By Jeff Foust on 2011 July 6 at 2:19 pm ET The House Appropriations Committee released its draft Commerce, Justice, and Science (CJS) appropriations bill today, and the news is by and large not good for NASA. The committee is proposing $16.81 billion for NASA in FY12, nearly $2 billion less than the $18.724 billion in the president’s FY12 request. Here is an account-by-account comparison between the president’s budget request (PBR) and the House Appropriations Committee (HAC) draft bill (all values in millions of dollars):
| Account |
PBR |
HAC |
Difference |
| Science |
$5,016.80 |
$4,504.00 |
-$512.80 |
| Aeronautics |
$569.40 |
$569.93 |
$0.53 |
| Space Technology |
$1,024.20 |
$375.00 |
-$649.20 |
| Exploration |
$3,948.70 |
$3,649.00 |
-$299.70 |
| Space Operations |
$4,346.90 |
$4,064.00 |
-$282.90 |
| Education |
$138.40 |
$138.00 |
-$0.40 |
| Cross-Agency Support |
$3,192.00 |
$3,050.00 |
-$142.00 |
| Construction |
$450.40 |
$424.00 |
-$26.40 |
| Inspector General |
$37.50 |
$36.30 |
-$1.20 |
| TOTAL |
$18,724.30 |
$16,810.23 |
-$1,914.07 |
Within Exploration, the House bill includes $1.063 billion for the MPCV and $1.985 billion for the SLS, both slightly higher than the administration’s request. In addition, although the text of the legislation doesn’t specifically mention it, the press release accompanying it states that the bill terminates funding for the James Webb Space Telescope because it is “billions of dollars over budget and plagued by poor management.” The CJS subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee is scheduled to mark up the bill tomorrow, with the full committee to take it up the following week.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 July 6 at 5:28 am ET The Pew Research Center released poll results yesterday that concluded that Americans wants the US to remain leaders in space exploration. Fifty-eight percent of those polled said they agreed it was “essential” that the US “continue to be a world leader in space exploration”. Slightly higher positive responses came from people with family incomes in excess of $75,000, and somewhat more Republicans said yes than Democrats or independents; there was little differentiation based on education.
This is the first time that Pew has asked this question, so there are no comparable previous poll results. (Pew asked in the same poll if the shuttle program had been a good investment for the country, and 55% said yes; that sounds good until you see that in previous polls in the 1980s that number had been as high as 73%.) However, one problem with the question is that the poll doesn’t define what it means for the US to be a “world leader” in space exploration. Does it mean having any kind of human spaceflight program? One that is oriented to going to the Moon? to Mars? to a near Earth asteroid? One that relies exclusively on its own government-owned and -operated crewed spacecraft, or one that purchases flights to at least low Earth orbit? Or, perhaps, one that places a much greater emphasis on robotic planetary exploration over human spaceflight altogether? Different people can have very different reasons for answering yes. Perhaps more telling, though, is that no matter how you define leadership in space exploration, nearly two in five Americans polled don’t think it’s essential.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 July 2 at 11:08 am ET Going into Friday afternoon’s speech at the National Press Club, there was little expectation that NASA administrator Charles Bolden would make any major announcements, including on the agency’s plans for the Space Launch System (SLS). And that’s how it turned out: his speech was focused on the agency’s general plans for life after the space shuttle, and for a more general audience.
Bolden specifically sought to counter the belief in some quarters that the end of the shuttle program was tantamount to the end of human spaceflight or even the space program itself. “Some say that our final shuttle mission will mark the end of America’s 50-year dominance in human spaceflight,” he said. “As a former astronaut, as the current NASA administrator, i’m here to tell you that American leadership in space will continue for at least, at least the next half-century because we’ve laid the foundation for success, and for us at NASA, failure is not an option.” A little later in the speech, he was even more to the point. “So, when I hear people say, or listen to the media reports, that the final shuttle flight marks the end of US human spaceflight, I have to tell you: you must all be living on another planet.”
(The only news that arguably came out of the address had nothing to do with Bolden or NASA: in brief comments at the end of the luncheon, retiring astronaut Mark Kelly, husband of congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, knocked down rumors that he was eying a political career. “My main focus right now, and for the foreseeable future, is Gabby’s recovery and also spending some more time with my kids,” he said, referring to his wife’s continuing recovery from a near-fatal shooting in January. Rumors about him potentially running for Giffords’ House seat or the open Senate seat in Arizona in 2012 had been in the media in recent weeks, although based almost wholly in speculation and not on anything Kelly had said or done. At least one news outlet tried to keep the story alive, though: “Giffords’ husband rules out run for public office — at least for now” was the headline in The Hill.)
In his speech, Bolden said little about plans for the SLS, other than “we’re nearing a decision” on it and “we’ll announce that soon”. While not surprising, the lack of a formal announcement about the agency’s SLS plans–or even the specific timing of that announcement–has disappointed industry. “We had been hearing a few weeks ago that the plan was to get all this done and make some sort of formal announcement on or before July 8,” when Atlantis is set to launch on the final shuttle mission, Jim Maser, president of Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne (PWR), said in an interview earlier Friday. Now, though, he said he’s not certain an announcement will come by the scheduled launch.
Maser, who made clear in March his desire for a decision on NASA’s future programs, including the SLS, still has that same sense of urgency, if not greater. “Now that the shuttle is finally ending, there’s a huge sense of urgency in industry” to know what those plans are, he said, adding he wasn’t concerned about the specifics of the plan so much as having a firm direction for industry: “We need a plan, the direction where we’re going.” He said his company would be “fine” with some of the rumored SLS designs leaked in recent weeks that would use Space Shuttle Main Engines and the J-2X, both manufactured by PWR.
Maser said in the interview that he’s had to give layoff notices to about 300 PWR employees, but some of those notices could be rescinded if a decision on SLS comes soon. “I don’t think we can wait any longer than the end of this fiscal year,” or the end of September, he said. “We’d like to see something in July.” He noted that the end of July will mark a year and a half since the administration’s original announcement that it was canceling Constellation without a firm replacement plan in place. “The only word I have for that is pathetic.”
By Jeff Foust on 2011 June 30 at 7:09 am ET The least surprising headline of the day is from Aerospace Daily: “NASA Funding Mired In Budget Politics”. While politics has always played a major role, the article suggests that the situation this year is even more complicated and uncertain than usual. Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), who chairs the Senate appropriations subcommittee whose jurisdiction includes NASA, told Aerospace Daily that the Senate has barely started work on the FY2012 appropriations bills, as it sorts through the consequences of the final FY11 continuing resolution as well as the ongoing debate about raising the debt limit. Mikulski and other appropriations subcommittee chairs have yet to receive their budget allocations, which means that they can’t start work on marking up appropriations bills.
The path is a little clearer in the House, at least from a procedural standpoint. According to the schedule published in May by the House Appropriations Committee, the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies subcommittee (which includes NASA and NOAA) will mark up its appropriations bill a week from today, July 7 (which by coincidence is the day before the last shuttle launch); the full committee will take up the bill on July 13. But the committee is otherwise keeping its plans close to its vest, beyond a budget allocation that suggests the potential for significant across-the-board budget cuts.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL), who does not serve on the appropriations committee, told the Huntsville Times earlier this week. “Hopefully, NASA can survive. But that’s going to be up to the public to decide what they want… That’s going to be a battle.”
In the same interview, Brooks also addressed comments made in a debate earlier this month by Republican presidential candidates about funding NASA. Dismissing perceptions by some who watched the debate that the candidates were not supportive of NASA, Brooks said that any of the candidates would back NASA more than President Obama, and that specifically “you’ve got Mitt Romney and you’ve got [Tim] Pawlenty” as “likely” supporters of the agency. Romney, as previously noted here, does have a modest track record on space policy from his 2008 campaign, but Pawlenty, the former governor of Minnesota, does not.
Those Republican presidential candidates may be getting a visit in the coming months from someone who freely speaks his mind on space policy: Buzz Aldrin. “I’m going to be talking to the people” running for the GOP presidential nomination, he said in a speech this week in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Aldrin, who according to the report “expressed disappointment” that the president made no public speech or other acknowledgement of the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s speech calling for a manned lunar landing by the end of the 1960s, said space exploration needs a “specific public objective”.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 June 28 at 6:15 am ET One year ago today the Obama Administration released its national space policy, a document that, while having much of the same policy foundations as previous documents, differed in both details and tone. The new policy placed a greater emphasis on space sustainability, responsible use of space, and international cooperation, while also supporting commercial space efforts, improved space system procurement, and other initiatives. So, one year later, how is the government doing to implement that policy?
In this week’s issue of The Space Review, I report on one assessment of the policy from a panel discussion earlier this month in Washington. Peter Marquez, who coordinated the development of the policy last year as the director of space policy for the National Security Council (and is now working in the private sector), said in general government is doing a “good job” carrying out the policy. He cited in particular efforts by government agencies, working with industry and other governments, to battle the “existential threat” to GPS posed by LightSquared. However, the government is lagging in other areas, such as support for space situational awareness and progress on export control reform, he said.
Another panelist, Andrew Palowitch, the director of the Space Protection Program, suggested that, for now, the impact of the new policy has been relatively limited. “Everything that happened in this last year, and everything that’s going to happen in the next year, is completely independent of that national space policy,” he said, citing the long lead times of space initiatives. He did, though, call the new space policy “fantastic” that will start having more of an impact in 18 to 24 months. Marquez disagreed with this assessment to some degree, arguing that what the US has been doing “on the international front” has been strong affected by the new policy.
The policy, argued Ben Baseley-Walker of the Secure World Foundation, has helped improve the US’s reputation internationally: “What the national space policy has done is to start to rebuild trust, start to rebuild consistency, and start to rebuild the reliability of the US as an internationally-engaged partner.” However, panelists agreed that while the new policy is consistent in its general themes with the European Union’s proposed code of conduct for outer space activities, it does not mean the US will, or should, sign on to that code.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 June 28 at 5:49 am ET It appears that the threat of a Senate subpoena was sufficient to get NASA’s attention. Florida Today reports that NASA is providing the Senate Commerce Committee with documents it requested last week. The report is unclear whether the agency had actually delivered those documents to the committee by its deadline of 6 pm Eastern time yesterday, or had simply agreed to provide the documents and made other arrangements. In a letter last week to NASA administrator Charles Bolden, the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee warned they would issue a subpoena for documents regarding NASA’s plans for the Space Launch System and Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle if NASA didn’t comply with their request by Monday.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 June 24 at 8:32 am ET Jon Huntsman, the former Utah governor and ambassador to China who formally announced his candidacy for president earlier this week, opened his national campaign headquarters yesterday in Orlando. Being in central Florida, so close to the Space Coast, it’s not surpring someone asked him about his space policy views. His answer, in essence, was to stay tuned.
“We always want to be at the cutting edge of space flight. Today it’s an affordability issue,” he said, the Orlando Sentinel reported. “When we get around to space policy, we’ll come down here and make sure people are fully aware of what our hopes are.” He added, according to the article, that he puts a top priority on improving the nation’s economy, and that the “long term return on investment” from space programs can aid in that.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 June 24 at 5:59 am ET Members of the Senate Commerce Committee, and their staff, have made it clear for months that they have been frustrated with the lack of information they have received from NASA about its plans to implement provisions of the 2010 NASA authorization act, particularly regarding the Space Launch System (SLS) heavy-lift rocket. Last month they formally requested a comprehensive set of documents from NASA on various programs, including SLS, the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, and commercial crew initiatives.
The committee’s patience may have finally run out. In a letter Wednesday to NASA administration Charles Bolden, Sens. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), the chair and ranking member of the full committee, warned NASA that if it did not provide specific documents to the committee by the end of the day Monday it would issue a subpoena for them. “While NASA has provided a partial response to our May 18 letter, you have thwarted our oversight activities by withholding key documents that describe NASA’s compliance with the 2010 Act,” the letter states. It adds that in one case “NASA was withholding at least 19 separate drafts of a report it is required to submit to Congress under Section 309 of the 2010 Act.” That section of the 2010 authorization act requires NASA to provide a “detailed report” on the agency’s plans to implement the SLS and MPCV. NASA released a draft report in January but has yet to provide the final report.
So, will this subpoena compel NASA to release the documents? Or, perhaps, encourage NASA to accelerate release of the final report and make a formal decision on its SLS plans, which recent reports indicate are all but a done deal?
By Jeff Foust on 2011 June 23 at 7:57 am ET It’s tough enough to raise the billions of dollars needed to build out a nationwide hybrid satellite/terrestrial wireless network, as LightSquared has found. But when that system may interfere with one of the most crucial satellite systems anywhere, those problems are, well, squared, something that Congress will be looking into during a hearing today.
Scrutiny of LightSquared’s system has grown in recent weeks after tests by come in industry indicated that the company’s wireless signals would interfere with GPS signals, in the worst case making GPS receivers useless. Recent reports, including one by the White House-chartered National Space-Based Positioning, Navigation, and Timing Systems Engineering Forum, have confirmed that LightSquared’s system would interfere with GPS signals.
LightSquared (formerly SkyTerra) has one satellite in orbit, launched last year; that satellite will be augmented by a terrestrial system that the company is seeking to raise money to build out. While the company originally argued that there was no danger of interference, the company this week admitted there was an interference issue but that there was an easy fix: it would instead shift to a different block of spectrum for its initial service, one that “largely free of interference issues” expect for some high-precision GPS receivers. An industry group, the Coalition to Save Our GPS, is skeptical of LightSquared’s claims, claiming that the company’s proposal “borders on the bizarre”.
Concerns about LightSquared’s potential impact of GPS will be aired at a hearing this morning by the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. The hearing will feature a number of government and industry witnesses, including an executive with LightSquared.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 June 21 at 7:10 am ET In this week’s issue of The Space Review, I reviewed the new book Falling Back to Earth by Mark Albrecht, who was the executive secretary of the National Space Council during the George H.W. Bush administration and, later, president of International Launch Services. Much of the book, as I note in the review, talks about his time on the space council, including development of the Space Exploration Initiative and clashes with NASA regarding implementing SEI. Albrecht is pessimistic about the future of human spaceflight, citing the failures of SEI and the Vision for Space Exploration, saying “it is hard to imagine” another president making a major push in this area.
At the end of the book, though, Albrecht does state that “changes are urgently needed at NASA” for there to be any hope of reviving human space exploration, reforms that are not themselves sufficient but “necessary preconditions for success” of any new exploration initiative. At the heart of these proposed changes is a greater reliance on public-private partnerships “that recognize that the center of technical development and manufacturing excellence has shifted to the private sector.” (This approach sounds similar to NASA’s COTS and CCDev efforts, although he doesn’t explicitly mention either.) He also endorses greater participation by international entities “based purely on financial and technical capability” as opposed to policy considerations.
Separately, he calls for a radical restructuring of NASA as it relies more on these partnerships. The agency, he argues, should be focused on space science and human space exploration; other efforts, including aeronautics and Earth sciences, should be transferred to other agencies. He advocatesfor closing unneeded NASA centers through a BRAC-like process. Congress should support this by resisting earmarks for local center projects, and also through supporting “permissive statutory contexts for aggressive public-private initiatives.”
NASA, he argues in the book’s conclusion, can again achieve the heights it experienced early in its history, “but to do so will require a sober self-assessment, a desire to change, and a willingness to let go of what has long brought institutional comfort at the expense of national achievement.” Whether his proposed reforms can achieve those changes, or are even feasible, is an open question.
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