By Jeff Foust on 2010 September 29 at 6:23 am ET It’s official: the Senate NASA authorization bill is on the floor schedule for the House today as the sixth of six bills to be considered under suspension of the rules. With that in mind, the Washington Post sounds off on the state of the agency and its future in an editorial Wednesday, its second in two months. The Post calls the bill “flawed” because it is “an oddly specific plan in which members of Congress took it upon themselves to specify the exact contours of the U.S. plan for space — contours that often seem to conform to district and state lines.” Without additional funding, which the editorial concludes is not forthcoming, the Post instead believes a better, if relatively unspecific, approach would be to “invest in research and aeronautics and to salvage technology, expertise and resources from the Constellation program” for use for human space exploration at some future date.
By Jeff Foust on 2010 September 28 at 9:02 pm ET Former NASA administrator Mike Griffin, who has previously said he liked the original House version of the NASA authorization bill more than the Senate’s version, is now openly calling for House members to vote against the Senate bill when it comes up for a vote tomorrow. “After considerable reflection, I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that NASA and the nation’s space program would be best served if the House were to vote against the Senate Authorization Bill in its present form,” Griffin said in an email message obtained by SpacePolicyOnline.com. The Senate bill, Griffin writes, has “grievous flaws” and, while better than the administration’s proposal in his opinion, “it is not enough better to warrant its support in law.”
Griffin’s email is not the only sign of opposition to the Senate bill, although not necessarily for the same reasons. According to a Space News tweet, Ohio congressmen Dennis Kucinich (D) and Steven LaTourette (R) are asking fellow members of the Ohio congressional delegation to vote against the bill, because of jobs at NASA Glenn as well as commercial crew and space technology funding.
Because the bill will be considered under suspension of the rules, it will require a two-thirds majority to pass. Will it get it? The Orlando Sentinel reports that “Initial signs are that the vote could be very close” with the chair of the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), expected to vote against it. The Hill, though, claims that the House is “likely” to pass the bill.
If the House doesn’t pass the bill, it makes it unlikely any authorization bill will make it out of Congress this year, leaving it up to appropriators to make policy when they get to funding bills after the November election. Griffin, in his email, seems willing to settle for that. ” If we cannot do better than that,” he writes, referring to the Senate bill, “then I believe we have reached the point where it is better to allow the damage which has been brought about by the administration’s actions to play out to its conclusion than to accept half-measures in an attempt at remediation.”
By Jeff Foust on 2010 September 28 at 7:21 am ET While the announcement yesterday by Rep. Bart Gordon that the House will vote this week on the Senate’s version of a NASA authorization bill, rather than its own, would seem to clear the way for passage of the bill, advocates of the Senate version are not resting. Because the House will take up the bill under suspension of the rules, which requires a two-thirds majority for passage, the Space Access Society is asking people to contact their representatives again and request they vote for the Senate bill, while also warning there are more battles to come. “The Old Guard has suffered a setback, but it’s unlikely to fade away anytime soon.”
Rep. Pete Olson (R-TX), who this weekend published an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle supporting the compromise House version, told the paper now that it was more important to “end the uncertainty” facing NASA and its employees and contractors. Olson said he was “throwing his support” behind the Senate bill.
One person who hasn’t decided on the House bill is Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL). His spokesman tells Florida Today that neither the Senate nor the House bills do enough to close the post-Shuttle gap and that Posey was “still evaluating the details of both the proposals”. In the same article Rep. Suzanne Kosmas (D-FL) expressed her support for the Senate bill, consistent with earlier comments from her.
By Jeff Foust on 2010 September 27 at 2:18 pm ET It appears that advocates of the Senate version of the NASA authorization bill have won their battle: House Science and Technology Committee chairman Bart Gordon issued a statement Monday afternoon saying that he anticipated the full House to take up the Senate bill on Wednesday. “It has become clear that there is not time remaining to pass a Compromise bill through the House and the Senate,” he says in the statement. “For the sake of providing certainty, stability, and clarity to the NASA workforce and larger space community, I felt it was better to consider a flawed bill than no bill at all as the new fiscal year begins.” Exactly how that vote will take place isn’t stated in the release, but one option would be to do it under suspension of the rules, which would prevent amendments whose inclusion could make it difficult to reconcile with the version the Senate passed in early August.
Gordon, though, made it clear he wasn’t happy with elements of the Senate version, including an “unfunded mandate” for an additional shuttle mission, its “overly prescriptive” language for a heavy-lift vehicle, and the lack of a timetable for development a government backup capability to commercial providers for ISS access. He also suggested that he’s not done fighting about those issues, either: “I will continue to advocate to the Appropriators for the provisions in the Compromise language.”
By Jeff Foust on 2010 September 27 at 12:46 pm ET With the House not planning to take up its version of a NASA authorization bill before Wednesday, space advocates opposed to the legislation are continuing their efforts to win support for the Senate’s version. Commercial suborbital spaceflight supporters sent out emails on Sunday asking people to contact their representatives on Monday to seek their support for the Senate bill. The Space Frontier Foundation today released a video where members of the NewSpace community “support the need for a budget focused on innovation and new enterprise, not wasting money on failed projects.”
The House legislation, though, does have its supporters in Congress, who are speaking out about it. In a Houston Chronicle op-ed Saturday, Rep. Pete Olson (R-TX) expressed support for the bill, calling it “a strong bipartisan bill that preserves and improves NASA’s human space flight program, while also helping support private sector research and development in human space flight.” By contrast, he argues, the Senate bill “falls short of the House measure in clearly defining the path – and equally important – ensuring the necessary future funding for NASA’s human space exploration efforts.” As members of Congress, he concludes, “we have a duty to clarify NASA’s future and not buck our responsibility to a reluctant president.” (How exactly the president is “reluctant” on this matter isn’t clear.)
Another House member, Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT), expressed his frustration with the lack of a vote on a bill in an article Sunday in the Ogden (Utah) Standard-Examiner. Bishop told the paper that while he likes the Senate version and “could live with” the earlier House bill, “Gordon’s bill is the one he really likes best.” Bishop blames the lack of a vote on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who Bishop says “is opposed to the NASA manned space program.” (It’s uncertain just how involved Pelosi has been in this process, as previous reports have only cited the involvement of House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer.) “If the Speaker will just schedule it, we will be in great shape,” Bishop said of a vote on the bill. “If not, we’re still not dead, but we’re on life support. This is probably the most important issue we’re fighting for right now.” One wonders how many of Bishop’s colleagues, of both parties, would agree that the NASA authorization bill is their “most important issue”.
By Jeff Foust on 2010 September 24 at 6:53 am ET If the House Science and Technology Committee thought that its revised version of the NASA authorization bill, with additional funding for commercial crew development, would win support from commercialization advocates, well, not exactly. “Although they’ve done their best to appear to be compromising, the fine text makes it clear that
they want to continue Constellation,” Space Frontier Foundation executive director Will Watson said in a statement by the organization. The Foundation complains about “24 separate restrictions” on commercial crew in the revised bill (although not enumerating them) as well as the bill’s combination of commercial cargo and crew funding into one account. The Foundation also criticizes language elsewhere in the bill that appears to leave the door open for continued development of the Ares 1. They ask that the House instead vote on the Senate bill.
Similar complaints come from the Space Access Society in a separate statement, which expresses concerns about “a whole tangle of reviews, reports, certifications, and other requirements” for commercial crew development as well as “continued development of something a lot like Ares/Orion”. The organization is also calling on the House to accept the version approved by the Senate. “We think it’s time to settle on the Senate compromise, resolve this matter, and move forward.”
Although both organizations sent out alerts warning the House would vote on this compromise version as soon as Friday, it appears that no vote is imminent. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, in a statement late Thursday, said there would be no votes on Friday, and that the House would next meet this coming Wednesday, September 29. The statement indicated that the priority for the House then would be to pass a continuing resolution before the fiscal year ends Thursday; Hoyer said he hoped the House could vote on it today but negotiations with the Senate on the CR are not complete.
By Jeff Foust on 2010 September 23 at 12:24 pm ET The House Science and Technology Committee announced Thursday morning the release of “compromise legislative language” for a NASA authorization bill, presumably (although not explicitly stated) after negotiations with the Senate [I’ve since been told, second-hand, that this compromise bill was drafted just by the House, and is not necessarily endorsed by the Senate]. The full text of the bill is available, as well as a summary comparing the new version with the one passed by the committee in July. Some highlights:
- The new bill calls for the development of a “Space Launch System” similar to what the Senate proposed, although without the lower minimum launch capacity (as little as 70 tons) in the Senate bill. Instead, this calls for a “scalable capability of lifting payloads of at least 130 metric tons” into LEO, although scalable from what, and by when, isn’t stated; the bill requires at least the capability of servicing the ISS by the end of 2016.
- The compromise bill includes $1.19 billion for exploration technology development as part of an overall $2.67 billion for space technology over the three years of the bill; the earlier version had only $5 million for exploration technology development, in exploration versus space technology.
- The compromise bill includes $1.212 billion for commercial crew development over three years ($412 million in 2011 and $400 million each in 2012 and 2013), far more than the earlier bill ($150 million a year) but still short of the administration’s original request. As expected, the loan guarantee language in the original bill is gone in this one; instead, the funds “shall be allocated at the discretion of the Administrator” to those efforts deemed the highest priority towards the goal of supporting continued utilization of the ISS.
- The compromise bill includes $150 million over three years for exploration robotic precursor missions, while the original bill provided only $5 million.
- The bill also includes language formally authorizing the flight of the “launch-on-need” shuttle mission (STS-135) no earlier than June 1, 2011, unless “the Administrator determines that the level of risk of flying such mission is unacceptable.”
By Jeff Foust on 2010 September 23 at 6:26 am ET The Washington Post examines the lobbying efforts of SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who has become something of a lightning rod in the ongoing debate about the administration’s NASA proposals, specifically development of commercial crew capabilities. The articles does note one area of debate: whether he has become a Democratic partisan in the process:
Since 2003, Musk has given about $300,000 to federal candidates, divided evenly between Democrats and Republicans, according to records compiled by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. In the first six months of 2010, however, Musk donated nearly $71,000 to Democrats, compared with less than $7,000 to Republicans from him or his company’s PAC, the data show.
During a recent interview, Musk bristled at the notion – increasingly asserted by Republican detractors – that he has become a Democratic partisan. After all, he’s an avid supporter of Republican Meg Whitman, the California gubernatorial candidate who oversaw the acquisition of PayPal when she headed eBay.
But Musk also acknowledged that he is “a fan of Obama,” calling him “a good president” and “a big proponent of competition.” He said he has been disappointed in GOP opposition to the administration’s NASA plans.
Specifically, the SpaceX PAC has contributed $40,900 to congressional candidates in the current election cycle, with $6,000 of which going to Republican candidates. Since the beginning of the year Musk has donated only $1,000 to Republicans, namely the Future Leaders PAC, while donating over $70,000 to Democratic candidates and organizations. Still, he notes, “Our influence is a tiny fraction of any one of the giant contractors,” such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin, who spend far more on lobbying than SpaceX.
The whole lobbying process, he suggested, has left him a little disillusioned. “For a while I was thinking government doesn’t deserve the negative reputation the public has,” he said. “But now I think maybe it does.”
By Jeff Foust on 2010 September 23 at 5:42 am ET Later today House Republican leaders will unveil “Pledge to America”, their platform of policy changes they seek to enact if the GOP wins a majority in the House in November’s elections. POLITICO obtained a draft of the platform that, while not directly addressing space policy, does suggest that NASA will find it difficult to retain recent budget increases, let alone get additional funding down the road. One provision of the draft platform states:
Cut Government Spending to Pre-Stimulus, Pre-Bailout Levels: With common-sense exceptions for seniors, veterans, and our troops, we will roll back government spending to pre-stimulus, pre-bailout levels, saving us at least $100 billion in the first year alone and putting us on a path to begin paying down the debt, balancing the budget, and ending the spending spree in Washington that threatens our children’s future.
With NASA not falling into any of the listed “common-sense” exceptions, that would suggest the agency would be vulnerable to at least a modest budget cut. In FY 2009 NASA got just under $17.8 billion (plus $1 billion in stimulus funding enacted later in the year). The agency’s proposed FY11 budget is $19 billion, a topline figure that has been accepted virtually without debate in Congress, at least up to now. Another provision, meanwhile, suggests that future budget increases will be hard to come by:
Establish a Hard Cap on New Discretionary Spending: We must put common-sense limits on the growth of government and stop the endless increases. Only in Washington is there an expectation that whatever your budget was last year, it will be more this year and even more the next. We will set strict budget caps to limit federal spending on an annual basis. Budget caps were used in the 1990s, when a Republican Congress was able to bring the budget into balance and eventual surplus. By cutting discretionary spending from current levels and imposing a hard cap on future growth, we will save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.
The five-year budget projections for NASA released by the administration in February had the agency’s budget increasing to just under $21 billion by FY2015, an increase criticized in some quarters for not being large enough. Even that, though, could be difficult to retain.
By Jeff Foust on 2010 September 22 at 1:18 pm ET You have to hand it to the Institute for Liberty (IFL), a conservative think tank: they don’t mince words when it somes to their assessment of the House version of the NASA authorization bill. “The bill is worse than a sham,” said Andrew Langer, president of the organization, in a press release. “It is a travesty of incredible proportions.”
The organization held a press conference yesterday (on either very short notice or with little publicity; I got an email about it roughly 20 minutes before it was scheduled to start, and thus was unable to attend even if I had been free) about a new initiative called “No Space Pork!” (the exclamation point is apparently part of the name of the effort.) Interestingly, the IFL targeted two members of the House Science and Technology Committee, Reps. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) and Alan Grayson (D-FL), who both supported the legislation during the committee’s markup of the bill in July:
IFL took their message to the people of Arizona’s 8th and Florida’s 8th congressional districts early last week, polling households and asking for permission to send letters on their behalf. Thousands agreed to lend their names to the effort, inundating both offices with messages of opposition.
“While people continue to be enthusiastic about the nation’s space program, they want that money spent wisely, on concrete and measurable goals that will be historic. But this bill, and the vision it endorses, go against all that,” Langer said in the statement. According to the release, the IFL is creating a web site, NoSpacePork.com, for its new initiative, although as of midday today the site redirects to the press release.
|
|
