By Jeff Foust on 2011 August 19 at 6:15 am ET While work on fiscal year 2012 budgets is slowly making progress in Congress, federal agencies are already working on their planned 2013 budgets, preparing submissions to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Those agencies, including NASA, are now being given guidance from the White House to be ready to trim their budgets. In a memo to agency heads Wednesday, OMB director Jacob Lew said agencies should be ready to cut their budgets by five to ten percent. “Unless your agency has been given explicit direction otherwise by OMB, your overall agency request for 2013 should be at least 5 percent below your 2011 enacted discretionary appropriation,” Lew says in the memo. “As discussed at the recent Cabinet meetings, your 2013 budget submission should also identify additional discretionary funding reductions that would bring your request to a level that is at least 10 percent below your 2011 enacted discretionary appropriation.”
In the case of NASA, which received $18.485 billion in 2011, the memo’s guidance would require the space agency to submit a budget no greater that $17.56 billion (a five-percent cut) as well as a version no higher than $16.64 billion (a ten-percent cut). However, House appropriators have approved a budget that would give NASA just $16.8 billion in 2012, which means that, if that spending level holds, the 2013 proposal would represent a much more modest cut over 2012.
Those proposed cuts, Lew said, should be targeted on certain programs rather an across-the-board cuts or other budgetary sleight-of-hand. However, he also said there was an opportunity for agencies to “double down” on specific programs “because they provide the best opportunity to enhance economic growth.” In a separate blog post, Lew said that just because OMB is asking for proposals with five- and ten-percent cuts doesn’t mean the administration will enact them. “We asked agencies to provide these two options so that the President can have the information needed to make the tough choices necessary to meet the hard spending targets put in place by the Budget Control Act and to meet the needs of the Nation,” he wrote.
If this guidance from the White House sounds familiar, it should. Last year then-OMB director Peter Orszag and then-White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, in a joint memo, asked agencies to propose targeted cuts in agency’s 2012 budget submissions amounting to at least five percent of its budget. As it turns out, the 2012 budget proposal for NASA only partially incorporated any proposed cuts: the administration’s request for 2012, $18.72 billion, was a little more than $700 million, or about four percent, below what the administration had proposed for FY12 in its 2011 budget submission. As noted above, though, at least the House is seeking bigger cuts in 2012—and quite possibly in 2013 as well.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 August 17 at 6:20 am ET Earlier this month came word that a draft letter was circulating on Capitol Hill, reportedly linked to Utah’s congressional delegation, calling on the administration to publish its design for the Space Launch System (SLS) heavy-lift launch vehicle and ensure it makes use of solid rocket motors. The advocacy group Tea Party in Space (TPIS) recently obtained a signed copy of the letter, featuring the signatures of five senators, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and four Republicans, most notably Orrin Hatch of Utah. TPIS minced no words in its reaction to the letter: “TPIS calls on these five senators to renounce this letter and apologize to Administrator Bolden and the hard working men and women at NASA.”
While five western senators signed one letter about the SLS, five southern senators have put their names to another letter critical of the administration’s work on SLS. The letter to President Obama, dated Monday and signed by Republican senators from Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi, called on the White House to “immediately provide the Section 309 report to Congress”, a reference to the provision of the 2010 NASA authorization act that called on NASA to provide Congress with a report the reference vehicle designs for the SLS and the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) within 90 days of the bill’s enactment. The letter notes that the final report is now nearly 200 days overdue. “We believe the time has come to deliver the report to Congress.”
That letter is also critical of elements of NASA’s 2011 operating plan, which includes spending money allocated for SLS on facility work at the Kennedy Space Center that the senators believe should not be charged exclusively to SLS. “The misallocation of SLS funds and the lack of synchronization between rocket and spacecraft development at NASA seem to suggest that this Administration has no intention of properly using appropriated funds,” the letter concludes, asking for NASA to resubmit an operating plan “to ensure that the funds appropriated for SLS are used to develop the 130 metric ton heavy lift vehicle required in both the authorization and appropriations acts.”
By Jeff Foust on 2011 August 17 at 5:43 am ET With NASA transitioning into the post-shuttle era, and doing so in a turbulent economy, it’s no surprise that there’s concern about jobs and job losses, and not just in Houston or Florida’s Space Coast. Up to 600 jobs in Huntsville could be eliminated in the next two months, the Huntsville Times reported late last week, based on Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN) notices sent to contractors at the beginning of this month. Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL), whose district includes Huntsville, used the potential layoffs to criticize the administration: “We still have a White House that is hostile to NASA’s traditional manned spaceflight role,” he claimed. At a town hall meeting over the weekend, he reiterated that he and fellow members of the state’s congressional delegation were “frustrated” with the NASA, and did not sound confident about the agency’s budget for 2012: “I would love to be optimistic (about money for NASA) but having dealt with this White House and this Congress, I don’t know,” he said.
Concern about NASA-related jobs is not limited to Alabama Republicans, though. After a meeting with Lockheed Martin officials on Friday, Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO) said he and the rest of his state’s delegation supported continued funding for the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) program, on which Lockheed is the prime contractor. The company “is one of our most important employers,” he told the Denver Post, and it “is showing the world the Orion capsule. It’s what America represents.”
Meanwhile, an op-ed writer for the Orlando Sentinel suggests that NASA’s mission be focused on technology development and job creation, with no mention of a specific exploration mission or destination. Chuck O’Neal envisions a president address that calls on NASA “to create as many new technologies and new innovations as is necessary to employ every able-bodied person in this country.” Well, good luck with that.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 August 13 at 11:18 am ET Last’s week meeting of the NASA Advisory Council at NASA Ames featured a presentation by John Holdren, director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). His talk, and the Q&A session afterward, covered general issues associated with science policy and NASA. That included the message that the administration was still committed to the NASA policy it unveiled just over 18 months ago, as well as a little frustration about how it’s been communicated to the public.
“The president and [NASA administrator] Charlie [Bolden] and I have all been accused from time to time of not having a vision, of not having a destination, of not having a plan, and I think that’s just misinformation,” Holdren said. All three of those elements exist, he claimed, specifically arguing that investments in advanced technologies—something threatened with significant cuts in the current Congressional debate on the FY12 budget—are essential to meeting those objectives.
Later, Holdren described how he and bolden tried to get published an op-ed intended, as he put it, to “knock down, in succession, five of these misconceptions” about the administration’s plans. That op-ed was submitted but rejected by the Washington Post and the New York Times; it eventually appeared in POLITICO last month. “We couldn’t get it published. Nobody would take it,” he said, his exasperation clearly evident even those listening in to the presentation via telecon. “It’s been quite frustrating.”
“We are thinking about ways to do better,” he said. “I have had some discussions with the president about whether it’s time for another major presidential speech about our space policy and our space program and our priorities.” The president, he added, has been tied up with other issues, most notably the debt ceiling debate, “but now that that’s done, we’re going to come back to all these other issues that need his attention, and I think one of them will be the space issue.”
That space policy, Holdren said, is based on three “pillars” for human spaceflight: extending the life of the ISS to at least 2020, developing commercial crew systems for transport to and from ISS, and advanced technology investments. “These three pillars were fully supported by me and by Charlie Bolden,” he said. Later, he added: The president remains completely committed to those pillars of his human space exploration policy… He will continue to be an ally as we try to figure out this exceptionally diverse and important array of NASA missions done in a severely budget-constrained environment.”
He criticized Congress, though, for trying to get NASA to work on those priorities plus the immediate development of a heavy-lift vehicle without sufficient funding. “If you want to do everything, you have to provide the money to do everything,” he said. “If we’re going to build a heavy-lift rocket now and invest in the advanced technologies that we’re going need to make use of a heavy-lift rocket to go to destinations in deep space, safely, efficiently, rapidly, you’ve got to have the budget… That really is our great challenge going forward.”
By Jeff Foust on 2011 August 10 at 8:20 am ET In a speech on Florida’s Space Coast yesterday, Congressman Bill Posey (R-FL) warned that NASA’s human spaceflight program needed a “clear mission” in order to retain its funding in the coming years. “Absent a clear mission, human spaceflight, I’m afraid, will be very vulnerable,” he said, according to Florida Today’s account of his speech. (The article doesn’t mention if Posey specified what he thinks a “clear mission” means, but earlier this year he unveiled legislation that would mandate a return to the Moon that was previously planned under the Vision for Space Exploration.) Posey also fired a round in the direction of NASA leadership, calling it “arrogant, petulant and defiant” for not releasing information requested by Congress regarding plans for developing the Space Launch System rocket.
One item not covered in the Florida Today article was Posey’s apparent support for NASA’s commercial crew program. According to a tweet from Edward Ellegood, who attended the address, Posey said that “commercial space providers are our best hope for getting U.S. astronauts back into orbit.” Ellegood passed on some other news, though, overhearing from an unidentified individual that Sen. Barabara Mikulski (D-MD) may cut commercial crew funding and transfer it to the James Webb Space Telescope, a project whose funding was cut in an appropriations bill awaiting consideration by the full House. The Senate has not started work on its appropriations bill; Mikulski chairs the appropriations subcommittee that would draft that legislation.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 August 7 at 2:24 pm ET With concerns about overall federal spending higher than at any time in recent history, fiscal conservatives are taking a closer look at NASA spending, as evidenced by a couple of recent releases–although, at least in one case, their logic is muddled, at best.
Last week Tea Party in Space (TPIS) issued a press release in response to a letter reportedly linked to Utah’s congressional delegation about the use of solid rocket motors in the Space Launch System (SLS). TPIS “strongly condemned” that letter, arguing that the language in the letter strongly requesting the use of solid rocket motors on the SLS was “a sole-source bailout for the Solid Rocket Motor industry”. TPIS called on Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) in particular to “disown” the letter if he is not involved in it and said anyone who signs on to it should be “ashamed” of themselves. “TPIS and its volunteer network will be reaching out nationwide to candidates and elected officials of all parties, to ensure that this sole-source earmark is terminated,” the release warned.
That logic is relatively straightforward compared to what the Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) announced last week when it released its list of earmarks in the House version of the FY12 Commerce, Justice, and Science appropriations bill. The very first of the “outrageous examples of pork” they cited was for NASA, although it’s difficult to figure out exactly what they’re opposed to:
$237,800,000 to the NASA Space Exploration Crew Vehicle and Launch System, both part of the Constellation Systems Program. CAGW recommended in its 2011 Prime Cuts to eliminate Constellation after years of missed deadlines and cost overruns. In 2010, the Constellation Program was cancelled by the President, but the 2012 Commerce bill confirms that the program continues to receive funding.
SLS and the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle are getting much more than the $237.8 million in the FY12 bill cited in the CAGW release: a little over $3 billion, or more than 12 times the amount listed in the release. There’s no other NASA program in the House appropriations bill getting a similar amount; the Exploration Research and Development line is the closest in subject matter and funding, at $289 million, but that doesn’t appear to be what CAGW is referring to. (I’ve contacted CAGW for clarification and will pass along anything I hear from them.)
By Jeff Foust on 2011 August 5 at 8:28 pm ET The Orlando Sentinel reported late today that NASA estimates the cost of its new heavy-lift launch vehicle and crew spacecraft could be as much as $38 billion through 2021. The estimate, from an internal NASA report obtained by the Sentinel, pegged the cost of developing the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) through 2017, the scheduled date of the first, uncrewed test flight of the vehicles, at $17-22 billion. Getting the vehicles ready for their next launch, and the first crewed mission, in late 2021 would be an additional $12-16 billion, bringing the overall cost through 2021 at $29-38 billion.
The article doesn’t go into greater details about the cost estimates, but the numbers given work out to an average cost per year in the first phase of $2.4-3.1 billion (assuming this starts in fiscal year 2011, when Congress appropriated $3 billion in the final continuing resolution for SLS and MPCV.) In the second phase (2018-2021), the cost of preparing the vehicles for crewed missions and carrying out that initial human circumlunar mission would cost an average of $3-4 billion a year.
The sums reported in the article can cause some sticker shock, but the per-year averages are not nearly as bad, and in line with what Congress appropriated in 2011 and has proposed (at least in the House) for 2012. However, there are several caveats to keep in mind. One is that development programs rarely have flat budgets: there will be, presumably, a peak in funding at some point, perhaps around mid-decade, where the program costs will be considerably higher than the average. A second issue is whether even the average funding levels can be sustained over a longer period, particularly in an era of relative fiscal austerity for discretionary programs like NASA. Perhaps the biggest issue, though, is that this is NASA’s own internal budget estimate, and the agency does not have a track record for hewing closely to those original estimates as programs are implemented. A separate independent cost review by Booz Allen Hamilton is in progress, as previously reported; as the Sentinel article notes, “even agency insiders expect Booz Allen Hamilton to come back with a higher price tag given NASA’s history of lowballing initial cost estimates.”
By Jeff Foust on 2011 August 4 at 6:36 am ET Congress may be on summer recess now, but it’s not entirely devoid of activity. Yesterday Rep. Sandy Adams (R-FL) announced Wednesday she has introduced legislation to support a local economy facing thousands of layoffs with the retirement of the Space Shuttle. The “Shuttle Workforce Revitalization Act of 2011″, HR 2712, would designate all of Brevard County, Florida (home of the Kennedy Space Center), as a Historically Underutilized Business Zone (HUBZone), giving businesses there preferential treatment for some federal contracts. The legislation, she notes in the release, would give local businesses a “competitive edge” in federal procurements and “will not cost the federal government a single additional dollar, nor does it authorize or appropriate any additional funding.” Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL) said in the release that he supports the Adams bill, although he has not signed up yet as a co-sponsor.
Late Wednesday evening Rep. David Wu (D-OR) formally resigned from the House. Wu had previously indicated that he would resign in the wake of news of a personal scandal once the debt ceiling debate was resolved. Wu was a senior Democrat on the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, serving on the space subcommittee and as the ranking member of the technology and innovation subcommittee. Wu had been skeptical about at least some elements of the administration’s space policy, including its emphasis on commercial space transportation; at a May hearing on the FAA Office of Commercial Space Transportation’s 2012 budget proposal, he said he was “absolutely stunned” commercial spaceflight was not held to the same rigorous standards of commercial aviation, and warned that an accident involving a commercial vehicle “could potentially flatten the space program for a period of years.”
By Jeff Foust on 2011 August 3 at 7:16 am ET With work on the debt ceiling legislation complete, both the House and the Senate have now recessed for their traditional August break, and won’t return until after Labor Day. That means that work on appropriations legislation, among other items, is on hold until then. The House Appropriations Committee passed its version of an appropriations bill that includes NASA and NOAA last month, but the bill didn’t make it to the House floor before recess. The Senate, meanwhile, has yet to formally start work on its version of such legislation, which could be significantly different from the House version, particularly for programs like the James Webb Space Telescope that the current draft of the House bill does not fund.
There isn’t a complete absence of activity on the Hill, though. NASA Watch reported this week about a draft letter to NASA and OMB regarding the Space Launch System (SLS). Like some previous requests from members of Congress, the letter calls on the administration “to publish its final design in an expeditious manner.” However, the letter also weighs in on the design, pushing the administration to incorporate solid rocket boosters in the SLS design to expedite its development. In particular, signatories of the letter state that they “will vehemently oppose the use of any government funds for the development of a new liquid propulsion system”, arguing that such spending would be “irresponsible” in the current fiscal climate when “existing technology, specifically solid rocket motors” can handle the task.
NASA Watch reports that the letter has been traced back to the Utah congressional delegation, which is not surprising as the solid rocket motors being proposed for the SLS are made in the state, and members of that delegation have spoken out in the past on the use of solids for the SLS. For example, last November members of the delegation met with NASA leaders to express their concerns NASA was “circumventing” the 2010 NASA authorization act by studying alternatives to solid rocket motors for the SLS. A statement after that meeting from Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) claims that “Utah experts [the delegation] consulted say the legislation’s requirements for the heavy-lift rocket can only be realistically met by using solid rocket motors.” The final paragraph of the new draft letter states, “Based upon expert advice the only way to realistically meet these requirements is through the use of Space Shuttle and Ares derived components, including solid rocket motors.”
By Jeff Foust on 2011 July 31 at 1:39 pm ET As the debate grinds on in Washington about a deal to raise the debt ceiling, there have been questions about what will happen should an agreement not be reached by the current deadline of Tuesday. On Friday NASA administrator Charles Bolden sent out message to the agency’s workforce, effectively telling them it will be business as usual this coming week at the space agency. “I am sending this note to remind you that NASA employees should plan to come to work next week, as scheduled, at their normal place and time,” he wrote in the memo, obtained by SpaceRef.
POLITICO examined Friday the lobbying practices of aerospace companies in this new space policy era. Much of the article is less about NASA than about efforts by SpaceX to win business from the Air Force for military launches, arguing that its rockets are just as good as those built by United Launch Alliance but cost much less. SpaceX, the article notes, is on a pace to exceed its 2010 lobbying expenses of $600,000, much more than the $120,000 a year spent by ULA but a small fraction of that spent by ULA’s corporate parents, Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
That article leads, though, with the belief that the president and SpaceX founder Elon Musk are good friends—“President Barack Obama’s élan for Elon Musk”, as the article cleverly puts it—based on Musk’s donations to Obama and “multiple personal visits”. Musk, though, quashes any idea the two are close. “People think Obama is my best friend. If he has been my best friend, he sure hasn’t been very good at helping me out,” Musk told POLITICO. “Obama has been doing a good job within the scope of what he can do … but not pushing further. And Congress has done quite a bad job.”
Speaking Friday morning at the NewSpace 2011 Conference at NASA Ames Research Center, Virgin Galactic president and CEO George Whitesides spent most of his time talking about the status of his company and the progress they’re making in developing a suborbital vehicle. However, the former chief of staff to NASA administrator Bolden also touched upon space policy issues for part of his talk. Whitesides noted he had just come from the EAA AirVenture show in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and wondered when the space field would be able to host a show of a similar type and scale. “While we cannot be sure that the current national policy will get us to that future, I think we can be reasonably sure the path we were on before would not get us to that future,” he said.
He said that if we had continued down the path of an “Apollo-like” program, there would be little funding available for technological innovations that could lower the cost of space access in general and create an “exothermic reaction” of activity in space. “I really do believe—and I was involved in some of these conversations—that the underlying motivation for these new national policy changes is a desire to go further, and to go sustainably,” he said. “What is motivating, I think, this policy is absolutely not a desire to kill human spaceflight, but it is a desire to essentially press the reset button on human spaceflight, and to try to get it into a pathway that really can fulfill our dreams.” He added it was ironic that some viewed the policy as killing human spaceflight when instead it’s intended “to encourage human spaceflight to thrive, ultimately.”
|
|
