By Jeff Foust on 2011 March 3 at 7:25 am ET NASA administrator Charles Bolden made his first visit to Capitol Hill Wednesday to defend the FY2012 budget request, encountering criticism of the proposal from some members of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee. Members such as committee chairman Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX) criticized a budget proposal that did not align with the authorization act, with more funding than expected for commercial crew development but less for other human spaceflight accounts, in particular the new heavy-lift launcher and crew capsule. From the committee’s press release about the hearing:
Chairman Hall has long supported the development of commercial capabilities as a worthy goal, but not at the expense of ensuring a safe reliable system to get American astronauts into space. Discussing the NASA Authorization Act, Hall said, “Commercial crew was not ignored, but to be perfectly clear, it was not – and is not – Congress’ first priority. Yet the Administration’s FY2012 budget proposal completely flips the priorities of the Act, significantly increasing Commercial Crew funding while making deep cuts to the Human Exploration Capabilities accounts which Congress clearly intended to serve as our assured access to space.”
The committee’s ranking member, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), was also critical of elements of the budget request: “I had thought that the Administration agreed with the compromise that was enacted into law, but I am afraid that I do not see it reflected in the proposed NASA budget request. The request cuts NASA’s overall budget plan and its human exploration budget even further than before, delays the development of the next generation vehicles, and eliminates any concrete destinations or milestones beyond the International Space Station.”
Bolden defended the emphasis on commercial crew in the budget request. “I am certain that commercial entities can deliver,” he said, as reported by AFP, adding that we must “become unafraid of risks.”
In her release, Rep. Johnson said that “the most constructive approach for all of us here is to consider the budget request that you will present today as the beginning of the discussion, not the end.” But then, a budget request is rarely accepted without debate.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 March 2 at 7:36 am ET Yesterday the House passed another continuing resolution (CR), providing another two weeks of funding to keep the government operating. With the Senate willing to support this CR, the threat of a government shutdown at the end of this week has been eliminated (or, more accurately, pushed back for two weeks.)
The CR has a mix of good and bad news for NASA. The good news is that agency is not included in the $4 billion in spending cuts the House put into the CR. However, the CR does not appear to contain any additional provisions beyond those cuts, which means that a provision dating back to the FY10 appropriations bill preventing NASA from terminating any Constellation programs, even those not continued under the new authorization act, remains in force. (Language removing that provision was included in the full-year CR, HR 1, passed by the House last month, but this CR extends previous ones and does not refer to HR 1, which the Senate has not taken up yet.)
By Jeff Foust on 2011 March 2 at 7:19 am ET In a letter released Tuesday, a group of 56 “space leaders”, ranging from former astronauts and NASA officials to industry executives, called on Congress to fully fund NASA’s commercial crew development program, claiming it is “critical to the health of the Nation’s human spaceflight efforts.” Funding for that program is 2011 is still pending a final appropriations bill, and the 2012 budget debate kicks into gear this week with hearings on the NASA budget today in the House Science Committee and tomorrow in a subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee.
In the letter, the authors argue that funding commercial crew can reduce the agency’s costs and thus free up funding to carry out other elements of the agency’s plans as specified in the 2010 authorization act. “Funding NASA’s Commercial Crew program would lower the cost of access to low Earth orbit, thus enabling more of NASA’s budget to be applied to its focus on exploration beyond low Earth orbit, and better enabling the kind of program laid out in NASA’s authorization bill,” the letter states, underlined for emphasis. It adds that commercial crew “represents one of the best means to prevent damage to NASA’s human spaceflight capabilities in the face of across the board spending cuts being discussed by Congress.”
By Jeff Foust on 2011 March 1 at 6:11 am ET The House is expected to take up today a short-term continuing resolution (CR) to keep the government operating for two more weeks and thus avoiding a government shutdown at the end of the week. The House CR would include $4 billion in cuts, although none of them would appear to directly affect NASA or other space activities. The White House and Senate leadership would prefer a month-long CR to allow more time to work out a final FY11 spending bill, although House Speaker John Boehner prefers the two-week version, POLITICO reports.
Another stopgap funding bill isn’t the only thing on appropriators’ minds in the House. On Thursday morning NASA administrator Charles Bolden will appear before the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee to discuss the administration’s FY12 budget request. That will be just a day after Bolden testifies on the same topic before the House Science, Space and Technology Committee.
As Congress weighs NASA’s future funding, the space agency’s Indian counterpart is getting some good budgetary news. India’s 2011 budget includes a 35-percent increase for the Indian Space Research Organisation: 66.26 billion rupees (US$1.47 billion) for 2011-12 versus 48.8 billion rupees ($1.08 billion) in 2010-11, according to Indian government budget documents. Some of that additional funding will go towards India’s nascent human spaceflight plans as well as its Chandrayaan-2 robotic lunar mission.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 February 28 at 11:23 am ET Speaking this morning at the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference in Orlando, George Nield, the FAA associate administrator for commercial space transportation, announced that the FAA’s 2012 budget request includes $5 million for a space access prize. “I’m a big proponent of the value of prizes to stimulate innovation, so I’m pleased to announce that in the president’s 2012 budget request, he recommended that we receive $5 million for a Low Cost Access to Space Prize,” Nield said during a speech in the conference’s opening plenary. “We plan to work with both NASA and the DOD to discuss how best to implement this program, but I think our initiative has a lot of potential to benefit this crowd, so please stay tuned.”
The FAA budget request does indeed include a passage about this proposed prize (turn to page 144 of the PDF):
In addition, $5 million is requested to establish a program for incentivizing advancements in space transportation by non-governmental organizations. The Low Cost Access to Space Incentive would provide a $5 million award designed to jump-start the creation of an entirely new market segment, with immediate benefits to private industry, NASA, the Department of Defense, and academia. Consistent with the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010, FAA shall consult widely both within and outside the Federal Government, in defining the scope and criteria for the competition. This program also supports the President’s Directive for “agencies to increase their ability to promote and harness innovation by using policy tools such as prizes and challenges.â€
It wasn’t clear from Nield’s talk or the language in the budget request whether this prize will be orbital spaceflight, suborbital spaceflight, or both.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 February 26 at 9:44 am ET The current continuing resolution that funds the federal government, including NASA, expires in less than a week: midnight on Friday, March 4. Unless Congress can agree to a new funding bill, be it a full FY11 appropriations act, as the House passed last week with HR 1, or another short-term stopgap bill, the federal government will be shut down—just as NASA is wrapping up the STS-133 shuttle mission to the ISS.
For the mission itself, a shutdown would have little or no impact. “For the mission that’s flying we’d probably consider most of the folks mission critical personnel, and that’s pretty much transparent to us,” said Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA associate administrator for space operations, in the STS-133 post-launch press conference late Thursday (skip ahead to the 17:50 mark to catch the question from Craig Covault and Gerstermaier’s response.) “I think from a top-level standpoint we’ll be able to just press on and continue kind of the way we’re heading.”
How it might affect preparations for the final two shuttle missions is less clear. “We’ll kind of see what happens. We haven’t really done any detailed contingency planning yet,” Gerstermaier said of the agency’s overall planning.
While a shutdown might not affect the current shuttle mission or ISS operations, much of the rest of the agency might be severely affected. The AP report that during the last government shutdown, in the mid-1990s, only seven percent of NASA employees were at work. It’s not clear whether that percentage would be higher, or even lower, if there’s a government shutdown down in a week, but it’s likely a lot of activities would not be deemed “mission critical” and thus put on hold until a new appropriations bill is passed.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 February 24 at 7:10 am ET In an interview with CNN, NASA administrator Charles Bolden suggested that NASA stretched out the shuttle program far longer than it should have. “It was time for the shuttle to go a long time ago, in deference to a vehicle that was going to take humans to the Moon,” he said, suggesting that the Challenger accident 25 years ago forced NASA “to stick with the shuttle and break off our exploration dreams for a while.” He also criticized the situation that has developed over the last several years, with a gap of several years between the impending retirement of the shuttle and a replacement system to carry US astronauts to orbit. “What is not acceptable is the fact that the most powerful nation in the world, the United States of America, finds itself in a situation that we didn’t do the proper planning to have a vehicle in place to replace shuttle when it lands its last landing in June,” he said.
(He added that we now have the opportunity “to pick up where we left off, pre-Challenger” and resume plans for human exploration beyond Earth orbit, adding that the president told NASA to put people on Mars “by 2030″. Actually, in his April 15, 2010, speech at KSC, President Obama set no specific deadline for landing humans on Mars, instead saying that by the mid-2030s humans could orbit Mars, and “a landing on Mars will follow”.)
In the near term, though, there’s the issue of flying out the remaining shuttle flights, including STS-135, the mission added in last year’s authorization bill intended in part to reduce, albeit only incrementally, the post-shuttle gap. Without a FY11 budget, though, there’s the question of whether NASA will be able to afford that additional flight. Bolden, in his CNN interview, said it likely would. “We are budgeted for 135 and unless something disastrous happens, it’s our intent to fly it,” he said. Shuttle managers are also confident the money will be there. “We have a plan in place to shuffle the money around and fund the flight, STS-135,” said shuttle launch integration Mike Moses, the Orlando Sentinel reports, adding that “we’ve gotten the letter from headquarters saying we’ll be able to fly STS-135 regardless of what happens in the next budget.”
Less confident, though, is Rep. Pete Olson (R-TX), who told Houston TV station KTRK that “it’s still a fight” over whether NASA gets sufficient funding, suggesting yet again that money be taken from NASA earth sciences programs to pay for the shuttle mission, should it come to that. While the House has passed a continuing resolution (CR) to fund the government through the rest of fiscal year 2011 (cutting NASA’s budget by several hundred million dollars in the process), key senators oppose the bill, raising the odds of a government shutdown when the current CR expires at the end of next week, which could further complicate the agency’s plans.
“We’re optimistic it’s going to be there when we get there,” Chris Ferguson, commander of STS-135, told KTRK. “If it is, fantastic and if it’s not, well it’s the will of taxpayers.”
By Jeff Foust on 2011 February 22 at 7:38 am ET Some miscellaneous items from the last few days:
It’s not posted yet on the committee’s web site, but the full House Science Committee will hold a hearing on Wednesday, March 2, on NASA’s FY12 budget request. NASA administrator Charles Bolden is the sole witness scheduled to testify.
Last week the Senate Commerce Committee announced the chairs and ranking members of its subcommittees. To no one’s surprise, Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) will return as chairman of the science and space subcommittee. The committee’s new ranking member is freshman Sen. John Boozman (R-AR). However, it’s likely that full committee ranking member Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) will continue to play a major role in any space topics during this Congress.
Last week the full House approved an amendment to its 2011 continuing resolution to transfer nearly $300 million from NASA to a Justice Department community policing program. The amendment was introduced by a Democrat, but passed thanks to the votes of 70 Republicans, who joined 158 Republicans to approve the amendment. So what was the reaction of Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL)? He blames the Obama Administration: “If the White House had argued for NASA among House Democrats, we would have protected NASA from this cut,” he told the Huntsville Times. Of course, if those 70 Republicans hadn’t voted for it, the amendment wouldn’t have passed regardless of what the Democrats did, as the GOP is now in the majority, but Brooks offers no explanation why 70 of his fellow House Republicans voted for the amendment.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 February 19 at 6:43 am ET In a plenary address Friday afternoon at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, presidential science advisor John Holdren devoted a few minutes towards the end of his speech about what the administration has done in the area of NASA policy. The speech certainly contained no surprises for anyone who has been following the topic the last couple of years, yet provided a good summary of the administration’s thinking on the topic to an audience that, by and large, hasn’t followed the subject as closely.
“This is kind of a complicated story,” Holdren said by way of introduction. “NASA has been a big challenge for this administration because we inherited a space program in disarray at NASA, in some degree of demoralization, after years of mismatch of resources and the vision.” He described the Bush Administration’s “grand vision” of returning humans to the Moon, but noted the required budget resources were never provided, even while science and aeronautics programs “had been gutted in NASA to feed Constellation.” He then discussed how the Augustine Committee examined that situation and had concluded that Constellation “was unexecutable for any plausible budget scenario.” His description of how Ares 1 and Orion would not be ready until 2017, while the ISS, the initial destination of that system, would be deorbited in 2016, generated some laughter in the audience.
“So we developed a plan, a comprehensive plan, to rebalance NASA’s programs,” he said, discussing the extension of the ISS to at least 2020, commercial crew and cargo development, more science and technology development work, and “looking at more diverse destinations for crewed missions that could be visited more expeditiously than going to Mars and landing astronauts on its surface, or even returning to the surface of the Moon.” He showed a picture from President Obama’s visit to Cape Canaveral in April, walking with Elon Musk at the SpaceX pad with the Falcon 9 in the background. Holdren noted that since that photo op the Falcon 9 has flown successfully twice, including December’s Dragon test flight.
“There were a lot of arguments about the president’s proposals,” he said, in perhaps a minor understatement, eventually leading to the NASA Authorization Act last fall. That bill was a “compromise” that he said “contained quite a lot that the president wanted and that the NASA leadership wanted, but also reflected a congressional preference for using existing technologies and contracts to develop a replacement for Constellation’s heavy-lift rocket by the end of 2016, rather than spending more time developing new technologies and getting that heavy-lift rocket somewhat later.” That bill “had a lot of what we wanted and it was the best we were going to do, so we took it.”
The FY12 budget proposal, he said, funds “every element” of the authorization act, although not at the levels in the law, something he acknowledged. “Some of those arguments are rooted in challenges arising from a lack of a 2011 budget,” he said. He added that “the omens of success for commercial crew… have been improving,” citing the Falcon 9 launches as well as “the entry of one of Constellation’s prime contractors into the commercial crew competition.” He didn’t mention that company, although earlier this month ATK, which had been building the Ares 1 first stage, announced its CCDev proposal for Liberty, a rocket derived from the Ares 1. (Boeing, another major Constellation contractor, received a CCDev award last year.)
By Jeff Foust on 2011 February 18 at 6:05 am ET The House is continuing to debate hundreds of amendments associated with HR 1, the year-long continuing resolution that would fund the federal government for the remainder of fiscal year 2011. Among the amendments that have not yet been taken up on the floor of the House is one by Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) that would, in effect, defund NASA’s exploration program:
Amendment No. 96: At the end of the bill, after the short
title, insert the following new section:
Sec. 4002. None of the funds made available by this Act
may be used for “National Aeronautics and Space
Administration, Exploration”.
That amendment is taken seriously enough to warrant a bipartisan “Dear Colleague” letter from 14 members of Congress who represent districts or states with NASA centers. The DeFazio amendment “would prohibit NASA, one of the most effective job-generating agencies in the federal government, from spending any money on its exploration program,” according to a version of the letter forwarded from a reader yesterday. “By prohibiting funding for NASA’s exploration program so late in the operating year, it will result in tens of thousands of lay-offs to on-site contractors across the country, and cause us to cede our world leadership in human space exploration to other countries such as China and Russia.” [emphasis in original] The letter’s signatories include Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX), chairman of the House Science Committee, as well as members whose districts include or are near to Ames, Glenn, Goddard, JPL, Johnson, Kennedy, and Marshall.
It’s not clear when, or even if, the House will take up the DeFazio amendment. House leaders have indicated they plan to wrap up debate on the bill and vote on it Friday before departing for a week-long break, and there are many other amendments still under consideration. Incidentally, there’s another amendment introduced, by Rep. Heath Shuler (D-NC), that states that “None of the funds made available by this Act may be used for the Constellation Systems Program of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.” Depending on the current definition of “Constellation Systems”, that may be a moot point.
[Update 2pm: Neither DeFazio amendment nor the Shuler amendment are on the list of those amendments deemed in order, and thus won’t be considered by the full House today (which is still demanding various amendments to the CR).]
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