Still playing the waiting game

Three debate about NASA in Congress revolves around three procedural issues: when will the House take up a NASA authorization bill (and what it will look like), when will appropriators follow suit with funding, and since a final FY11 funding bill won’t be done until after October 1, will any policy changes be incorporated into a continuing resolution (CR)? Yesterday saw insights into, although not action on, all three.

In a meeting with reporters Tuesday morning House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer included a NASA authorization bill on “an ambitious to-do list” for the House between now and a planned adjournment on October 8. That statement didn’t make clear what bill the House would take up, although Florida Today reported that the House could take up the bill next week “if [Rep. Bart] Gordon and [Sen. Bill] Nelson reach a compromise.” That suggests the House is unlikely to vote on an unamended version of the bill the House Science and Technology Committee approved in July, something that would require a formal conferencing process to resolve differences from the Senate version and that others warned wouldn’t be feasible with the limited time remaining in the current session.

Meanwhile, Sen. Bill Nelson told CQ that the CR would not make any changes to NASA, including adding extra money or making other policy changes. Republicans, the report states, have said they would only support a “clean” CR without any changes, thus NASA programs (including, presumably, Constellation) would continue under the CR at current FY10 funding levels. Work on the final appropriations bill, he said, would have to wait until the lame duck session after the November mid-term elections.

Is Bolden in the doghouse with the White House?

While an investigation by the NASA inspector general cleared administrator Charles Bolden of ethics law violations, he did not get off cleanly: the report concluded that Bolden’s actions were not “consistent with the Ethics Pledge he, as an Administration appointee, had signed”. That assessment was shared by a White House official, as noted in the report:

With regard to the Ethics Pledge, OGC [Office of the General Counsel] lawyers told the OIG [Office of the Inspector General] that the White House Deputy Associate Counsel expressed the view that Bolden should have acted more prudently concerning his contact with Marathon and characterized his actions as a procedural violation of the Pledge. They said the Deputy Associate Counsel recommended that Bolden receive refresher ethics training, which the OGC lawyers said they provided to Bolden on June 1, 2010.

This faux pas, coupled with other events (most notably his now-infamous al-Jazeera interview earlier this summer) has not won Bolden much support from the White House. An unidentified administration official criticized Bolden in an Orlando Sentinel story about the report: “Administrator Bolden continues to be not only a distraction for the administration, but most importantly to the mission of NASA.” The official, the article added, “could not recall another incident in which a similarly high-level leader was so publicly reprimanded.”

Bolden, meanwhile, is headed to Saudi Arabia this weekend to mark the 25th anniversary of the launch of the first Saudi astronaut, a trip that may also have diplomatic overtones. That has already generated some criticism from other quarters that such efforts are also a distraction. “NASA should spend more of their time and resources here working on keeping America first in space, employing America’s top engineers and protecting our national security rather than performing diplomatic outreach to the Middle East,” Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL) told the Sentinel.

Bolden cleared of ethics law violations

Back in June the Orlando Sentinel reported that NASA administrator Charles Bolden was being investigated by NASA’s inspector general for a potential ethics breach: he contacted an executive of Marathon Oil, a company where Bolden previously served as a director and still owned stock in, to get an opinion about a NASA biofuels program called OMEGA. At the time NASA was considering signing an memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Navy to continue work on the project and Bolden, apparently, wanted another opinion of the effort.

This morning the NASA Office of Inspector General (OIG) issued its final report into the investigation, clearing Bolden of any violations of law but concluding that his actions were inconsistent with the ethics pledge he (and other administration officials) signed:

In sum, we found no evidence that Bolden or Marathon received a present or promised financial benefit as a result of Bolden’s call. We also found that the information Bolden received from Marathon did not cause him to withhold funding to the OMEGA project or to direct that the proposed MOU with the Navy be abandoned.

We concluded that Bolden’s contact with Marathon regarding OMEGA did not violate federal laws or regulations pertaining to conflicts of interest. However, we found that the contact was not consistent with the Ethics Pledge he, as an Administration appointee, had signed, and that it raised concerns about an appearance of a conflict of interest involving the NASA Administrator and a large oil company to which he had financial ties.

When interviewed by the OIG about this matter, Bolden readily acknowledged that he had erred in contacting Marathon. Bolden said he has since recused himself from issues involving OMEGA and has received supplemental training regarding his ethical responsibilities.

The ongoing “politically topsy-turvy battle” for NASA

NASA, in particular its human spaceflight program, “has become the focus of a brutal, potentially crippling and politically topsy-turvy battle for control that is likely to come to a head next week,” the Washington Post reports in Sunday’s edition. The article provides a review of the current situation the agency finds itself in on Capitol Hill, including “a series of unlikely alliances and negotiating positions” such as opposition by some conservatives to the commercial crew program in the administration’s budget proposal. Or, as SpaceX founder Elon Musk put it in the article, “You know there is something strange going on when Republicans, who ostensibly should be pro-privatization, are arguing as though they are from the Soviet Politburo. There’s something wrong with that picture.” (Regardless of the accuracy of such an assessment, it’s unlikely to win Musk and SpaceX new friends in the GOP.)

While most of the information in the article should be familiar to most readers, there are a couple of lesser-known items of interest in the article. In particular, it reports that the Senate bill’s partial funding for commercial crew development came “only after Boeing gave congressional staffers a detailed presentation about its own space plans”, thus defusing some of the arguments that such a program would rely on untried companies, according to unnamed participants in those discussions.

Meanwhile, in Florida, Rep. Suzanne Kosmas (D-FL) said Friday she hopes that the House passes a bill like the Senate version of the NASA authorization bill. “We are in negotiations between the Senate and the House, very aggressively seeking resolution to overcome the differences,” she told Florida Today, referring to the “preconferencing” discussions about the legislation. “[O]ur efforts will be — as they have been in my attempts to amend the House bill — that we can move forward with an acceptable piece of legislation that wouldn’t require renegotiating.” Kosmas added that she hopes to have a “move-forward plan” for the bill by the middle of this coming week “and that we will be able to cast a vote on it.”

United Launch Alliance is one company hoping that something like the Senate bill makes it through Congress, but isn’t certain a bill will pass at all, the Decatur (Ala.) Daily reports Sunday. “So we don’t know if there’s going to be an authorization bill or, in the end, what it will look like, how prescriptive it will be,” ULA vice president of business development George Sowers told the paper. “For all we know there may never be an authorization bill, at least not this year.”

What will the House vote on, and when?

Yesterday’s Huntsville Times has its own take on the current NASA legislation situation from the perspective of how the various bills would affect the Marshall Space Flight Center and the city. In the article, one area congressman, Robert Aderholt (R-AL), said there was “behind-the-scenes lobbying by special interest groups” to get the House to vote on the Senate’s version of the bill, as opposed to the version passed by the House Science and Technology Committee. “While I appreciate some aspects of the Senate authorization bill, the House of Representatives deserves a vote on its own committee bill, and I hope Democrat House leadership schedules that soon,” he said. Aderholt doesn’t appear to be a big fan of the Senate bill, supporting provisions in the House bill for the development of a government crew transportation system and requiring “commercial companies to prove their abilities before receiving billions of taxpayer dollars.”

Despite the lack of a clear resolution to the ongoing debate, Bob Mitchell, president of Houston’s Bay Area Houston Economic Partnership, believes a resolution will come soon after talking with officials, including local congressman Pete Olson. “We feel confident that we’re going to get a bill passed within the next two weeks,” he told Houston-area newspaper the Friendswood Journal, without providing additional details supporting that statement. A resolution in two weeks would almost certainly require the House to pass either the Senate bill or an amended House bill that emerges from the preconferencing process with the Senate. If the House passes a version that requires a formal conferencing process with the Senate, some have speculated that nothing will pass before the end of the current Congress.

Mitchell, in the same article, blamed impending layoffs at one JSC contractor, Jacobs Engineering, on NASA for “improperly redirecting funding for current programs.” That appears to be a reference to past reports that NASA had been asking contractors to withhold money for termination liabilities, although the cuts instead appear linked to the end of the fiscal year and an anticipation that a continuing resolution (a virtual certainty even if the differences in the House and Senate authorization bills are patched up in the next two weeks) would reduce funding going to contractors.

Boeing, Space Adventures, and the commercial crew debate

At a press conference yesterday, Boeing and Space Adventures announced an agreement where Space Adventures will market seats on Boeing’s planned CST-100 commercial crew capsule. The announcement comes, of course, in the midst of a debate on Capitol Hill about NASA’s future direction, including how much agency funding should be devoted to commercial crew development efforts. (During the nearly 90-minute press conference, someone did ask whether the press conference was timed to influence the debate; Boeing’s John Elbon, vice president anad manager of the company’s commercial crew transportation program, said the timing was coincidental “although maybe it will turn out to be a fortuitous situation.”)

Elbon, though, did acknowledge that commercial crew funding from NASA was essential to the development of the CST-100. “If we had to do this with Boeing investment only,” he said, “we wouldn’t be able to close the business case.” NASA’s proposed program aids their business case both by providing funding to support vehicle development as well as a customer base in the form of transporting NASA astronaut crews to and from the ISS, he said. Elbon added that if commercial crew is funded at the much lower level in the House bill that the Senate version or the administration’s original proposal, it wasn’t a case of closing the business plan but instead delaying their schedule, which currently calls for the CST-100 to be ready for service in 2015.

However, both Elbon and Space Adventures chairman Eric Anderson rejected the argument that, because Boeing’s business plan required government funding, the program was thus somehow not commercial. “It becomes a very good deal for the US taxpayer” by having multiple customer bases that spread out the development and operational costs of such a system, Anderson said, later citing historical examples such as airmail supporting the early aviation industry. “I think the argument that if it’s not purely funded and purely financed by private industry that there’s no market, I think that is, with all due respect, hogwash.”

While not explicitly saying as much, Elbon in his comments all but endorsed the Senate’s version of a NASA authorization bill with what he called “a very balanced approach to the exploration program.” That includes not just commercial crew funding but also continued work on Orion for crewed missions beyond Earth orbit as well as immediate work on a heavy-lift launch vehicle. “We don’t see a lot of new technology on the horizon that would make that development [of an HLV] faster or less expensive.” All of these items, of course, are in the Senate’s version of the bill, but not all are in the House version.

Augustine’s “lukewarm endorsement” of Senate NASA bill, and more

What does the head of the committee that proposed options for the future of human spaceflight think of the legislation currently making its way through Congress? Space News put the question to Norm Augustine, and got a “lukewarm endorsement” of the Senate bill. “I am of course prepared to address ‘facts,’ and I believe it to be correct that the Senate bill comes closer to any of the options in our report than the House bill,” he wrote in an email earlier this week. He added, though, that “without funding over the long-term that matches the work to be performed, no program is likely to succeed.”

Meanwhile, some breaking news from the online publication The Daily Caller: “President Obama’s NASA plan meeting opposition on the Hill”. The article is actually a succinct summary of the the current state of NASA legislation, adding that as of yesterday no agreement had been reached in “preconferencing” discussions to reach a compromise between the House and Senate bills. Regardless of the state of negotiations, it adds, the House version is expected to go the floor next week.

Mike Thomas, a columnist for the Orlando Sentinel, doesn’t mince words in his latest column, starting with the headline: “NASA incompetent — or just lying to us?”. Thomas, who hasn’t been much of a fan of NASA over the years, focuses on the DIRECT launcher concept, dismissed by NASA when it was proposed a few years ago but now, at least in some quarters, embraced by the agency. “This means that NASA either is completely incompetent, has been lying for four years or is praying its last Hail Mary.”

More opposition to House NASA authorization bill

If there are supporters of the House’s version of the NASA authorization bill, they’re not nearly as vocal as the opponents of the legislation, as a couple more recent examples illustrate. Yesterday the Council for Citizens Against Government Waste (CCAGW), the lobbying arm of Citizens Against Government Waste, decried the bill as “sole source space pork” for its support of the Ares 1 (or at least an Ares 1-like vehicle). “At a time when the economy is struggling and there is a rapidly growing $13.5 trillion national debt, politicians in Washington, D.C. should invest limited taxpayer resources in projects that have merit instead of wasting money on an attempt to resurrect the redundant, overpriced, unproven, and ethically challenged Ares 1 project,” said CCARW president Tom Schatz, who is also president of the parent CAGW. He called for passage of the Senate version, “which would allow the private sector to invest in a competitive commercial system and result in more efficient space travel.”

In an editorial today, Florida Today also endorsed the Senate version of the authorization bill as a better path to remove “uncertainty” on Florida’s Space Coast. “It’s time to move forward, and that can best be accomplished with House members dropping their measure that could come up for a vote soon and supporting the better Senate blueprint,” the editorial states. While the Senate version has programs like commercial crew and HLV development that could benefit the region, “the House bill rides the dead horse that’s Constellation” without even providing that with sufficient funding, it argues.

Briefly: standing up for ULA, SpaceX and India, and decolonizing NASA

In an editorial Monday, the Decatur (Ala.) Daily opposes provisions of the Senate NASA authorization bill and accompanying report that define what a heavy-lift launch vehicle should look like. The editorial is a followup to an article Sunday that described how “the overly prescriptive legislation”, which mandates a shuttle-derived design, would rule out a role for local company United Launch Alliance. “[W]e think catastrophe looms when politicians try to dictate how to make a mission succeed,” the editorial notes. The Senate “should be setting space policy, not trumping NASA’s excellence at figuring out how best to accomplish its mission.”

(On a side note, at last week’s Space Transportation Association roundtable on Capitol Hill, former NASA administrator Mike Griffin was asked what he thought about having the Senate be so specific in its design for an HLV. His response, as I noted in The Space Review this week, “It is regrettable, absolutely, that Congress has to be the design bureau of last resort, but sometimes it’s necessary.”)

Is SpaceX lobbying against a US-India commercial launch agreement? In an essay in the Financial Times, an analyst with in Indian think tank claims that SpaceX would “lobby hard against any measure that takes American payloads abroad”, such as provisions in an agreement between the two countries that would allow India to launch US-manufactured satellites. “It should not come as a shock if after signing the CLSA and accounting for all the ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’, it turns out that all that is available for international launches are the non-profit, university-type small payloads leaving the lucrative ones to American companies.”

Finally, NASA plays a supporting role in Dinesh D’Souza’s controversial cover story in the latest issue of Forbes where he examines President Obama through the curious prism of decolonization. D’Souza seizes upon NASA administrator Charles Bolden’s comments about NASA outreach to the Muslim world (never mind that the administration later said Bolden misspoke) as evidence for his argument than anticolonialism is at the heart of the president’s personal philosophy. “No explanation other than anticolonialism makes sense of Obama’s curious mandate to convert a space agency into a Muslim and international outreach,” D’Souza writes. Unless, of course, the president isn’t converting NASA into an outreach agency.

Where not everybody knows your name

Let’s say you’re a major aerospace company. You have a significant presence in a state, employing hundreds of people. Your work plays a critical role in both national security and civil space activities. You might assume that political leaders in that state would be familiar with your company’s work, or have, at least, heard of the company. For United Launch Alliance in Alabama, think again.

In an article in Sunday’s Decatur (Ala.) Daily, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) tells the paper that he “did not know enough about the company to comment” about provisions in the NASA authorization bill approved by the Senate that would seem to shut out ULA from developing a heavy-lift rocket in favor of using shuttle-derived architectures. [The article may require a subscription for some, but you might be able to read it by going through Google News.] To some degree, that’s understandable: Sessions does not serve on the Senate Commerce Committee, which drafted the authorization bill, so one can see how he would not be familiar with elements of the bill and its accompanying report (which lays out the specifics about the committee’s desired architecture.) But the kicker comes at the very end of the article: “During the interview in Decatur two weeks ago, Sessions repeatedly referred to ULA as ‘UAL.'”