By Jeff Foust on 2011 May 17 at 5:36 pm ET The House Science, Space, and Technology Committee announced today that its space subcommittee will be House plans commercial cargo hearing “NASA’s Commercial Cargo Providers: Are They Ready to Supply the Space Station in the Post-Shuttle Era?” on Thursday, May 26, at 10 am. The scheduled witnesses:
Mr. William Gerstenmaier, Associate Administrator, Space Operations Mission Directorate, National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Ms. Cristina Chaplain, Director, Acquisition and Sourcing Management, U.S. Government Accountability Office
Ms. Gwynne Shotwell, President, Space Exploration Technologies
Mr. Frank Culbertson, Jr., Senior Vice President and Deputy General Manager, Advanced Programs Group, Orbital Sciences Corporation
By Jeff Foust on 2011 May 17 at 12:45 pm ET Well, they may have many things in common, but the relevant one here is that they all talked about space policy yesterday. Buzz Aldrin made an appearance on Neil Cavuto’s show on the Fox Business Channel, talking about the future of America’s space program. “Everyone but us seems to want in on space,” Cavuto said in the lead-in to his interview. Aldrin noted that the decision to retire the shuttle dated back to 2004. “That’s over seven years to come up with a substitute. Where is the substitute? It did not come out of Constellation. Constellation needed to be cancelled,” he argued. “Some of us saw this coming a long ways back, but nobody was going to listen that we were building the wrong rockets and the wrong spacecraft to replace the shuttle,” he said later. He largely supported the administration’s policy of handing access to LEO to commercial providers, while Cavuto lamented the fate of the nation’s space program. “Don’t yell at me. I’m telling you what’s going on here, Mr. Hero,” Cavuto said to Aldrin at one point at the end of the interview when Aldrin declined to agree with Cavuto’s assessment that “it is what it is, sadly.”
In a related story, Fox News reported over the weekend that Aldrin wants to make space a campaign issue in the 2012 presidential election. He said that the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s 1961 speech announcing the goal of landing a man on the Moon by the end of the decade, coming up on May 25, “can be an opportunity for this President [Obama]to make a proclamation about our space future. Unfortunately, I just don’t think that is going to happen.” Aldrin said he will be speaking at a 50th anniversary event about that speech at the JFK Library in Boston and, according to the report, he “feels after that, many people around the world will realize this can be a campaign issue.”
Houston’s KRIV-TV used the launch Monday of the shuttle Endeavour to interview Gene Cernan, the last man to walk on the Moon. Cernan, who has not been a fan of the administration’s space policy, reiterated his concerns in the interview. He called the shuttle’s retirement “premature” in the interview. “The space shuttle has literally just reached its prime. It’s just ready to really perform,” he said. “There are a few of us old fogies who have called Mr. Obama’s space program a mission to nowhere,” he added. “When the last shuttle lands in June, where are we going to go? What is our mission?” Like Aldrin, he harkened back to Kennedy’s vision of space exploration 50 years ago. “We’re abdicating our role.”
There there is the rather unexpected commentary from shock jock Bubba the Love Sponge, the nom de radio of Todd Clem. “You know, a lot of people may be sad to see the shuttle program go, but you know, I actually applaud Obama once on this move,” he said. He sees human spaceflight as using outdated technology and wasting billions of dollars, and believes human spaceflight should instead be privatized. “Privatize NASA and quit throwing away money,” he concluded, saying “taking the toys away from NASA” is good place to start cutting federal spending.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 May 17 at 11:54 am ET Only a handful of members of Congress made it down to Florida for Monday’s launch of the shuttle Endeavour: five members, including local congresswoman Rep. Sandy Adams (R-FL) and Rep. Pete Olson (R-TX), were included on lists of VIPs attending the launch provided by NASA (a sixth, of course, was Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), the wife of STS-134 commander Mark Kelly.) By comparison, nearly 50 members of Congress made it down to Florida for the April 29th attempt that also lured President Obama to the space center.
A couple of members not in attendance did make statements about the launch on Monday, though. Sen. Key Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), the ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee, wished the shuttle crew and other involved with the mission well. (The release, curiously, repeatedly misspells the shuttle’s name as “Endeavor”.) Hutchison also congratulates the team involved with the shuttle’s major payload, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. The senator was a major advocate for flying the billion-dollar multinational experiment when it was dropped from the shuttle manifest as the agency worked towards retiring the shuttle in 2010. A provision of the NASA Authorization Act of 2008 called on NASA to add an additional shuttle mission primarily for flying the AMS, and the agency did so formally in 2009.
Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX), chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, also issued a statement about the launch, providing generic thanks to the mission and acknowledging the shuttle program’s thirty years of operations. Hall added he was “very thankful” that Rep. Giffords could attend the launch as she recovers from the Tucson shooting in January. Giffords is the ranking member of the committee’s space and aeronautics subcommittee.
Then there is Rep. Tom Reed (R-NY), a member not normally known for speaking out on space issues. Speaking with local TV station WETM, Reed makes it clear he’s not a fan of increasing NASA’s budget, at least with federal dollars. “There’s limited dollars to go around so hopefully this can be expanded to a program that is going to find alternative revenue sources,” he told WETM. The reported added that Reed suggested NASA find “private and state resources to help solve the revenue problem.” Because, you know, states are just flush with cash to spend on NASA…
By Jeff Foust on 2011 May 17 at 11:26 am ET The space subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee is holding a hearing Wednesday morning titled “Contributions of Space to National Imperatives”. The hearing was formally announced by the committee only last Friday, the 13th, and the list of witnesses for the hearing was not posted as of Tuesday morning, making this hearing at least a little mysterious.
Update 5 pm: The list of witness has since been posted by the committee:
Mr. Elliot Holokauahi Pulham
Chief Executive Officer
Space Foundation
Mr. Frank Slazer
Vice President of Space Systems
Aerospace Industries Association
Dr. Christopher F. Chyba
Professor of Astrophysics and International Affairs
Director, Program on Science and Global Security, Princeton University
Capt. Frank L. Culbertson Jr. (U.S. Navy, ret.)
Commander
International Space Station Expedition 3, Astronaut (ret.)
Chyba also served on the Augustine Committee and Culbertson is now a senior vice president at Orbital Sciences responsible for its human spaceflight programs.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 May 14 at 1:43 pm ET This coming Tuesday is a special election primary for California’s 36th congressional district, which had been represented by Jane Harman until her retirement earlier this year to lead the Wilson Center in Washington. The top two vote-getters in Tuesday’s primary, regardless of primary affiliation, will move on to a general election in July.
Among those hoping to make the cut Tuesday is an executive with a NewSpace company. Stephen Eisele, one of six Republicans running in the special election, is also head of sales for Excalibur Almaz, the multinational company that is developing a commercial orbital spaceflight program using legacy Russian hardware. Eisele, who joined Excalibur Almaz in 2007, is responsible for the company’s global sales activities; the bio on his web site notes that he specifically works “with the entertainment industry to help foster creative partnerships for future projects.”
Given that background, it’s not surprising that he mentions space issues on his campaign web site.”I am a strong supporter of our US defense and aerospace industry and believe in fostering continued commercialization and incentivizing innovation through competition,” he writes. “Having worked in the Space industry for many years, I am a strong advocate of Space exploration and its benefits to humanity.” He specifically cites the need for export control reform and the use of prizes, but doesn’t go into other details about civil or national security space policy.
Eisele, though, faces a major challenge in the election: the district, which includes many of the South Bay communities in the Los Angeles area from Venice Beach to San Pedro, is heavily Democratic. Given the open nature of the primary, that will make it difficult for any Republican, let alone a relatively unknown newcomer like Eisele, to get enough votes to move on to the July runoff.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 May 13 at 6:57 am ET As noted here yesterday, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), chairman of the appropriations subcommittee whose jurisdiction includes NASA, had some critical remarks about cooperation with China in a symposium on China’s space program held earlier this week. Wolf’s office has posted his prepared statement from that hearing, which goes into more details about his thoughts about both China’s space efforts and NASA.
Much of Wolf’s statement goes into his concerns about China’s plans and its human rights record. “One of the world’s worst human rights abusers does not deserve to be rewarded with greater ‘cooperation’ with the U.S.,” he states. He also talks about the “surprising pace” of China’s space program, including its plans for a space station and, at some time beyond, human missions to the Moon. “In less than 10 years the Chinese have gone from launching their first manned spacecraft to unveiling plans last week for an advanced Chinese space station designed to rival the International Space Station,” he states. (Those plans, actually announced last month and publicly acknowledged even earlier, suggest that the station would hardly “rival” the ISS, at least in size: the total mass of the station would be about 60 tons, compared to over 400 tons for the ISS and about 130 tons for Mir.)
Wolf also took some shots at the Obama Administration for what he perceives to be a lack of support for human space exploration. “Last year, Congress wisely repudiated an administration proposal to take a ‘time out’ from NASA’s Exploration program,” he states. “Fortunately, Congress rebuked this proposal in the 2010 NASA Authorization Act and has provided funding for a robust Exploration program beyond Low Earth Orbit.” He also said NASA’s absence at Wednesday’s hearing on China’s space program “is reflective of this administration’s abysmal record on American leadership in space.” (The administration was represented at the event by Amb. Gregory L. Schulte, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for space policy, who spoke immediately before Rep. Wolf.) “[I]f the United States does not get serious about its own Exploration Program, the next flag planted on the moon may be a Chinese flag,” Wolf says in his testimony. As chairman of a key appropriations subcommittee, it will be interesting to see how he translates those statements into actions, particularly given the fiscal constraints facing the government in the coming fiscal year and beyond.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 May 13 at 6:26 am ET It’s been clear for some time that the budget environment for the next fiscal year (and beyond) will be constrained, given concerns about massive budget deficits and the nation’s growing debt. This week has given another clue about how tight those budgets might be for next year for NASA and other agencies. The House Appropriations Committee released its draft funding allocations for FY12, broken down by subcommittee. For Commerce, Justice, and Science, which includes NASA, the current “notional” spending allocation is $50.2 billion, compared to $53.3 billion in 2011 and nearly $57.7 billion in the administration’s 2012 budget request. In 2011 NASA’s funding of just under $18.5 billion accounted for nearly 35 percent of the subcommittee’s total; if that fraction holds in 2012 NASA would end up with about $17.5 billion, or more than $1 billion less than the agency’s request of $18.7 billion.
Of course, there’s no guarantee that percentage of the overall account will carry over to 2012: appropriators could choose to give NASA more money at the expense of other agencies, or cut it even more. (And the Senate has yet to weigh in with its own budget allocations.) According to the schedule released by House appropriators this week, the Commerce, Justice, and Science budget will be among the last take up by the committee, with a subcommittee markup planned for July 7 and the full committee on July 13.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 May 12 at 12:17 pm ET Nearly a year after the release of an overall national space policy, the Obama Administration is starting a review of “sectoral” policies, starting with the national space transportation policy. In his remarks opening the meeting of the FAA’s Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC) in Washington yesterday, FAA associate administrator for commercial space transportation George Nield stated that the first interagency policy committee meeting regarding updating the policy took place on Tuesday. The policy was last updated by the George W. Bush Administration in December 2004 in a document officially designated NSPD-40. “It’s been several years since that was put out, and things have changed, so we want to look through what we have and see if the existing environment warrants some modifications to the policy,” Nield said.
In a presentation later in the meeting, representatives of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Security Council, who are jointly running the policy review, provided some more details. The review of the policy is just getting started, they noted, with a target of completing the review in four to five months, although they cautioned that timeline is subject to delays. “Issues come up, there are challenges that you have to work through,” Damon Wells of OSTP said. That work would be followed later by reviews of other sectorial policies covering commercial remote sensing and positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT).
Because the review is in its earliest stages, officials said they weren’t sure yet if the review would result in just tweaks to the 2004 policy or a wholesale rewriting. “It’s useful to look at that document for tone and for the level of detail,” Wells said, but added it was too soon to say what level of changes would be made to the policy. “We’ve got to go through the conversation first.”
One thing the administration is doing upfront is to solicit input from industry. As part of the interagency review, the FAA asked COMSTAC to provide a 10-page paper later this month; they are also accepting two-page addenda from companies that want to address specific topics. Some of the items that COMSTAC considered in a working group meeting Tuesday that may work their way into that final paper include support for NASA’s commercial crew development effort and the FAA licensing of launches of missions carried out under that program, adding a section of the policy to specifically address suborbital spaceflight activities, and support for technology development and improvement of ground systems, range infrastructure, and in-space propulsion technologies.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 May 12 at 7:17 am ET A proposal being circulated to use shuttle-derived elements to develop at least a demonstration of a heavy-lift launch vehicle is generating criticism from some quarters, the Orlando Sentinel reported Thursday. The architecture under consideration for the initial Space Launch System would be similar to the Jupiter-130 concept from DIRECT, placing the Orion capsule on top of a modified external tank with three space shuttle main engines and two solid rocket boosters. That’s raised some concerns that NASA may not compete the ultimate design of the SLS, instead modifying existing Constellation-era contracts for various components of the vehicle.
NASA administrator Charles Bolden, speaking at a meeting of the FAA’s Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC) Wednesday in Washington, denied that the was any intent by NASA to “no-bid” the design of the SLS. “We are not headed on a no-bid process,” Bolden said in response to a question by COMSTAC member Berin Szoka (who is also quoted in the Sentinel article.) Bolden said that NASA is currently trying to determine if existing development contracts “fit the scope” of the agency’s exploration plans and if the agency can legally transition those contracts to new efforts. If those happen, NASA is also examining “at what point do we transition from existing contracts to open up the aperture so that other companies than those who presently have contracts have an opportunity to compete.” He concluded that “we’re going to have open competition at some point.” Asked by Szoka why that couldn’t start now, Bolden responded, “I want to keep things moving and preserve the industrial base to the best of my ability right now.”
At about the same time Bolden was talking about heavy-lift contracting, Congressman Frank Wolf (R-VA) was raising another warning about US cooperation with China. Speaking at a symposium on China’s space program held at the US Capitol by the US-China Commission, Wolf reiterated concerns he brought up at a hearing of his appropriations subcommittee last week that the Obama Administration might be trying to circumvent language in the final FY2011 continuing resolution that prevents NASA and OSTP from cooperating with China. “I take this blatant disregard for the law very seriously and the committee is currently reviewing its options,” he said, according to Space Policy Online’s summary of his talk.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 May 11 at 6:00 am ET Yesterday we noted new legislation introduced last week to reform satellite export controls by giving the president the ability to remove satellite and related components from the US Munitions List (USML), although still prohibiting their export to China. However, some caution that the introduction of that legislation doesn’t mean reform is right around the corner.
During a meeting of the Export Controls Working Group of the FAA’s Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC), congressional staffers, speaking on a not-for-attribution basis, warned that a couple of obstacles will hinder any near-term progress. One is the so-called “Section 1248 report”, after the section of the FY2010 defense authorization act that required the Defense Department to prepare “an assessment of the national security risks of removing satellites and related components from the United States Munitions List.” That report was due in April 2010, but only in the last few days has Congress received an “interim” report. That interim report, according to one staffer, concluded that there are “no unacceptable security risks” of moving commercial satellites and related components off the list. Until the administration releases a final report, not expected until late this year, though, that staffer expected Congress not to act on any reform effort. (Space News has more details on the details of that report.)
The second factor is the administration’s ongoing export control reform efforts, which seek to unify various export control lists and systems. (That work is one reason why the Section 1248 report is so late.) Such an effort is a major, and slow, process. “This is a momentous undertaking,” said a panelist. “Sisyphus had an easier job than what they’re attempting to do with this export control reform.” The thinking on Capitol Hill, according to the panelist, is that Congress prefers to wait to see how that reform effort works out before moving to make changes of its own. There’s also skepticism that the reform effort will work out as the administration has proposed: while there’s support for a unified IT system and even a single, tiered export control list, there’s less support for two other major aspects of the reform effort, creation of a single licensing agency and single enforcement agency.
Panelists also noted one of the challenges for proponents for export control reform has been the difficulty in identifying specific negative impacts on US industry caused by moving satellites and related components to the USML n the late 1990s. While the share of the commercial satellite market held by American manufacturers dropped after that change, other factors could also play a role in that change, and various reports on export control policy have not been able to quantify the its effect on American industry. What has changed minds on Congress about the issue, though, according to one staffer, is the introduction in recent years of “ITAR-free” satellites by European manufacturer Thales Alenia Space. Those satellites, which contain no US-built components, can be freely exported to China for launch there. “That was proof that control of satellites on the ITAR is working against US interests,” said a staffer.
“I think there is a lot of support for moving commercial satellites and related components off the list. I think it’s just a question of timing,” one panelist concluded. And that timing is not particularly urgent.
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