By Jeff Foust on 2011 May 10 at 5:48 am ET Ah, export control reform. The space industry has talked about the subject for over a decade, since shortly after Congress put satellites and related components on the US Munitions List in the late 1990s, subjecting them to the far more rigorous requirements of ITAR. While there have procedural changes during this time that have helped streamline the export licensing process, efforts for more fundamental changes, including removing satellites and their components from the USML, have so far fallen short. But that doesn’t mean people haven’t stopped trying.
Last week Rep. C. A. “Dutch” Ruppersberger (D-MD) introduced HR 1727, the “Strengthening America’s Satellite Industry Act”. (The legislation was oddly squeezed in between two other unrelated bills introduced by Ruppersberger the same day, the Child Care Protection Act of 2011 and the Right Start Child Care and Education Act of 2011.) The bill covers a variety of issues associated with export controls, but the key provision of bill for the satellite industry is section 5, which states that “the President is authorized to remove satellites and related components from the United States Munitions List”. That’s similar to a provision in a State Department authorization bill in the previous Congress; that bill passed the House but died in the Senate. Both the older legislation and Ruppersberger’s new bill include language that would still ban the export of such components to China. If passed, the bill would likely support ongoing export control reform efforts by the Obama Administration, which seeks to reduce the number of items on the USML but increase protections on those items that remain.
Export control reform will also be featured this Thursday in a hearing by the full House Committee on Foreign Affairs, although it’s not clear if the hearing will get down to details such as satellites. Separately, the Export Controls Working Group of the FAA’s Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC) will be meeting this afternoon, featuring a panel discussion on the “politics of export control” with two congressional staffers.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 May 6 at 8:02 am ET Thursday morning the space subcommittee of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee took up a topic that typically gets little attention: commercial space transportation, and the regulation thereof, as it examined the fiscal year 2012 budget proposal for the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST). The office’s proposed major budget increase ($26.6 million in 2012, a 75% increase over the $15.2 million it received in 2010) was the subject of considerable scrutiny by committee members, although a bigger, underlying problem may be a lack of familiarity with the office and its activities.
Some members of the committee expressed skepticism about the need for an enhanced AST budget. The office’s head, FAA associate administrator George Nield, cited a projected spike in commercial launch activity due to both commercial ISS cargo, and later crew, missions, as well as commercial suborbital spaceflight. Nield said he expects “several dozen” commercial launches that will require licenses or experimental permits from his office in 2012, primarily from suborbital ventures. That’s far more than the single-digit level of commercial launch activity overseen by AST for each of the last several years.
“You’re asking for us to increase your budget for a ‘what-if’,” Rep. Sandy Adams (R-FL) said to Nield towards the end of the hearing. “I have grave concerns about that.” Adams said that after another witness, Gerald Dillingham of the GAO, noted that his office could not justify the requested jump in spending. “We have argued that maybe incrementally, based on the industry, one could start making that move in that direction,” he said, referring to increasing AST’s budget, “rather than the ‘big bang theory’.” Adams was also far more combative than her colleagues on the committee, expressing frustration when she could not get what she thought was a simple answer on how long it took AST to provide a reentry license to SpaceX last year. (That was apparently because of some miscommunication between Adams and Nield, who had been trying to explain that the office issued the license about two weeks after receiving a complete application; Adams was citing one year, which may date back to the initial submission of the application that only much later was deemed substantially complete.)
Another area of attention was on the eight-year restriction on AST’s ability to issue safety regulations included in the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act of 2004 and expires in December 2012. There are efforts by industry to extend that deadline given the lack of flight experience built up by commercial operators during that time. In fact, a provision tucked away at the end of HR 658, an FAA reauthorization bill passed by the House last month, changes that provision from eight years after enactment of the 2004 legislation to eight years after “the first licensed launch of a space flight participant”. There seemed to be little objection to that extension, although there was some discussion about why that restriction should be eight years long. Dillingham said it wasn’t clear to the GAO “what the basis was for the eight years”, while another witness, Henry Hertzfeld of George Washington University, suggested that in place of an “arbitrary” time limit, the extension should be based instead on indicators “of the maturity of the industry and the risks involved.”
One subcommittee member, Rep. David Wu (D-OR), seemed particularly concerned about the fact that commercial spaceflight is not held to the same rigorous safety standards as commercial aviation. “I am absolutely stunned about that characterization of the future of commercial human spaceflight,” he said, warning later that an accident involving a crewed commercial vehicle “could potentially flatten the space program for a period of years.” Nield responded that any form of transportation has risks and fatal accidents. “The nation needs to understand that that is part of the risk of exploring the unknown, of doing new things,” he said.
One topic that got very little discussion was a proposal in the 2012 budget proposal for AST for a $5-million low cost access to space prize. Subcommittee chairman Rep. Steven Palazzo (R-MS) suggested in his opening testimony that such efforts should be left to NASA. “It is my view that NASA is doing a more than sufficient job funding new technologies and capabilities through aggressive use of Space Act Agreements,” he said. Given the constrained fiscal environment, he added, “I question the wisdom of implementing another form of federal largesse.”
A general, if unsurprising, theme from the hearing, though, was that many members just aren’t familiar with the roles and responsibilities of AST. Part of that is no doubt because many of the subcommittee’s members, including Chairman Palazzo, are freshmen who are perhaps getting their first exposure to the office, but even more experienced members expressed misunderstandings about the role of the office and its future plans during the course of the hearing. As the office seeks additional funding for what it anticipates to be a much higher level of commercial activity, industry advocates may need to step up their outreach to Congress on just why those additional resources are necessary and important.
[Disclaimer: my employer does work for AST, but is not involved in licensing or permitting activities for the office, nor the development of Congressional testimony.]
By Jeff Foust on 2011 May 5 at 7:05 am ET One of the few specific space policy provisions included in the final continuing resolution that funds the federal government through the rest of fiscal year 2011 has to do with cooperation with China–or, rather, prohibiting cooperation with China. The CR prevents NASA and OSTP from using any funds to “develop, design, plan, promulgate, implement, or execute a bilateral policy, program, order, or contract of any kind to participate, collaborate, or coordinate bilaterally in any way with China or any Chinese-owned company” unless specifically authorized in a future law. That also prevents NASA from using any funds “to effectuate the hosting of official Chinese visitors at facilities belonging to or utilized by” the space agency. That would appear to put the brakes on any prospects for cooperation with China, at least through this fiscal year.
However, in testimony before the CJS subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee on Wednesday, OSTP director John Holdren suggested that the administration has found a “loophole” in that ban, according to ScienceNow. The White House has concluded, he said, that the provision doesn’t extend to “prohibiting interactions that are part of the president’s constitutional authority to conduct negotiations.” That includes, he said, a bilateral agreement on scientific cooperation between the two countries that dates back to 1979.
Holdren, Space News reported, has pragmatic reasons for seeking cooperation with China on space exploration in particular, including a future human expedition to Mars. “If China is going to be, by 2030, the biggest economy in the world… it could certainly be to our benefit to share the costs of such an expensive venture with them and with others,” he said.
That did not sit well with some members of the subcommittee, including chairman Frank Wolf (R-VA), who has been very critical of China, in particular its human-rights record. An “irate” Wolf, as described by Space News, criticized the idea of Sino-American space cooperation, “repeatedly pounding a hand against the table top in front of him.” However, according to ScienceNow, Wolf appeared to accept Holdren’s constitutional explanation, asking for consultation on “a case-by-case basis” when any administration dealing with China might conflict with the law. By contrast, Rep. John Culberson (R-TX), another subcommittee member, was not assuaged at all by Holdren’s statements, warning Holdren that “you’re endangering your funding and NASA’s funding” by contemplating any cooperation with China. “You have a huge problem on your hands.”
By Jeff Foust on 2011 May 3 at 7:39 pm ET A few space policy items from the last few days you might have missed given the other news:
Nearly two years after being named to lead a committee to study the nation’s human spaceflight plans, Norm Augustine remains concerned about the funding allocated to those now-revised efforts. “I think with regard to this year’s budget, the match is reasonable,” he said in an interview with MSNBC. “But if we’re to have a program of the type that we described as attractive in the report that we put out, there’s not enough money in the out years to do it.” If that additional funding, on the order of $3 billion a year, is added, Augustine says the agency’s current effort is “the right program, in my judgment.”
Augustine added that he’s optimistic about the prospects of commercial spaceflight, saying “we will eventually have widespread tourism into orbit”. He also appears to advocate for propellant depots, saying the government should provide contracts to commercial firms to transport those propellants into orbit in a manner analogous to the airmail contracts of the 1920s. As for NASA’s ongoing commercial crew efforts, Augustine said that is progressing “better than I expected”.
Augustine acknowledges that some space veterans “and some of my most admired friends” don’t agree with that plan, citing in particular Neil Armstrong. Another would likely be Gene Cernan, who told the Houston Chronicle that, unlike Augustine, he doesn’t “have a lot of confidence” in some elements of the commercial sector to take over transporting astronauts to LEO. While some companies, he says, are “highly qualified”, others are “young entrepreneurs with a lot of money, and for them it’s kind of like a hobby”, an apparent reference to SpaceX in particular (who he does not mention by name.) He adds that he thinks that “there are wiser heads in Congress and I believe they will prevail”, apparently through making sure NASA develops the heavy-lift vehicle included in the NASA authorization act last year.
On Sunday, Florida Today examined what happened to the $40 million in economic aid promised to the Space Coast to help mitigate the effects of the end of the shuttle program. That funding was promised by President Obama in a speech at the Kennedy Space Center last year, but last week the newspaper reported the funding was not included in the final FY11 continuing resolution that Congress passed last month. The funding was to come from NASA’s Cross-Agency Support account, but when funding for that was cut by $83 million over 2010 levels, the workforce funding bore the brunt of the cut.
The article goes on to curiously note that the workforce funding was not included in either the agency’s 2012 budget proposal or in the House budget resolution. However, there would be no reason to include it in the 2012 budget request since the $40 million was a one-time item to be funded only for 2011 (and FY11 spending levels were not finalized for about two months after the FY12 proposal was released), and the House budget resolution, which also came out before FY11 was wrapped up, did not go into that level of detail.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 April 30 at 2:23 pm ET Just over a year ago President Obama visited the Kennedy Space Center to give a major space policy speech about his vision for NASA’s future in space exploration. Yesterday, the president returned to KSC, a visit originally intended to watch the launch of space shuttle Endeavour on its final mission. Although the launch was scrubbed over three hours before launch, the president still made the stop with his family, spending a couple hours at the Cape before he continued on to Miami for a commencement address.
Yesterday’s stopover, though, was a much lower profile visit. There was no speech or other statement to the media; a handful of pool reporters trailed the president for much of his time at the center. The president apparently didn’t intend to use the visit to make any significant statement about his space policy. In a press conference at KSC about the shuttle launch scrub after the president left, KSC director Bob Cabana offered only general comments about what the president said during his visit. “He was extremely supportive of what we were doing,” Cabana said. “I think it was great that he came down today. I think the family really enjoyed the visit.”
Later, Cabana said, “The president supports our spaceflight program. He’s very supportive of what we’re doing,” adding that the president “is supportive of us building a large rocket and crew vehicle to go beyond our home planet” as well as the commercial crew program. “Everybody that he ran into, he thanked them for what we’re doing,” Cabana said. “He enjoyed his tour and seeing all that he saw, and he wants us to keep doing good things.”
Those comments fell short of some expectations for the president to say more about NASA’s future in a region that is facing the impact of thousands of layoffs when the shuttle program ends later this year. “Obama had a parallel purpose for the trip — to ease the political damage of job losses in the space industry and reaffirm his commitment to space exploration,” POLITICO reported. His visit “highlights the need for the president to mend fences in a state stung by proposed cuts to the space program,” The Hill stated. It’s not clear that his visit did much to ease damage and mend fences.
Both articles noted that President Obama isn’t responsible for the decision to cancel the shuttle (which dates back to the unveiling of President George W. Bush’s Vision for Space Exploration in January 2004), and POLITICO in particular that his space policy isn’t necessarily what one would expect from this White House: “For a president described by Republicans as a big-government liberal, even a socialist, his space policy has cut against the stereotype, experts say.”
However, the issue of jobs on the Space Coast is something that Republicans are likely to bring up in their 2012 campaigns there against both the president and Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL), who will be running for reelection. On the same day as the president’s visit, the campaign of Republican challenger George LeMieux issued a video lambasting Nelson for allowing what it claims will be 23,000 lost jobs when the shuttle ends. “Florida, we have a problem, and his name is Bill Nelson,” read the graphics on the 42-second video, which features no narration or other comments by LeMieux. “Bill Nelson is letting NASA die on his watch.” The campaign, by contrast, positions LeMieux as “a champion for our space program and a defender of our American exceptionalism,” without offering any specifics about what he would do differently.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 April 28 at 1:22 pm ET The space subcommittee of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee is holding a hearing next Thursday, May 5, on the FY2012 budget request of the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST). George Nield, the associate administrator of commercial space transportation at the FAA, is the only scheduled witness so far.
The FY2012 budget proposal for FAA/AST (included in the overall FAA budget proposal) requests $26.6 million for the office in 2012, up considerably from the $15.2 million it got in FY2010 (the 2011 budget is uncertain because of long battle to finalize FY11 spending government-wide.) the increase is largely due to the planned creation of the Commercial Spaceflight Technical Center at the Kennedy Space Center, as well as a proposed $5-million Low Cost Access to Space Initiative prize announced by FAA/AST in February.
In addition to FAA/AST’s budget, there are moves afoot in industry to adjust existing law regarding commercial spaceflight that could come up at the hearing. The Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act of 2004 gives FAA/AST the authority to issue regulations “governing the design or operation of a launch vehicle to protect the health and safety of crew and space flight participants”, but for the first eight years afte the law’s enactment, those regulations are limited to circumstances that resulted in, or posed the “high risk” of causing, serious or fatal injury to crew or spaceflight participants. The idea was to give industry time to build up experience in commercial human spaceflight and identifying best practices before codifying those practices in regulation.
That eight-year period expires on December 23, 2012, but the industry hasn’t developed as quickly as advocates expected in the heady days of 2004, when SpaceShipOne was winning the Ansari X PRIZE and other ventures appeared to be following close behind. While no one expects FAA/AST to start issuing regulations willy-nilly next December, the industry would like to extend that current restriction to provide industry assurance it won’t. “I’m not saying the FAA wants to do that, or would do that,” Jim Muncy of Polispace said during a session of the Space Access ’11 conference in Phoenix earlier this month, “but bureaucratic organizations tend to exercise their authority.”
Because the industry hasn’t developed as quickly, some in the industry are looking to reset that eight-year “learning period” through legislation, and have met with people in Congress about that. “We are setting up as an eight-year period from the first flight of a spaceflight participant, so that it’s literally eight years of learning,” said Muncy. He said at Space Access ’11 that the House Science Committee showed interest in holding hearings on this and then marking up legislation for this provision. This change, he added, might be rolled up into another proposal to include third-party indemnification for spaceflight participants, similar to existing indemnification for commercial satellite launches.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 April 27 at 9:08 pm ET Speaking at the Kennedy Space Center just over a year ago, President Obama promised $40 million for “regional economic growth and job creation” on Florida’s Space Coast, $35 million of it in in the form of grants through the Commerce Department to support business in the area. Late today, though, Florida Today reported that the grant program won’t be funded in FY2011. The article is short on details: it claims the funds were cut from the final continuing resolution (CR) that funded the government in 2011, although it’s not clear if Congress explicitly failed to fund the program or if NASA and the Commerce Department, as they drew up spending plans as required by the CR, decided not to fund the program. A spokesman for Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) blamed “extremists bent on wildly and blindly slashing the budget” for the cut. The other $5 million, intended to establish a commercial spaceflight technical center run by the FAA at the Cape, apparently also is not funded.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 April 27 at 6:45 am ET In a related story to the previous post about Sen. Marco Rubio’s (R-FL) op-ed on human spaceflight, the Daily Caller reports on similar comments made by George LeMieux, the Florida Republican planning to run for the Senate against incumbent Democrat Bill Nelson. (LeMieux served in the Senate in 2009 and 2010, filling out the remainder of Sen. Mel Martinez’s term after he retired; that seat is now held by Rubio.) According to the report, LeMieux talked to reporters Tuesday about the importance of cutting spending—except when it comes to spaceflight:
“There are very few things the federal government should be doing,” LeMieux said during a conference call with reporters Tuesday. “But one of the few things the federal government can only do is space exploration. We are seeing good private sector folks that are trying to go into low-Earth orbit and that’s great and we should encourage them, but the only folks that are going to go to an asteroid or go to Mars is going to be NASA.”
The article added that LeMieux called cuts to NASA “criminal”. The Daily Caller sees a “real dilemma” for Florida Republicans on this issue. “You see, space ships are to the Sunshine State what farm subsidies are to Iowa,” the article claims: efforts politicians back even if they may clash with broader ideological principles. “Almost all potential Florida up-and-comers looking to make waves on the national scene must defend NASA to make it anywhere beyond Tallahassee.” This could also be true for a few places outside Florida, like Houston, Huntsville, and northern Utah, which all have significant local economic stakes in government human spaceflight efforts in particular; note Rep. Mo Brooks’ (R-AL) comments earlier this week.
And the irony of all this is that while LeMieux said that only NASA can go to asteroids and Mars, Elon Musk is claiming he can send people to Mars in 10-20 years.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 April 26 at 8:19 pm ET In an op-ed published today in the Orlando Sentinel, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) worries about the future of NASA’s human spaceflight efforts under the current administration. “The president’s space policy is jeopardizing America’s longstanding commitment to manned space exploration,” he claims, citing the administration’s efforts to cancel Constellation (which was “our most reliable path to low-earth orbit,” he argues). In addition, he is not convinced the administration is serious about supporting the Space Launch System and Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle included in last year’s NASA authorization act, noting that the administration requested $1.2 billion less for them in its 2012 budget proposal than what was authorized last year.
“[B]y not having our own capabilities to transport Americans into space, our reliance on foreign countries for manned space exploration will jeopardize many of the national security functions that have made NASA’s work so vital,” he adds, although what exactly those “national security functions” that NASA performs are not specified. But what about the role of US-based commercial providers to ferry astronauts to and from LEO? Rubio is silent on the subject, curiously: he makes no mention of NASA’s commercial crew efforts, either positive or negative, even though they have the potential to end NASA’s reliance on Russia for crew transport sooner than the SLS and MPCV.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 April 26 at 7:09 am ET Houston area members of Congress are continuing to complain about NASA’s decision not to award the city with a retired shuttle, nearly two weeks after NASA announced the sites that will host a retired orbiter. In an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle on Sunday, Reps. Gene Green (D-TX) and John Culberson (R-TX) complain that the oversight “is more than just a disappointment – it’s an insult.” Interestingly, while they note they signed a letter to NASA administrator Charles Bolden asking him why Houston was left out, they make no mention of the two bills introduced in the House since the decision, HR 1536 and HR 1590, seeking to overturn the decision. (Green is a cosponsor of HR 1536, while Culberson has signed to neither.) Instead, the two appear to be more focused on future opportunities: “we will continue to fight to ensure that Houston will continue to guide humankind further into the wondrous realm of space by supplying our nation with a robust human space exploration program that is essential to our national security and leadership in the world.”
At a luncheon Monday in Huntsville, Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) complained about a lack of support for NASA from the White House. “I am afraid that NASA does not have a friend in the White House,” he said, the Huntsville Times reported, when asked whether NASA will push to have the new Space Launch System (SLS) heavy-lifter in service by 2016. Brooks added that Bolden “did nothing to fight a $300 million budget cut to the space agency.” What budget cut he’s referring to isn’t clear: the final FY11 continuing resolution (which Brooks voted for earlier this month) funded NASA at about $240 million below FY10 levels, and more than $500 million below the FY11 request. The Times article also reports that Brooks said the Huntsville area “fared well out of the recent 2011 budget crisis”, including $1.8 billion for the SLS, while also calling for state legislators to pass a resolution for a constitutional convention to consider a balanced-budget amendment.
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