Reports on Thursday indicated that NASA has settled on a design for the Space Launch System (SLS) heavy-lift booster that would be largely shuttle-derived, but would offer some room for competition. According to Aviation Week and NASASpaceFlight.com, the SLS design will be only slightly different from the reference design released in an interim report to Congress in January, using a core stage based on the shuttle’s external tank and fitted with Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSMEs), later transitioning to the RS-25E expendable variant. The upper stage would use the J-2X engine slated to begin test firings this month at the Stennis Space Center.
That reference design had originally called for the use of five-segment solid rocket boosters. While the reports indicated that SRBs will be used for initial launches, there will be a competition between SRBs and a liquid-propellant booster built by Teledyne Brown and powered by a variant of Aerojet’s AJ-26 engine (itself based on Russian NK-33 engines), at least for the “evolved” beyond Earth orbit SLS version. That approach would at least partially address calls for an open SLS competition made earlier this week by Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), which came on the heels of a similar letter by Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), especially since Teledyne Brown is based in Alabama and Aerojet is headquartered in California.
According to NASASpaceFlight.com, a formal announcement of the SLS plan would come on July 8, the same day as the last shuttle mission is scheduled to launch. That could address some concerns about the lack of details about the follow-on to the shuttle. The NASASpaceFlight.com article cites an “impassioned” speech by shuttle launch director Mike Leinbach after a recent countdown simulation where he was critical of the lack of information regarding what happens after the shuttle. “The end of the shuttle program is a tough thing to swallow and we’re all victims of poor policy out of Washington DC, both at the NASA level and the executive branch of the government,” Leinbach said. “I’m embarrassed that we don’t have better guidance out of Washington DC.”
What does Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) have in common with California’s two Democratic senators? He, like Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, is now calling on NASA to hold an open competition for the development of the Space Launch System (SLS). In a letter to NASA administrator Charles Bolden last Friday, Shelby said that while he wants the SLS developed as quickly as possible, he does not want “to foreclose the possibility of utilizing competition, where appropriate”, noting that the language in the NASA authorization act passed last year calls for the use of existing contracts and other resources “to the extent practicable”.
Shelby was particularly critical in the letter to the possibility of basing the SLS on shuttle hardware. “Designing a Space Launch System for heavy lift that relies on existing Shuttle boosters ties NASA, once again, to the high fixed costs associated with segmented solids,” Shelby writes.
“I have seen no evidence that foregoing competition for the booster system will speed up development of SLS or, conversely, that introducing competition will slow the program down,” Shelby concludes in his letter to Bolden. “I strongly encourage you to initiate a competition for the Space Launch System booster. I believe it will ultimately result in a more efficient SLS development effort at lower cost to the taxpayer.”
Shelby’s conclusion is similar to the one in another letter to Bolden from Boxer and Feinstein in late May, where the two also called for “a competitive bidding process” for the SLS. In some respects, though, it’s not that surprising: when Aerojet and Huntsville-based Teledyne Brown Engineering announced a joint venture earlier this month to develop rocket engines for various projects, including SLS, it got an endorsement from Shelby. “Congress directed NASA to develop a 130-metric ton Space Launch System with a first and second stage that leverage our Ares investments. The Teledyne-Aerojet team could have a critical role to play designing additional elements of the system, and I hope NASA looks at their capabilities carefully,” Shelby said in a comment provided to the Huntsville Times when the joint venture was announced.
Plutonium 238 (Pu-238), the radioactive isotope used in the radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), is essential to a number of spacecraft missions, particularly those bound for the outer solar system. However, getting the relatively modest funding (no more than a few tens of millions of dollars a year) needed to restart Pu-238 production in the US to ensure that a supply of the isotope is available for future missions has been difficult in recent years. The latest push is taking place this week. The Obama Administration included $10 million each for NASA and the Department of Energy (DOE) to restart Pu-238 production, but a draft version of the Energy and Water appropriations bill in the House does not include that funding. The full House Appropriations Committee is scheduled to markup the bill in a hearing today.
Emily Lakdawalla of The Planetary Society reported yesterday that the American Geophysical Union (AGU) is making a last-minute push to get the money added to the appropriations bill. In an email, the AGU said that Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), whose district includes JPL, plans to introduce an amendment to the bill to include the Pu-238 funding. (The AGU alert is not included in its list of “Science Policy Alerts” on its web site; it apparently went out to AGU members whose representatives are on the committee.) The AGU asked its members to contact their congressmen and ask them to support the Schiff amendment, providing a variety of talking points to use in those calls.
Getting that amendment through may be tough, however. In the report accompanying the draft appropriations bill, the committee criticized the administration’s plan to split the Pu-238 costs between NASA and DOE. “The Committee remains concerned that the Administration continues to request equal funding from NASA and the Department of Energy for a project that primarily benefits NASA,” the report states at the top of page 98. “The Committee provides no funds for this project, and encourages the Administration to devise a plan for this project that more closely aligns the costs paid by federal agencies with the benefits they receive.”
On Friday Huntsville’s “Second to None” task force, a group of local officials who lobby on space and defense issues, met with a member of Congress. Not the area’s own representative, Mo Brooks (R-AL), but with Rep. Terri Sewell (D-AL) from Birmingham. And afterwards local officials declared her their newest ally in supporting NASA, and NASA Marshall in particular. “Rep. Terri Sewell to be voice for TN Valley on NASA affairs” declared the headline of a WAFF-TV report on the meeting, while Huntsville mayor Tommy Battle called her “our new best friend”. Local officials hope that Sewell, who serves on the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, will help win support from her fellow Democrats on space topics.
Sewell seems willing to do that. “I see the role for myself and the rest of the congressional delegation as helping to promote that innovation and that excellence,” she said, as one account of the meeting reported. “I know that the Rocket City is a shining example of all that is right about the state of Alabama and about our innovation in science and technology throughout this country.” Sewell said that while the federal government needs to cut overall spending, it needs to make “strategic investments”, of which NASA is one example.
“NASA is an investment into the future and we have to have a future,” Battle said. “We sell technology out of this country. We have people that are smarter than any other place in the world sitting right here in Huntsville, Alabama and we have to sell that technology.” The reports didn’t indicate if Battle specified what Huntsville-based technology he thought should be sold “out of the country”.
Space policy made a cameo appearance in Monday night’s Republican presidential debate in New Hampshire, with former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich arguing for greater privatization of the space program while former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty said that the space program should be “refocused” but not eliminated.
The discussion was kicked off by a question about the impending retirement of the space shuttle and that, in the words of WMUR-TV’s Jean Mackin, “President Obama effectively killed government-run spaceflight to the International Space Station and wants to turn it over to private companies.” Thus, she asked, “what role should the government play in future space exploration?”
Gingrich, to whom the question was directed, responded:
Well, sadly—and I say this sadly because I’m a big fan of going into space, and I actually worked to get the shuttle program to survive at one point—NASA has become an absolute case study in why bureaucracy can’t innovate. If you take all the money we spent at NASA since we landed on the Moon, and you apply that money for incentives for the private sector, we would today probably have a permanent station on the Moon, three or four permanent stations in space, a new generation of lift vehicles, and instead, what we’ve had is bureaucracy after bureaucracy after bureaucracy, and failure after failure. I think it’s a tragedy, because younger Americans ought to have the excitement of thinking that they, too, could be part of reaching out to a new frontier.
You know, you had asked earlier, John [King, the moderator], about this idea of limits because we’re a developed country. We’re not a developed country. The scientific future is going to open up and we’re at the beginning of a whole new cycle of extraordinary opportunities, and unfortunately NASA is standing in the way of it, when NASA ought to be getting out of the way and encouraging the private sector.
CNN’s King then asked if any of the other candidates wanted to weigh in with a different opinion about NASA’s future, someone who wanted “the government to stay in the lead here when it comes to manned spaceflight.” After a brief pause, Pawlenty stepped in with, “I think the space program has played a vital role for the United States of America.” “Can we afford it going forward?” asked King. Pawlenty’s answer:
In the context of our budget challenges it can be refocused and reprioritized, but I don’t think we should be eliminating the space program. We can partner with private providers to get more economies of scale, and scale it back, but I don’t think we should eliminate the space program.
That comment prompted a rebuttal from a vexed Gingrich:
John, you mischaracterized me. I didn’t say end the space program. We built the transcontinental railroads without a national department of railroads. I said you can get into space faster, better, more effectively, more creatively, if you decentralized it, got out of Washington, and cut out the bureaucracy. It’s not about getting rid of the space program, it’s about getting to a real space program that works.
Just before the debate moved on, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney weighed in with a comment tangentially related, at best, to the question:
I think fundamentally there are some people—and most of them are Democrats, but not all—who really believe that the government knows how to do things better than the private sector.
For those who have been following Gingrich, his comments are not that surprising: he has been supportive of private sector ventures over big government programs in the past, most notably when, last February, he and former congressman Bob Walker praised the White House for its “brave reboot” of NASA. Romney’s comment didn’t add much to the discussion, although he already has a track record from the 2008 campaign, where he said he supported the Vision for Space Exploration but declined to promise additional funding for NASA until he studied the issue more; he dropped out of the campaign before he could elaborate on that. Pawlenty, though, had been more of a blank slate on space topics before the debate. His comments suggested a willingness to support public-private partnerships in space, although not to the same degree as Gingrich.
The video of that portion of the debate (except for Romney’s concluding comment) is below:
Later this morning a Delta 2 rocket is scheduled to lift off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, carrying the Aquarius/SAC-D earth sciences satellite to orbit. That mission, designed to study ocean salinity and its effect on global climate, has not been immune to the delays that affect many satellite programs: it was originally planned to launch in September 2008. That delay is primarily an inconvenience for researchers, but delays in another, much larger earth observation program could have serious consequences for the country, one official warned last week.
Speaking at the Aerospace 2011: The Road Ahead conference held last Friday by Women in Aerospace in Arlington, Virginia, Kathryn Sullivan, a former astronaut and the new assistant secretary of commerce for environmental observation and prediction at NOAA, said that delays in developing the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) caused by a lack of funding would lead to delays in the development of the first JPSS satellite to the point where a gap in weather data was increasingly likely as existing satellites reach the end of their lives.
“Current year funding for NOAA already assures that we’ll have about an 18-month delay in procuring JPSS-1,” she said. “When you run the satellite lifetimes and likely failure rates, that suggests we have a very high probability—over 70 percent—of having a gap in the polar data streams in the 2014 to 2016 timeframe.” She said that while spending plans for the remainder of fiscal year 2011 have yet to be finalized, it was unlikely that the program would get funding “significantly much north” of current projections. “It’s a pretty bleak picture,” she concluded.
So what are the implications of a gap in data from polar-orbiting weather satellites? She noted in her speech that the data from satellites in general, which account for 93 percent of the data used in forecast models, are essential to long-term forecasting. “Polar birds are absolutely vital to our two- to five-day forecasts for the entire Earth,” she said. “You now have to sample and measure the entire globe to make a two-plus-day forecast of any point on the globe.” In one example, she demonstrated the effect of such data on forecast models for the “Snowmageddon” winter storm that dropped over two feet of snow on Washington, DC, and elsewhere in the mid-Atlantic region of the US in February 2010. While forecast models that used the satellite closely predicted the actual snowfall amounts several days out, those without the data underestimated the amounts by about 50 percent.
If the data provided by polar-orbiting satellites is so crucial to weather forecasting, why is it so difficult to win funding to keep the JPSS satellites on schedule? Sullivan blamed the difficulties in getting a “ramp” of funding needed for development programs in general, and in the current fiscal environment in particular. “You end up with three years in a row where you have to provide a large slug of procurement dollars to keep the program moving on the pace you originally projected,” she said. “Washington doesn’t like budget ramps. Washington likes nice, easy increments.” Combine that with current pressures to reduce federal spending, she added, and “you have the perfect storm of misaligned fiscal biorhythms.” (One contributing factor she didn’t dwell upon was the predecessor of JPSS, the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS), which suffered delays and cost overruns so severe that last year the administration effectively cancelled it, breaking it into separate civil and defense programs.)
Sullivan said NOAA was working with the administration and Congress to try and secure sufficient funding for JPSS in future years’ budgets. “We’re working on a daily basis with OMB and the Congress to see what can be done to ameliorate this problem for the current year and set up for the years ahead in the next rounds of budgeting,” she said. She added that NOAA was also looking for potential commercial and international partnerships to address the potential data gap.
“We’re working so very hard to do everything we can to assure the continuity of this program, these observations,” she said. “It will be a sad and terrible day to retreat decades back on that service capability.”
Earlier this week reporter Leon Bibb of Cleveland’s WEWS-TV briefly interviewed President Obama at the White House. About halfway through the wide-ranging ten-minute interview, Bibb asked Obama about the future of NASA, with a particular emphasis on the future of the agency’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. “With the space shuttle program cutting back now, or ending, after this next flight, what do you tell people at Glenn Research Center?” asked Bibb. “Will there be a need for the NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland? And can they count on the White House standing behind NASA staying in Cleveland?”
Obama’s response, while not making any news with respect to the administration’s space policy, shows that the president continues to put an emphasis on technology development for NASA, while indirectly reassuring the local audience he has not plans to close Glenn:
Well, I believe in the space program. Look, I’m turning 50 in about a month and a half. But, that means that I grew up being inspired by Apollo and the Moon landing. So the key, even though the space shuttle is phasing out, is, what’s that next big leap? And that’s going to require research. That’s exactly part of our plan is to make sure that we’re researching new fuel, new mechanisms to allow for long-term space flight. There’s some additional technological leaps that we have to make because, basically, we’re using the same technologies that we were using back in the 60s, in a lot of cases. That’s why a research facility of NASA’s is going to continue to be critical because we want to find what are those next technological leaps that will take us not just to the Moon, but take us to Mars and beyond.
Here’s something you don’t see every day: a Tea Party group saying it’s in agreement with a pair of Democratic senators. Florida-based TEA Party in Space (TPIS), part of the larger Tea Party Patriots coalition, announced Monday that it has “publicly praised” a letter from Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) to NASA administrator Charles Bolden last month asking for a competitive bidding process for NASA’s Space Launch System heavy-lift rocket. In the statement, TPIS claimed Congress “tried to earmark $12 billion for existing Shuttle and Constellation contractors” with the language in last year’s NASA authorization act. “It is time to bring competition and fiscal sanity back into the NASA procurement system,” TPIS spokesman Everett Wilkinson said in the statement.
On the surface, a poll appears to offer good news to proponents of human spaceflight: a press release yesterday claims that “an overwhelming majority of Americans say they don’t want America’s manned space program to end”. The poll, performed by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research and commissioned by Ron Sachs Communications, found that 57% of Americans believed the US should “continue to be a world leader in manned space exploration”; splits among Republicans, Democrats, and independents showed little variation. But the single poll question also claimed that NASA has “no plans to continue sending men and women into space after 2011″. While there may be considerable debate about the effectiveness of various commercial crew development efforts, as well as the congressionally-mandated Space Launch System and Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, there’s clearly no shortage of plans for follow-on human spaceflight programs. Moreover, the poll doesn’t ask what people would do in order to ensure that the US remain a world leader, such as increasing NASA’s budget (either by increasing overall federal spending or cutting other programs) or transferring funds from other NASA programs. It’s easy, after all, to say the US should be a world leader in space exploration (or other areas) when one isn’t asked what it would cost. Like some other polls, the principle of GIGO may apply here.
The joint NASA-ESA ExoMars program is facing budget pressures on both sides of the Atlantic, Aviation Week reports. ESA is trying to cut €200 million from hardware costs for its elements of the ExoMars mission after costs from a consortium led by Thales Alenia Space came in higher than expected. NASA, meanwhile, is juggling its contributions to the program after cutting $700 million from its planned $2.2-billion contribution to the joint effort. Much of those cuts may come in the form of combining separate ESA and NASA rovers for the 2018 ExoMars mission into a single vehicle, as suggested earlier this year. The NASA rover, the Mars Astrobiology Explorer Cacher (MAX-C), was identified earlier this year as the top priority “flagship” planetary mission for the next decade, but only if its costs could be cut.
As first reported by Space News last Thursday, California’s two senators have asked NASA to hold an open competition for the development of the Space Launch System (SLS), the heavy-lift vehicle Congress directed NASA to develop in the 2010 NASA authorization act. In their letter to NASA administrator Charles Bolden, Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) asked that NASA “quickly open a competitive bidding process on the propulsion component” of the SLS. Citing NASA’s interim report to Congress in January about the development of the SLS, Boxer and Feinstein wrote that “we believe that it is not ‘practicable’ to continue the existing contracts” as recommended in last year’s authorization act. “Instead, we believe that NASA should open a competitive bidding process for the SLS to ensure that the agency obtains the best technology at the lowest possible cost.”
The release of the letter (actually dated May 27) coincided with the announcement that Aerojet and Teledyne Brown Engineering had formed a partnership to develop liquid-propellant rocket engines. The joint release by the two companies specifically notes that they “will pursue contracts for the manufacture of liquid rocket engines for NASA through the Space Launch System program” as well as other, unspecified customers. The agreement got an endorsement from a major congressional supporter of the SLS, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), who told the Huntsville Times, “The Teledyne-Aerojet team could have a critical role to play designing additional elements of the [SLS] system, and I hope NASA looks at their capabilities carefully.” (Teledyne Brown is based in Huntsville, while both Aerojet and Teledyne Brown’s parent, Teledyne Technologies, are headquartered in California, which may explain the senators’ interest in competing SLS components.)
But with a final report on NASA’s heavy-lift plans not expected until late this month or early July, NASA has not indicated if they’ll complete some or all elements of the SLS. Speaking at Women in Aerospace’s Aerospace 2011: The Road Ahead conference Friday in Arlington, Virginia, Doug Cooke, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems, said no decision has been made yet on competing the SLS design. “We are weighing the various acquisition approaches,” he said. Asked specifically about a full and open competition, he said, “I would not rule it out.”
The panel on which Cooke participated was billed as “Beyond LEO: The Battle of the Heavy Lift Vehicles”, but there was little evidence of any battles among the panel’s participants, which included representatives of Aerojet, ATK, Boeing, and Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, in addition to Cooke and Senate staffer Jeff Bingham. The industry participants in particular believed it was time to make a decision on an SLS design and start developing. “The range of things we’re trying to decide between now is pretty small,” said Jim Chilton, vice president and program manager of exploration launch systems at Boeing.
“It’s time for a decision,” said Jim Maser, president of Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, reiterating his desire for a near-term decision on the launch system he expressed a few months ago in a meeting with reporters. “We all have our opinions. NASA has the information. It’s time to move on.”
The panelists in general expected a decision on the SLS design this year, perhaps in the coming weeks, and also were optimistic the initial version of the SLS would make its first flight around 2016 as stated in the authorization act. Boeing’s Chilton, for example, said he envisioned SLS launching an Apollo 8-style “lap around the Moon” by early to mid 2017. Only Aerojet vice president Julie Van Kleeck offered a caveat: “I think we have the capability to do it in 2016 if we have the will.”
And will NASA have the will—and the funding—to develop and fly the SLS by 2016? Bingham, who said he was speaking for himself and not officially representing the views of the Senate Commerce Committee, said the authorization act supported the development of both the SLS and commercial crew development, but funding could put the two in conflict with each other. “There’s no issue with or conflict with those goals,” he said. “Where it becomes in conflict is in resources. When you only get so big a pie, and you start having to make priorities, that’s where you start having this push-and-shove between commercial and governmental. That shouldn’t be. That’s an artificial conflict that shouldn’t have to be there if we were properly resourced as an agency.”
One of the more compelling speeches at the National Space Society’s International Space Development Conference (ISDC) in Huntsville, Alabama, earlier this month was by Jeff Greason, president of XCOR Aerospace and a member of 2009’s Augustine Committee that reviewed NASA’s human spaceflight plans. Greason’s speech, the video of which is now available online, focused on the need for a strategy for expanding human presence beyond Earth.
Greason explained that the organization of any major effort, from wars to space exploration, has a particular hierarchy, starting with an overall goal. Below that is the strategy that offers the “big picture approach” for achieving that goal. Below that are objectives by which one measures progress on that particular strategy towards the goal, and below that are tactics needed to achieve those objectives.
“Strategy is the void that we have right now,” Greason said. At one end there is a lot of discussion about tactics, such as the the choice of launch vehicles that often dominates debates on space policy, he noted. There’s also, he said, a growing realization of what the goal of the national space program is, although it’s mentioned only obliquely in various policy documents over the years. “It is actually the national policy of the United States that we should settle space.”
What’s missing, though, he said, is a coherent strategy for implementing that national goal, which in turn would inform the tactics being debated. “We don’t even have the beginnings of a national agreement of what our strategy ought to be,” he said. “And until we have one, we’re going to continue to flail.”
What is Greason’s idea for a strategy? In the speech, he proposed a “planet hopping” approach analogous to the “island hopping” strategy the US used against Japan in World War Two. “What we have to do is take the planetary destinations in sequence,” he said, referring to the Moon, near Earth objects, the moons of Mars, and Mars itself. “In each one of them, the purpose of the initial human outpost is not to be there and look cool. It is not to unfurl flags and take pretty pictures, and it is not the holy grail of science, although we will get all of those things. It’s to make gas.” That is, each destination will produce propellant that will enable a cost-effective step to the next destination.
“If you do that, a lot of interesting things fall out,” he said. Such an approach would generate demand for propellant in low Earth orbit, enabling lower cost launches (through increased demand for launches) and propellant depots, and also provide a predictable market for new reusable launch vehicles.
Moreover, such an approach could be affordable, as each step in the process would serve as a multiplier in reducing costs versus a direct-to-Mars approach. “It’s my belief that if we pursued this the right way, we actually could afford to do this, all the way out to the first landings on Mars, for the kind of budget NASA’s getting now,” he said.
That strategy, or something like it, is critical to the future of NASA’s human spaceflight program, he argued. Without such a strategy, he said, “we’re going to build a big rocket, and then we’re going to hope a space program shows up to fly it. Any in my opinion, that strategy—the strategy of default—is going to result in the end of the NASA human spaceflight program” when members of Congress question the wisdom of spending several billion dollars a year on that effort and its lack of progress in an era of constricting budgets. “If we haven’t done better in the next ten years than we have in the last ten years, we’re going to lose that fight, and NASA’s human spaceflight activity will end.”
