By Jeff Foust on 2010 November 25 at 9:37 am ET Lockheed Martin has gotten some attention this week with a proposal to conduct an unmanned Orion test flight as early as 2013. The test flight, using a Delta 4 Heavy launched from Cape Canaveral, would put the spacecraft into an elliptical orbit; the Orion would later splash down off the California coast. This is not the first time Lockheed Martin has talked about being ready to do an Orion test flight circa 2013, but this time they’ve provided more details, including identifying the launch vehicle.
However, a Wall Street Journal article Thursday (subscription required) suggests that Lockheed’s proposal could run into Congressional opposition. “[T]hose plans may run into flak as Republican lawmakers take control of House committees and subcommittees that oversee NASA,” the article claims, citing unnamed industry sources (at least some of whom, according to the article, work for Lockheed competitors). The article goes on state that those members of Congress “may view the proposed test flight as circumventing congressional language to quickly develop a new heavy-lift NASA rocket able to transport astronauts past low-earth orbit.”
The Journal article cites a couple of members in particular, Reps. Pete Olson (R-TX) and Frank Wolf (R-VA), the likely new chairs of the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee and House Appropriations Committee CJS subcommittee respectively, as likely opponents, although neither provide any comments to the newspaper suggesting they would oppose such a test. The article goes on to state that “biggest battle” may be whether an improved Delta 4, “packing more power and certified safe enough to carry astronauts”, could be a candidate for the heavy-lift launcher outlined in the new authorization act. That, however, may conflate two separate issues: human-rating the Delta 4 to carry Orion (as proposed by ULA in its Augustine Committee testimony last year) and upgrading the Delta 4 (or Atlas 5) for cargo-only heavy-lift missions.
By Jeff Foust on 2010 November 23 at 7:18 am ET Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) got some attention late last week when he criticized the White House staff on a number of issues, including space. Nelson’s speech came a day after he reportedly “lit into” President Obama in a Senate caucus session. However, Nelson’s NASA-specific complaint, the “misconception that Obama wants to eliminate the manned space program”, as the Gainesville (Fla.) Sun reported, isn’t new: Nelson has made that statement on a number of occasions this year, as far back as mid-February, only a couple weeks after the White House released its FY11 budget proposal.
Members of New York’s congressional delegation are also expressing their concerns about NASA, but on a very different subject: where the shuttle orbiters will go once the fleet is retired next year. According to the New York Daily News, members are concerned that as Texas members of Congress take leadership positions, prospects dim that the Intrepid museum in New York City will get an orbiter. But while the article claims that New York’s odds “got way longer in an uphill fight with Texas”, Congress may not have much influence on the decision, which rests in the hands of NASA as it currently stands. Language inserted into the NASA authorization bill this summer actually improves New York’s chances, since it requests that NASA give preference to awarding orbiters to locations “with an historical relationship with either the launch, flight operations, or processing of the Space Shuttle orbiters or the retrieval of NASA manned space vehicles, or significant contributions to human space flight”; the Intrepid was involved in the recovery of Mercury-Atlas 7 and Gemini 3.
By Jeff Foust on 2010 November 20 at 9:37 am ET While NASA administrator Charles Bolden has been putting in his share of appearances, he hasn’t said much, nor made himself available to the media: the last speech by Bolden on NASA’s web site (as opposed to a short statement) is from early September. Space News, though, scored a coup when it obtained a transcript of an all-hands meeting by Bolden at NASA Marshall on Tuesday, a meeting that was open to NASA employees but closed to the media and general public. A Space News article summarizes some of the highlights of Bolden’s talk, which covered a wide range of topics. Some other items of interest:
• On the budget, Bolden sounded skeptical that a final FY11 appropriations bill would be completed during the current lame-duck session. That bill “we are hoping will come as soon as possible, in all likelihood not before the new Congress comes in, but that’s not an impossibility,” he said. He added that while the change in party control of the House is a “wild card”, he’s talked with “almost every” newly-elected member of Congress though last weekend and found bipartisan support for the agency. (He cited an unnamed candidate in Florida “who campaigned against the incumbent because the incumbent supported wasteful NASA spending”, but that candidate, who apparently won, now “wants to support wasteful NASA spending”.) “So I am cautiously optimistic that we will be okay once the appropriations bill is signed into law,” he said.
Bolden, asked about what the best and worst cases the agency could expect for its budget, said the best case would have been having the administration’s original proposal passed, but that it “could be a best case” if appropriators end up funding the agency at the levels in the authorization act. The worst case, he said, would be if Congress decided to roll back the budget to 2008 levels, as House GOP leaders proposed earlier this fall. “It would not be devastating,” Bolden said, but “there will be
some programs that might go away.”
In the meantime NASA is operating under a continuing resolution (CR) at funds the agency at 2010 levels through December 3; that’s likely to be extended, perhaps into February. Bolden noted that one decision the agency made during this time was to smooth out the funding for Constellation since the authorization bill “significantly” reduced the requested funds for closing out the program: “[W]e didn’t want to make an abrupt change right away and end up having more people out of work.”
• On a related issue, Bolden downplayed the recommendation by the co-chairs of the deficit reduction commission to cut support for commercial crew development in the NASA budget, as part of a much larger package of cuts aimed at reducing the overall federal budget deficit. “My advice is don’t worry about it,” Bolden said, because it’s only a proposal by the committee chairs at this stage. He added that “commercial crew and cargo are essential for us” and that “we are critically dependent upon the success of the commercial entities.” However, he also pressed for funding the additional shuttle mission included in the authorization act “to bite on the risk” of delays in commercial cargo development by the two COTS and CRS awardees, Orbital Sciences and SpaceX. Flying the STS-135 mission “would give us an opportunity to put additional supplies and parts and pieces on board station that would take us out and give the commercial guys an opportunity to experience delays as we anticipate they will, because everybody does.”
• Bolden also downplayed the work by NASA’s Human Exploration Framework Team (HEFT), which came out with a phase 1 report in September. “HEFT is just a nursery, if you will, for ideas. It is not a program. It is not an office. They don’t make decisions,” Bolden said. “They just feed information to me and the rest of the leadership team.”
• Bolden provided some details about his trip to China last month. “We got an opportunity to see everything. Everything that we asked for plus some more,” he said. That apparently included a trip to the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, the spaceport used for China’s human spaceflight missions and rarely visited by Westerners. He said he presented “three principles” that were essential for any future cooperation with the US on spaceflight: transparency in all their actions, willingness to exercise reciprocity, and performing mutually beneficial activities. “If we didn’t get anything out of it, we weren’t interested,” Bolden said. He mentioned that on the last night there he met with a three-star general who runs both China’s human spaceflight program and its anti-satellite program (“An odd mix of responsibility,” he noted) who said that China didn’t need to cooperate with the US, and vice versa, but “the potential, if we choose to work together, is incredible.”
• Bolden also mentioned a couple of times what he reads—or, more accurately, what he doesn’t. “I don’t read the blogs,” he said. “You know all they do is just upset my day so I don’t read them, and you read them if you want.” He later cited as one example of why he doesn’t read blogs the criticism he got for remaining in Prague during the International Astronautical Congress at the end of September while the House was taking up the NASA authorization bill. “I was on the phone with everybody, you know, all of our committee members,” he said, adding that NASA center directors were also talking with members and answering their questions; in the end, the bill passed by a wide margin. “So if you want to go read somebody who’s going to be critical of you everyday, have at it. I don’t recommend it.”
By Jeff Foust on 2010 November 19 at 7:18 am ET To hear members of Utah’s congressional delegation, the soundtrack on the ninth floor of NASA Headquarters these days is a certain Judas Priest song. “NASA has signaled an interest recently in possibly circumventing the law,” Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) said in a statement after a meeting Thursday with NASA administrator Charles Bolden and deputy administrator Lori Garver. The law in question is the NASA Authorization Act of 2010, in particular the provision in Section 302 about the development of a “Space Launch System”, a heavy-lift launch vehicle. Hatch and other members of the state’s congressional delegation (most of whom also met with Bolden and Garver) are concerned that NASA might move in a direction that would cut out ATK, which manufactures solid rocket motors in the state.
What triggered this meeting isn’t clear, but one possibility is the award earlier this month of a number of heavy-lift studies “for evaluating heavy-lift launch vehicle system concepts, propulsion technologies, and affordability,” according to the NASA announcement of the awards. ATK received one of those contracts, but so did 12 other companies, including United Launch Alliance and SpaceX. “The studies will include heritage systems from shuttle and Ares, as well as alternative architectures and identify propulsion technology gaps including main propulsion elements, propellant tanks and rocket health management systems,” the release noted.
The idea of alternatives to shuttle- and Ares-derived concepts, both of which used solid rocket motors, is anathema to the Utah senators and congressmen. “I join my colleagues in admonishing NASA to strictly adhere to the law and use solid rocket motors in the development of the new Space Launch System,” Sen. Bob Bennett (R-UT) said in the statement. “Today’s meeting confirms that we are in a long-term fight over the future of NASA’s manned space flight program,” added Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT). “I remain very concerned that NASA continues to delay the transition from Constellation systems toward the new heavy-lift program while they needlessly explore private start-up technologies that remain unproven, require more money and are unfit for human-rated space travel.”
Just how NASA is “circumventing the law”, though, either with these studies or other work, isn’t clear. While report language that accompanies the bill specifically described their idea of an HLV, the law itself is vague and gives NASA some leeway. The law states that NASA “shall, to the extent practicable, extend or modify existing vehicle development and associated contracts… including contracts for ground testing of solid rocket motors, if necessary, to ensure their availability for development of the Space Launch System.” [emphasis added] Later in the same section: “The Administrator shall ensure critical skills and capabilities are retained, modified, and developed, as appropriate, in areas related to solid and liquid engines, large diameter fuel tanks, rocket propulsion, and other ground test capabilities for an effective transition to the follow-on Space Launch System.” [emphasis added] Phrases like “to the extent practicable”, “if necessary”, and “as appropriate” give NASA leeway to go in different directions if they determine something as specific as outlined in the legislation’s report language is not practicable, necessary, and/or appropriate.
Hatch acknowledges in Thursday’s statement that the act “does not require the new heavy-lift rocket to use solid rocket motors.” However, it adds, “delegation members say the Utah experts they consulted say the legislation’s requirements for the heavy-lift rocket can only be realistically met by using solid rocket motors.” Hatch did not sound like he was assured by what Bolden and Garver told him at Thursday’s meeting: “Though they assured us that NASA would comply with the law, some of their answers reaffirmed my suspicions that we need to keep a very close watch on the agency. I will continue with other delegation members to ensure the agency abides by the law and protects this industry that is so vitally important to our national security and northern Utah’s economy.”
By Jeff Foust on 2010 November 19 at 6:29 am ET An article by Bakersfield, California, TV station KGET noted that Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) was among those in attendance last week at the groundbreaking of a new facility at the Mojave Air and Space Port where The Spaceship Company, the Virgin Galactic/Scaled Composites joint venture, will build WhiteKnightTwo aircraft and SpaceShipTwo suborbital spacecraft. Rohrabacher, a supporter of commercial spaceflight, had been invited by area congressman Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), and the article tantalizingly adds, “Rohrabacher is in line to become the chairman of the House Science Committee.” That may not be a direct line, though: the latest chatter is that Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX), the current ranking member of the committee, still has the inside track to chair the committee come January.
By Jeff Foust on 2010 November 19 at 6:21 am ET Former NASA chief of staff Courtney Stadd was sentenced Thursday to 41 months in prison on a conspiracy charge. Stadd had entered a guilty plea on the charge in August, stemming from allegations that he had conspired in 2004 and 2005 with NASA deputy chief engineer Liam Sarsfield to direct business to Mississippi State University, a client of Stadd’s consulting business. The case is separate from a federal ethics case last year, in which Stadd was sentenced to probation.
By Jeff Foust on 2010 November 18 at 10:32 am ET In an accepting an award from the Space Transportation Association during a Capitol Hill event this morning, Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-WV), the outgoing chairman of the Commerce, Justice, and Science (CJS) subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, immediately addressed the one issue on everyone’s minds about NASA’s funding for the coming year. “I don’t know, I don’t think anybody else knows” if the lame-duck Congress will pass an omnibus appropriations bill, rolling up the current separate appropriations bills, or instead extend a continuing resolution (CR), perhaps for the entire fiscal year. “It could go either way.”
Mollohan had a clear preference for an omnibus that would incorporate “all the hard work” the appropriations committee’s staff had put into the legislation so far. “My intellect tells me that we should get an omnibus,” he said, adding that the outcome may depend on what will happen in the Senate, where the endorsement of a ban on earmarks by minority leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) “was not a good omen.”
“A CR would be bad for NASA,” he said, because they generally don’t support the start of new activities. He did acknowledge that a CR could permit “anomalies” that would support new programs, but he said even in such a case “the new direction enacted in the authorization bill is likely to be delayed as well.” (He added that the NASA authorization bill that was signed into law last month “was one of this Congress’s real legislative achievements.”)
Mollohan praised a number of NASA programs developed during his tenure in Congress, from the Earth Observing System to the International Space Station to the Hubble Space Telescope and Mars Exploration Rovers. However, he did warn the agency and its supporters about a mismatch between missions and resources. “We’re still trying to do too much with too little. The accountants and the visionaries are still arm wrestling,” he said. “The cost of developing and launching satellites has gotten so high that we’re now somewhat dangerously relying on what you might call ‘design life plus,'” a reference to stretching out the lifetimes of operational satellites well beyond their design life because of delayed replacements. He also cautioned against being “much too dependent on the Russians” for access to the ISS.
Turning to exploration, Mollohan said that “we need to break out of low Earth orbit.” During the budget debate of the last year, he said, “one theme emerged: the Congress, reflecting the aspirations of the American people, want an aggressive human exploration program.” He said he found similar interest in both entrepreneurial and established space companies he’s met with. “These aspirations, and this enthusiasm, must be given an outlet through government and commercial space activities.”
Later, though, in the Q&A period after his speech, Mollohan acknowledged the difficulty in crafting a strong new direction for NASA. “NASA policy is very much developed by committee,” he said. “There’s no defining voice that says, ‘This is the way it’s going to be.’ That’s evident from how this exploration issue has been playing out this year.” While the administration wanted to go in one direction, some in Congress resisted, “so we end up with this indecision; an unstable policy area that still is undefined.”
At the end of the session, Mollohan praised his likely successor as chair of the CJS subcommittee, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), the current ranking member. “Frank Wolf is just wonderful to work with,” he said. “I hope he gets this committee. He’s very appropriate for this job.”
By Jeff Foust on 2010 November 17 at 12:50 pm ET Tomorrow’s scheduled hearing on NASA, “Transition and Implementation: The NASA Authorization Act of 2010″, by the Senate Commerce Committee, has been postponed to Wednesday, December 1, at 10:30 am. No reason for the delay was given.
There are two other space-related events going on in DC tomorrow, though. On Thursday morning the Space Transportation Association will be honoring outgoing Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-WV), who had chaired the Commerce, Justice, and Science subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, with jurisdiction over NASA and NOAA. Mollohan lost his bid for another term in the Democratic primary earlier this year. The breakfast and awards ceremony will be at 7:30am in Room 2359 of the Rayburn House Office Building. At 11:30 am Women in Aerospace is hosting a discussion titled “The Future of Human Spaceflight: Prospects, Programs and Educating the Pipeline”, featuring speakers from ESA, NASA, and the International Space University. Registration is $10-15 and includes lunch.
By Jeff Foust on 2010 November 17 at 6:41 am ET NASA’s Office of the Inspector General released Tuesday its assessment of the top management and performance challenges acing the space agency. The report identified six specific areas of concern:
- Future of U.S. Space Flight
- Acquisition and Project Management
- Infrastructure and Facilities Management
- Human Capital
- Information Technology Security
- Financial Management
The first item covers a wide range of issues, from the retirement of the shuttle and development of a heavy-lifter to commercial crew development and extension of the ISS. The second item notes the cost overruns and schedule delays that many programs have suffered, including, most recently, the James Webb Space Telescope. On the last item, though, there is some good news: NASA announced yesterday that it received a “much-improved” financial audit opinion. That improvement is the issuance of “a qualified opinion, with no material weaknesses”, rather than a disclaimer of opinion, which had been the case the last seven years.
By Jeff Foust on 2010 November 17 at 6:25 am ET Central Florida had two of its representatives on the House Science and Technology Committee, Reps. Alan Grayson and Suzanne Kosmas, who both served on the space subcommittee. However, both lost their reelection bids earlier this month. Will their successors also seek similar committee assignments? Only one appears interested, though, and only as a backup option.
Rep.-elect Sandy Adams, who defeated Kosmas, told the Orlando Sentinel that she’s seeking a position on the appropriations committee, which would rule out serving on other committees. Getting on the committee as a new member is a long shot, the article acknowledges, but Adams hopes that the influx of new members, plus her experience as an appropriator in the Florida Legislature, boosts her chances of winning a seat there. If she fails, though, she said she would seek alternative positions, including taking Kosmas’s seat on the science committee. Rep.-elect Daniel Webster, who defeated Grayson, said in the same article he’s interested in the transportation, armed services, judiciary, and rules committee, and apparently not the science committee.
The science committee, meanwhile, lauded the passage of a resolution congratulating NASA for its role in the rescue of 33 Chilean miners. H.Res. 1714, passed by a voice vote Tuesday, “congratulates the engineers, scientists, psychologists, and staff” of NASA for its role in the rescue and states that NASA’s experience “acquired through space flight is beneficial to human life on Earth and was critical to the successful rescue of the Chilean miners.” Notably, the resolution was introduced by Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), who appears the likely candidate to be the committee’s ranking member in the next Congress.
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