Hutchison indicated that the Space Launch System and Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle would be funded, although in the authorization those programs would get $4.05 billion, while comments earlier in the day indicated that those programs would get $3 billion a year through 2017. Hutchison also cited science as well as commercial crew as priorities in her remarks; the authorization act authorized $500 million for commercial crew in 2012, while the administration’s budget proposal sought $850 million. Notably absent from the discussion of priorities in the hearing: aeronautics and space technology.
“The NASA budget will be exactly where it was in 2009,” Mikulski said in her remarks. “So, if you liked 2009, you’re going to be crazy about our bill.” More details are likely to be forthcoming when the full committee takes up the bill Thursday afternoon, when it will also probably debate a number of amendments to the legislation.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 September 14 at 7:35 am ET Talk about short notice: early this morning the Senate Commerce Committee send out an advisory that there will be a press conference this morning at 10 am EDT with NASA administrator Charles Bolden and “members of Congress”, including Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) and Bill Nelson (D-FL), to “discuss the NASA announcement on the future of our space program”. What NASA announcement? It’s expected that NASA will finally announce its plans for the Space Launch System (SLS) heavy-lift rocket. Florida Today, citing “senior Obama administration officials”, said the SLS design will be similar to what’s been rumored for months, a design using shuttle-derived technologies although with, at some point, a competition for the booster stages between shuttle-based solid rocket boosters and potential liquid-propellant alternatives. The press conference will be webcast on the Senate Commerce Committee’s web site.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 September 14 at 6:41 am ET This afternoon the Commerce, Justice, and Science (CJS) subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee is scheduled to mark up its appropriations legislation, which will include funding for NASA. One particular area of interest will be what the subcommittee does to fund the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) after its House counterparts included no funding for the program in its version of the bill in July. The Senate subcommittee is chaired by Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), who criticized the House move not to fund JWST; Maryland is the home of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the Space Telescope Science Institute, two key facilities associated with the development and eventual operation of the telescope.
House appropriators said their decision not to fund JWST (in a bill yet to be taken up by the full House) was prompted by the considerable cost overruns and schedule delays on the project as cost estimates for the program exceed $8 billion. While some astronomers seek to restore that funding, others, particularly in the planetary sciences and solar physics, worry that saving JWST might come at the cost of other missions. That’s something I covered in detail in an article in this week’s issue of The Space Review.
Despite concerns that JWST might be canceled, there’s evidence that by the time the final FY 2012 budget is approved (likely well after the fiscal year starts on October 1), JWST will end up with some money. Mikulski is a supporter of the telescope, as noted above, and we’ll see later today how much her subcommittee is willing to provide to the telescope. Also, as I noted in The Space Review article, even House members who voted for the appropriations bill that denied funding for JWST believe it will be funded. “I’m confident it’s going to be restored,” Rep. John Culberson (R-TX), who serves on the House CJS appropriations subcommittee, said of JWST on Friday, calling his committee’s move “a shot across the bow” to get NASA to provide updated and more accurate cost estimates for the program. He added, though, that funding JWST can’t come at the expense of other NASA science missions, particularly planetary exploration.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 September 12 at 8:30 pm ET Although it wasn’t on the committee’s schedule over the weekend, the Senate Appropriations Committee has added a markup of the Commerce, Justice, and Science appropriations bill, which includes NASA and NOAA, for Wednesday afternoon at 2:30 pm. That will be followed by a full committee markup of the same bill Thursday at 2 pm. As noted over the weekend, the Senate budget allocation for the CJS bill is slightly higher than the House version, but how that translate into funding for these agencies remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee announced Monday plans to hold a full committee hearing on “NASA Human Spaceflight Past, Present, and Future: Where Do We Go From Here?”. Scheduled witnesses included former astronauts Neil Armstrong and Gene Cernan as well as former NASA administrator Mike Griffin. As all three have been critical of the current administration’s space policy to varying degrees, readers can draw their own conclusions about what the hearing’s atmosphere will be like.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 September 11 at 11:26 am ET The Senate Appropriations Committee has yet to formally markup its version of the Commerce, Justice, and Science (CJS) appropriations bill (it’s not on the schedule for this coming week), but there is one sign that its budgets, including those for NASA and NOAA, won’t be as constrained as what their House colleagues faced this summer. Last week the committee approved “302(b) allocations” for its subcommittees, effectively giving each appropriations subcommittee their own topline budget they have to fit their appropriations bills into. In the case of CJS, that allocation is $52.701 billion. That’s less than the $57.675 billion from the president’s 2012 request. However, it’s more than $2 billion more than the 302(b) allocation in the House for CJS, which was only $50.237 billion.
There’s no guarantee that any of that additional money (when compared to the House version) would go to NASA and NOAA. And those agencies are facing critical budget concerns about a number of their programs, from the James Webb Space Telescope to the Space Launch System to the Joint Polar Satellite System. The allocations suggest, though, that senators may not have to sharpen their budget-cutting knives as sharply as their House colleagues—at least not initially.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 September 11 at 11:12 am ET The Senate Appropriations Committee passed this week its 2012 energy and water appropriations bill, which includes funding for the Department of Energy (DOE). Senate appropriators, though, decided not to fund the administration’s request for $15 million for DOE to restart production of plutonium-238 (Pu-238), an isotope used in radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) for NASA science missions. In the report accompanying the bill, the committee gave no reason for the lack of funding, simply stating, “The Committee provides no funding for the Plutonium-238 Production Restart project.”
That move comes after House appropriators similarly declined to fund Pu-238 production in its DOE bill, although in that case appropriators said in their report that DOE should not share the funding burden with NASA for a program that primarily aids the space agency. The House did include Pu-238 funding for NASA in legislation that the committee passed in July, although that alone may not be sufficient for restarting production.
A lack of Pu-238, because the isotope is no longer produced in the US (although limited quantities of it have been purchased from Russia), has been an area of concern for planetary scientists in recent years, given that many of their proposed high-priority long-term missions require RTGs. The latest planetary science decadal survey, published earlier this year, noted the committee who prepared the report were “alarmed” about the availability of the isotope. “Without a restart of plutonium-238 production, it will be impossible for the United States, or any other country, to conduct certain important types of planetary missions after this decade,” the report stated.
Speaking at a planetary exploration event hosted by The Planetary Society on Capitol Hill on Friday, Steve Sqyures, who led the work on the decadal survey, said they did not let the potential lack of Pu-238 drive the decisions on prioritizing missions. “What we did instead is to turn the problem around and say that these are the missions that ought to be flown, and here is the plutonium-238 need profile that results from that,” he said. He noted the report did recommend the development and use of advanced RTGs that require significantly less Pu-238 than current systems. NASA, Squryres said, is “working very hard with DOE and folks on the Hill to try to come up with a plan for producing the amount of plutonium that’s needed” to meet the missions proposed in the study. That’s proving to be a difficult task.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 September 8 at 10:27 am ET This morning Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) and Bill Nelson (D-FL), the ranking member of the full Senate Commerce Committee and chairman of its space subcommittee, respectively, issued a press release about the status of the administration’s plans (or lack thereof) for the Space Launch System (SLS) heavy-lift rocket. The press release came in response to a Wall Street Journal article earlier this week that claimed the administration was suffering from “sticker shock” about the potential development cost of the SLS, as well as the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV), and other exploration systems. That article warned that the total cost of those systems could exceed $62 billion through 2025, particularly through the use of an unspecified “accelerated” approach.
Hutchison and Nelson, in their release, argue that the leaked cost estimate is just another step by the administration to stall development of the SLS. “No one has proposed to accelerate development,” they write. “We and others have – repeatedly – demanded that the administration’s budget office simply follow the development plan that the President signed into law last year.” They claim that NASA’s internal cost studies, and the independent assessment performed by Booz Allen Hamilton, had validated the plan for the SLS, and that the White House “should proceed immediately according to the reasonable, achievable development timetable embedded in federal law, and preserve America’s pre-eminence in space science.”
By Jeff Foust on 2011 September 7 at 5:56 am ET The Wall Street Journal reports today that the White House is concerned that NASA’s exploration plans may not be affordable over the long haul. Specifically, the concern within the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is whether Congress would be willing to spend as much as $62 billion through 2025 to develop the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) spacecraft, and related systems needed by the middle of the next decade to support a human mission to a near Earth asteroid as directed by the president last year. The key paragraph from the Journal article, citing an August 19 NASA budget analysis obtained by the paper:
Based on priorities already adopted by Congress—then adjusting for projected inflation and accelerated development efforts—the document indicates it could cost as much as $57 billion to deploy and use the proposed systems through 2025. Upgrading launch facilities and building additional spacecraft to allow astronauts to land on the moon or an asteroid, the document indicates, could boost the total to $62.5 billion.
Assuming this is spread out over 14 years (fiscal years 2012 through 2025), that works out to an average of about $4.5 billion a year, although doubtless with some peaks well above that average during various stages of development. Assuming that NASA’s budget remains flat for the foreseeable future at around $17-18 billion (an assumption that could be overly optimistic given the growing pressures to cut discretionary spending), that would be about a quarter of NASA’s annual budget, and could pose challenges to fit in among ISS, science, technology, and other spending.
What might be causing the most sticker shock, though, are the projected mission costs, according to the report: “Based on the various levels of federal investment sketched out in the August NASA budget document, each projected flight of the new rocket could entail between $6 billion and $10 billion in overall development and related costs.” The article adds that, according to “some government officials”, the president is expected to make a decision in the next few weeks on what program he’ll request funding for in 2012 and beyond.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 September 4 at 10:34 am ET A couple brief notes on a quiet holiday weekend:
A little over a week ago, Florida Sens. Bill Nelson (D) and Marco Rubio (R) sent a letter to the White House countering claims in another letter by five other senators that money appropriated for the Space Launch System (SLS) was being “misallocated” to facility upgrades at the Kennedy Space Center. Nelson and Rubio argued that the funds were being used appropriately to “decrease development and operations costs” for the SLS. In a statement to the Huntsville Times last week, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), one of the five senators who signed the original letter about the misallocation of SLS funds, tried to find some common ground with his Florida colleagues. “I am glad to see that my colleagues from Florida have joined me in pushing the administration to follow the law and move forward with the development of a Space Launch System,” he said in the statement. However, the portion of the statement quoted in the article suggested Shelby was not backing away from his original claim that SLS money should not be spent on the KSC upgrades.
On Friday the Wall Street Journal reported that Blue Origin suffered a setback in its vehicle development program when a test vehicle flew out of control at its west Texas launch site and was destroyed. The Journal article suggested the failure could affect NASA’s Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program, as Blue Origin is one of four companies with second-round CCDev awards from NASA. “The failure also could set back White House plans to promote commercially developed spacecraft to transport crews to the international space station by the second half of this decade,” the article claimed. However, Blue Origin’s own statement, posted on its web site shortly after the Journal article first appeared, and signed by Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos, suggests the test failure will have little or no effect on its CCDev-2 work: “We’re working on the sub-orbital crew capsule separately, as well as an orbital crew vehicle to support NASA’s Commercial Crew program,” Bezos wrote. The test also does not appear to be closely tied to any of its CCDev-2 milestones, according to a NASA document updated last month.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 September 1 at 7:02 am ET For Orlando Sentinel columnist Mike Thomas, it’s a question of what’s the lesser evil: “We can either go billions over budget on mismanaged science projects, or we can go billions over budget on even more mismanaged manned-spaceflight programs,” he writes in a column today. Thomas, who has been a critic of human spaceflight activities in the past, unsurprisingly chooses the former, in part because of the money already spent on the James Webb Space Telescope, as well as the scientific and other benefits it can yield: “It would be a big in-your-face to the Chinese, who could never build such a technical marvel, at least not until they’ve downloaded the plans from the NASA computers.” He doesn’t apply similar arguments to the Space Launch System (SLS) and Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV), and is skeptical of the cost estimates reported last month. “Factoring in the usual NASA cost overruns and delays, this rocket will cost $200 billion and go up in the year 2525.” (If man is still alive…)
The advocacy group Tea Party in Space (TPIS) sees last week’s Soyuz launch failure as proof Congress should fully fund NASA’s Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program in order to ensure American access to the ISS, the conservative news site NewsMax reports. CCDev would be faster and cheaper than SLS, the organization argues; a TPIS official called congressional support for SLS “a pretty warped sense of priorities”. “Tea Party in Space officials see NASA’s cost overruns as a microcosm of the larger bureaucratic snafus that plague the federal government generally,” the report adds.
Back in July, SpaceX hired Mark Bitterman, who had spent nearly 20 years at rival Orbital Sciences Corporation, most recently as vice president of government affairs, as its new senior vice president of government affairs. But Space News reported this week that, after less than two months on the job, Bitterman has resigned; a company spokesperson said “family obligations” require more of his time than the job would allow. (The version of the press release announcing his hiring is no longer listed on the SpaceX web site, although in addition to the Business Wire version listed above, there’s a cached version from earlier this week.)
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