By Jeff Foust on 2011 August 31 at 7:21 am ET Last week, the failure of a Soyuz rocket carrying a Progress cargo spacecraft to the ISS, thus raising the risk the Soyuz crewed spacecraft could be grounded for an extended period, prompted one member of Congress to call for “emergency” funding for NASA’s commercial crew development efforts, while another argued that NASA should accelerate work on the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket. Now another member of Congress has weighed in with yet another take on the failure.
“The recent orbit miscalculation [on a Proton launch] and Soyuz failure reinforce the necessity to expedite design and production of the next generation of NASA space flight,” wrote Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D-CO) in a letter to NASA administrator Charles Bolden on Tuesday. While making a passing reference to heavy-lift vehicle development, his focus is on the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) spacecraft. Arguing that American astronauts should fly to space on American vehicles, he writes, “To this point the Orion Space Capsule demonstrated exemplary safety and functionality.” And, he adds, “investment in this next generation of space travel provides a significant number of jobs to people in Colorado and a positive impact to our nation’s fragile economy.” Lockheed Martin is developing Orion in the Denver area, and some of those working on it are likely his constituents.
He makes no mention of commercial crew development in the letter, claiming that “NASA astronauts will be entirely reliant on Russian space technology and vehicles to conduct our space operations until the new Orion Multi Purpose Crew Vehicle is complete.” That omission is curious as one of the four CCDev-2 companies, Sierra Nevada Corporation, is working on its Dream Chaser vehicle in the Denver suburbs.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 August 30 at 7:13 pm ET At an event Friday in Huntsville, former NASA administrator Mike Griffin accused the current administration of doing “everything it could to oppose human spaceflight”. That statement was not a one-time shot against the Obama Administration: in an op-ed in the current issue of Space News, he goes into great detail regarding his accusation that the administration opposes human spaceflight. That is the theme of his piece: that the administration is doing everything it can to block NASA’s human space exploration efforts, specifically the Space Launch System (SLS) launcher and the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV).
And how is the administration doing that? Griffin makes a number of claims, ranging from the 2007 white paper from the Obama campaign that proposed delaying Constellation by five years and the White House’s original budget proposal from February 2010 that sought to completely kill Constellation to more recent efforts. He specifically cites leaking a cost estimate that pegged the cost of SLS and MPCV at $38 billion through 2021 as well as the cost estimate itself, which he says are based on “unrealistic schedule estimates, overly taxed budget allocations and suboptimal development sequencing and with NASA overhead being disproportionally charged to the exploration budget line — in other words, a mismanaged program.” Griffin argues that a “more realistic funding profile”, such as what was included in the NASA authorization act (which only goes through fiscal year 2013), could fund SLS at $1.6 billion a year and enable a 70-ton SLS to fly by 2017 and a 130-ton (“deep-space-capable”, as he describes it) SLS by 2020, allowing for annual flights thereafter. Griffin does not discuss the source of his cost estimates in his op-ed.
Griffin also doesn’t discuss why he thinks the Obama Administration is so dead set against human spaceflight, but concludes that the administration’s goal is its elimination. “Unfortunately, this administration is focused on killing human spaceflight by the death of a thousand cuts. Its plan wastes money, unnecessarily targets NASA’s highly skilled work force, jeopardizes future national security and, most importantly, cedes U.S. space leadership for the next two decades,” he concludes. The question is how convincing his argument will be: many supporters of SLS will sing Griffin’s praises, while critics (of SLS and/or Griffin and his tenure as administrator) will doubtless pick apart his arguments. Will his op-ed change any minds, or is it, in effect, a chance to vent?
By Jeff Foust on 2011 August 30 at 7:48 am ET It’s frequently noted here and elsewhere that space issues do not follow party lines closely, if at all, with differences of opinion more likely to be along regional or other lines than party affiliation. That’s demonstrated in the last few days by a couple of statements on space issues by Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL), working with two Republican colleagues.
Late Monday Nelson, in his role of chairman of the space subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee, issued a joint statement with the full committee’s ranking member, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), regarding the possibility that the ISS’s crew could be reduced to three or possibly, if temporarily, zero, in the wake of last week’s Soyuz launch failure:
“This is a very serious situation that bears close attention. Obviously, we must satisfy ourselves that the problem with the Russian rocket is identified and corrected as soon as possible. Perhaps the problems can be resolved quickly. But the very fact that NASA must make contingency plans for reducing the size or evacuating the crew of the International Space Station (ISS) if the Russian Soyuz cannot return to flight by November, is a compelling illustration of the urgent need to comply with the law and proceed immediately with the development of alternative and backup launch capabilities. Failure to take this action undermines U.S. leadership in space and jeopardizes our huge investment in the ISS.â€
It’s notable that the brief statement does not explicitly mention any specific “alternative and backup launch capabilities”, although the “urgent need to comply with the law” is a subtle reference to the Space Launch System (SLS), which Hutchison explicitly referenced in a statement of her own last week after the launch failure. Backup means can also include commercial crew vehicles, although there’s little stated concern that NASA is not complying with the law regarding their development.
The fact that Hutchison and Nelson issued a joint statement is not surprising, as the two have closely worked together on space issues for years. What is a little more surprising is a joint letter to President Obama by Nelson and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL). Rubio, in his first year in the Senate, has so far shown less interest in space than Nelson, although he does serve on the science and space subcommittee; there’s also a considerable general ideological difference between the two senators. However, the two joined forces in the letter to protect funding going to the Kennedy Space Center.
Nelson and Rubio reference a letter earlier this month from five other senators from Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi, who expressed concern about a “misallocation of SLS funds” for facility upgrades at KSC. Agreeing with the earlier letter’s call to move forward on the SLS, the Florida senators argue that spending SLS funds on KSC upgrades is within the intent of the law, saying that the funded upgrades are distinct from the more general “21st Century Launch Complex” upgrades planned for KSC and funded separately. “[T]hese projects have been selected because they decrease development and operations costs for the new vehicle,” they write. “Therefore, we strongly support the continued use of SLS funds to develop a complete heavy-lift rocket, including the KSC projects in question.” Or, in this case, geography trumps ideology.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 August 27 at 7:22 am ET The current and former administrators of NASA were both in Huntsville, Alabama, on Friday, with widely varying assessments of the agency’s human spaceflight programs. Appearing on a panel hosted by Huntsville mayor Tommy Battle on Friday afternoon, former NASA administrator Mike Griffin claimed that the current White House “has done everything it could to oppose human spaceflight”, in the words of the Huntsville Times. Griffin said that NASA should not expect to be given the go-ahead to work on a heavy-lift vehicle until after the Obama Administration leaves office, meaning that supporters of that vehicle in industry need to “continue with the building blocks so that when someone does say, ‘I want the United States to be on the frontier,’ we’re not starting from scratch.”
Current NASA administrator Charles Bolden spoke at a separate event in Huntsville on Friday night and had a brighter assessment of the future. “Despite what you may have heard,” Bolden said, according to a separate Huntsville Times article, “human spaceflight is not ending.” Bolden, who turned 65 last week, added that he believes “humans will walk on another planet in his lifetime.” As President Obama said in his Kennedy Space Center speech last year that he expected a human landing on Mars after a Mars orbital mission in the mid-2030s, it appears Bolden plans to be around well into his 90s.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 August 26 at 7:49 am ET One of the more controversial decisions that NASA has made in the last six months has had nothing to do with the Space Launch System, Commercial Crew Development, or James Webb Space Telescope programs. Instead, it was the agency’s decision, announced April 12, on where the shuttle orbiters will be displayed upon retirement. The decision in particular to transfer the orbiter Enterprise to the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York City and put Endeavour on display in Los Angeles was met with strong criticism, even anger, in Dayton, Ohio, and Houston, where many thought they were victims of a politically-motivated decision that ignored the merits of putting shuttles on display in those cities.
Yesterday, NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) released a report of its investigation of the decisionmaking process, finding no evidence of political influence from the White House or elsewhere on the selection decision. “While the Administrator was subject to a great deal of pressure from members of Congress and other interested parties, we found no evidence that this pressure had any influence on the Administrator’s ultimate decision on where to place the Orbiters,” the report’s summary states. “Moreover, we found no attempt by White House officials to direct or influence Bolden’s decision making.”
The report did find an error with the selection process: a “cut and paste” error in compiling scores used to judge the various proposals that caused the National Museum of the Air Force to lose five points in the final summary of scores. That extra five points would have put the Dayton museum into a tie with the Intrepid and Kennedy Space Center. However, Bolden told OIG officials that even if that error had not been made, he would have still made the same selection decision. The reason: the day before the announcement NASA contacted various facilities to confirm their interest in receiving an orbiter, and found out that the Air Force Museum “did not believe they would be able to secure the $28.8 million necessary to pay NASA for a flown Orbiter.”
This report, while clearing NASA of any political meddling in its decisionmaking process, did little to assuage those denied an orbiter. An AP article about the decision with the headline “Report: NASA made right picks for retired shuttles” was retitled by a Houston TV station as “Bolden Overrode Retired Shuttles Decision”. That was based on a passage in the report where, in 2009, Bolden rejected a recommendation by a NASA team to award orbiters only to NASA facilities (KSC, Houston, and the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville), saying that he preferred that “the Agency choose locations where the Orbiters would be seen by the largest number of visitors and thus serve NASA’s goal of expanding outreach and education efforts to spur interest in science, technology, and space exploration.”
Rep. Pete Olson (R-TX), whose district includes JSC, remained critical of the selection process in a statement yesterday. “It is patently evident from this IG report that Administrator Bolden sought and implemented a plan that would deliberately exclude ties to the shuttle program program [sic] and therefore remove Houston from the equation,” he said, saying the agency was “focusing on access to international visitors over Americans whose tax dollars paid for every single shuttle.” While Houston did score poorly on international visitors, the proposal also suffered from low attendance as well as facility availability and transportation risk factors.
Ohio wasn’t any happier with the report. “NASA may have followed the law when awarding the shuttles, but it is still guilty of incredibly bad judgment,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) in a statement, while taking credit for working to ensure the Dayton museum would be in the running for an orbiter. Both Brown and Rep. Steve Austria (R-OH) were, like Rep. Olson, critical of the international visitors factor in the ranking, as Dayton also scored poorly on that factor. “They are now putting a stronger emphasis on international tourism over American families and that is wrong,” Austria said in a statement. “Unfortunately, NASA has decided to take our national treasures and make them tourist attractions in large cities, rather than preserving the flight of the shuttles by placing one of them right here in the birthplace of aviation.”
One interesting aspect of the report is that while the report indicated there was no political influence on the selection process, there was political influence on the selection announcement. NASA had been prepared to announce the selected sites back in July, 2010, but when agency officials contacted the White House to inform the administration of their plans, “the White House asked Bolden to consider delaying the announcement out of concern that a negative reaction from key members of Congress might interfere with ongoing negotiations over NASA’s budget and authorization bills,” the report states. NASA officials concluded that the summer of 2010 “was not the right time for NASA to announce the Orbiter placement decision”; in particular, Rep. Bart Gordon, then-chairman of the House Science Committee, was concerned it would upset negotiations on the NASA authorization act then under consideration, and even cause Congress to take the decision out of the agency’s hands. That led NASA to wait until after the authorization bill was passed and, then, scheduling the decision on the 30th anniversary of the first shuttle launch.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 August 25 at 6:06 am ET Yesterday Rep. Dana Rohrabacher reacted to the loss of a Progress cargo spacecraft by requesting an “emergency transfer of funding” to NASA’s Commercial Crew Development program to provide the US with its own means to access the station. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison also issued a statement in response to the launch failure, and like Rep. Rohrabacher said the failure made it clear the US needed more options for accessing the ISS. However, she called for a different means to provide those options.
“As we have already seen with the multi-year delay with commercial providers of cargo to the space station, the country would greatly benefit from the timely implementation of the NASA Authorization Act of 2010 and development of the Space Launch System (SLS) as a back-up system,” Hutchison said in the statement, which was more about the SLS and the summary of the independent cost assessment of the program than it was about the Progress failure.
Hutchison argued that the assessment prepared by Booz Allen Hamilton supports her view that there are no obstacles to proceed with the development of the SLS. “This additional independent cost assessment confirms what NASA officials have known for months: The NASA approach to human space flight is sound, achievable, and can be initiated within our currently constrained fiscal limitations,” she said. Focusing on the report’s conclusion that NASA’s cost estimates are reasonable in the near term (rather than its concerns that long-term projections of cost savings may be “optimistic”), she added, “In other words, there is no cost-estimate-related basis for continuing to delay the commitment to proceed with the SLS development plans that were required by the Congress to have been delivered in the Section 309 Report that was due on January 10th.”
She reiterated comments in her statement last week that NASA release its SLS design as soon as possible because she believes doing so will prevent further job losses. “We strongly encourage NASA to immediately announce this week – not next month – the design for their next launch vehicle, which will halt the further loss of skilled aerospace workers now poised to be laid off from the NASA manned spaceflight program.”
By Jeff Foust on 2011 August 24 at 5:52 pm ET Earlier today a Soyuz rocket carrying a Progress spacecraft lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the 44th such cargo spacecraft launched by Russia in the ISS era. Unlike the previous 43, though, this one failed to reach orbit: an apparent failure in the Soyuz’s third stage caused the loss of the Progress as it plummeted back to Earth in a sparsely-populated region of Siberia. On board the Progress were 2.9 tons worth of food, water, and other supplies: nothing whose loss would cause immediate problems for station operations, given the existing store of supplies on the station. However, the Soyuz rocket will be grounded for some time—weeks, possibly months, depending on the nature of the failure and the corrective action required—which could delay other Progress missions and crew rotations, and possible reduce the station’s crew size temporarily from six to three.
The failure is a reminder that the Soyuz is the only way for crews to get to and from the ISS. (Even if the shuttle was still flying, the Soyuz is still the only existing vehicle that can serve as a “lifeboat” for station crews, so an extended hiatus in Soyuz launches would still pose a problem for ISS operations.) One member of Congress has seized on this dependence as evidence that the US should be doing more to develop alternate crew transportation systems. In a press release below (not yet posted on his web site), Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) says NASA should propose an “emergency transfer of funding” from other programs, including the Space Launch System, to accelerate the agency’s Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program (emphasis below in original):
“Today, Russia’s Soyuz launch vehicle failed to boost the Progress M-12M cargo ship into orbit to deliver needed supplies to the International Space Station. This failure should be a cause of grave concern, and a moment of reexamination of America’s space strategy,†said Rohrabacher.
“Today’s Russian rocket failure will interrupt ISS cargo deliveries, and could threaten crew transportation as well. NASA needs to conduct an investigation before another Soyuz spacecraft with new ISS crew members can be launched, and it is unknown how long such an investigation will take.â€
“I hope this is a minor problem with a quick and simple fix,†said Rohrabacher. “But this episode underscores America’s need for reliable launch systems of its own to carry cargo and crew into space. The only way to achieve this goal is to place more emphasis on commercial cargo and crew systems currently being developed by American companies.
“We need to get on with the task of building affordable launch systems to meet our nation’s needs for access to low Earth orbit, instead of promoting grandiose concepts which keep us vulnerable in the short and medium terms. The most responsible course of action for the United States is to dramatically accelerate the commercial crew systems already under development.
“I am calling on General Bolden, the NASA Administrator, to propose an emergency transfer of funding from unobligated balances in other programs, including the Space Launch System, to NASA’s commercial crew initiative. Funding should be used to speed up the efforts of the four current industry partners to develop their systems and potentially expand the recent awards to include the best applicants for launch vehicle development.
“NASA could potentially transfer several hundred million dollars from this long term development concept, since the SLS project has not even started, to the more urgently needed systems that can launch astronauts to ISS, reliably and affordably. This transfer will boost the development of American controlled technology and greatly reduce our dependence on the Russians.â€
Rep. Rohrabacher is a senior member of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 August 23 at 9:18 pm ET For those expecting many details about the independent cost assessment (ICA) of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) recently completed by Booz Allen Hamilton, an executive summary released Tuesday by the space agency was disappointing. The report provides no specific cost numbers for the SLS, the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV), or the “21st Century Ground Systems Program”, the suite of spaceport upgrades planned for the Kennedy Space Center to accommodate the SLS. Instead, the summary provides a qualitative assessment of the quality of the cost estimates prepared by NASA.
Supporters and skeptics of SLS will both find something to support their arguments in the executive summary. “The ICA Team concludes that the estimate is acceptable to serve as the basis for near-term, 3-5 year, AoA [analysis of alternatives] and Program decisions,” the report states. However, it’s less positive about the long term. “The estimate is not suitable for long-term budget planning or the development of a program baseline. The SLS cost estimate assumes several cost efficiencies that have not been realized on previous NASA programs. These efficiencies represent cost risk to the program as it is unclear whether they are realistic and leads to the impression that the estimate is optimistic.”
The report raised similar long-term concerns about the costs for MPCV and the spaceport upgrades. “Due to procurement of items still in development and large cost risks in the out years, NASA cannot have full confidence in the estimates for long-term planning,” the report concludes.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 August 23 at 6:31 am ET On Monday Aviation Week and Nature reported on the latest cost estimate for building and operating the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST): $8.7 billion. That includes the costs to build and launch the telescope, as well as five years of science operations. That new total figure should not be surprising: last month Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee’s Commerce, Justice, and Science Subcommittee, said the GAO has estimated the telescope’s cost at $7.8-8.0 billion. Excluding the five years of science operations from the new NASA cost estimate brings the JWST cost back to $8 billion.
So how does NASA propose to cover these additional costs? According to Nature, NASA is seeking to split the costs on a 50:50 basis between the agency’s science account and the rest of the agency. That could mean over half a billion dollars could be taken from exploration, technology, aeronautics, and other non-science programs over several years to cover those costs, should the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) approve NASA’s proposal. OMB has been studying the plan for several weeks, according to Nature, but hasn’t signed off on it yet.
Then there’s the issue of winning funding for fiscal year 2012 for JWST, given that the legislation the House Appropriations Committee approved last month included no funding for the telescope. JWST advocates are cautiously optimistic that some funding for the telescope can be restored later in the appropriations process. Representatives of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) met with House staffers earlier this month and found some support for the telescope even from the office of Rep. Wolf. “The staff expressed Rep. Wolf’s belief that JWST has an extremely strong science merit,” the AAS noted in a blog post late last week. “The staff commented that they have been inundated by social media correspondence about JWST and have made note of recent editorials in the NY Times and Washington Post.” Cutting JWST’s budget in committee, the report suggests, was a maneuver to “get NASA’s attention on these broader, Agency-wide management issues at the highest levels.” The AAS statement added that the organization is “hopeful” Congress will work out a deal to fund JWST in 2012.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 August 19 at 5:36 pm ET Today is NASA administrator Charles Bolden’s 65th birthday: he was born in Columbia, South Carolina, on August 19, 1946. So what did Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) get him for his birthday? A press release about the status of studies for the Space Launch System (SLS). According to Hutchison, the independent cost study for the SLS being carried out by Booz Allen Hamilton is now complete, and, she believes, “will confirm what myself and the NASA technical staff have known for many months — that the SLS plan is financially and technically sound, and that NASA should move forward immediately.”
The thrust of Hutchison’s statement was that NASA should no longer delay in annoucing its design for the SLS, in large part to preserve jobs that are being lost as the shuttle program winds down. “NASA began reviewing additional alternatives for the SLS in November of 2010. Since then, more than over 5,500 jobs have been lost, many of which could have been transferred to the SLS program,” she says. “This past June, Administrator Bolden confirmed to us that NASA had a design for the SLS. However, a formal announcement was delayed while the Administration awaited the results of an independent cost assessment, a delay that has cost 3,000 jobs.” She adds another set of layoff notices are due next week, and thus, “We cannot delay in announcing the plan that can provide a focus and a purpose for workers that remain and for the industries that rely on our space program to survive.” Unclear, however, is how many of those jobs would be directly relevant, at least in the near-term, to SLS development, and thus would be retained even if there was a final design for SLS.
Sen. Hutchison said she has not seen the Booz Allen report yet—a copy of the report was due to be delivered to Congress today—but sounded confident that it would expose no issues with the agency’s proposed design. “I expect the assessment will confirm what Congress and the NASA technical experts have known for nine months, that the Administration could have approved the vehicle design concept months ago, prevented the loss of thousands of jobs, and ensured U.S. leadership in space and science,” she said. (To underscore that, the press release includes a timeline of the decisionmaking process for the SLS, which it dates all the way back to June 2010, when NASA issued a Broad Agency Announcement for heavy-lift studies.)
I am reminded of a scene early in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan when Spock presents Kirk with a birthday present: an antique copy of A Tale of Two Cities. Kirk opens it up and starts to read:
Kirk: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Message, Spock?
Spock: None that I’m conscious of. Except, of course, happy birthday. Surely, the best of times.
Happy birthday, Administrator Bolden. Surely, the best of times. Right?
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