By Jeff Foust on 2010 September 10 at 6:27 am ET As some space advocates seek to block the House’s version of a NASA authorization bill, others have expressed support for at least key elements of the legislation. At a roundtable on Capitol Hill Thursday organized by the Space Transportation Association, former NASA administrator Mike Griffin offered his ideas of what he would like to see in a final authorization bill. “We’re no longer facing a future in which the administration’s proposal is one of the possible outcomes,” he said. “The Senate has passed an authorization bill that takes a more mature approach to human space exploration, and the House Science and Technology Committee has issued a draft bill that is even better.”
Griffin said that, given the chance, he would mix and match elements of the House and Senate bills. He said it was “crucial” to include the provisions in the House bill for the development of a government human space transportation system. “A crew launch capability which is not dependent on commercial interests or the state of international partner relationships is a strategic national asset and should not be sacrificed for lesser interests,” he said. He also called for retaining the safety standards for a crew launch system included in the House version. The Senate version’s language on heavy-lift launch vehicle develop should be retained, although modified to remove the initial development of an HLV with a capacity of as little as 70 tons “as it is technically unwise.”
“A NASA authorization act that captures the best of both bills will take us beyond the present muddled state to what we all hope will be a clear statement of national space policy and bipartisan agreement,” Griffin concluded.
Another panelist, Scott Pace, a former NASA official who is now director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, also threw his support primarily behind the House version of the bill. “The numbers in the House bill for developing government capabilities are higher than those in the Senate, thus, I believe it has a better chance for programmatic success,” he said. “The Senate bill has more funds for commercial crew and technology than the House, risking funds being spread perhaps too thin and schedules being slipped.” His preference, he said, was to start with the Senate bill since it has already passed the Senate “but to use the funding numbers that are in the House bill to ensure the best chance of success.”
A third panelist, Gary Payton, who retired as the deputy under secretary of the Air Force for space a little over a month ago, didn’t talk directly about the authorization bills but instead lamented the looming gap in US human spaceflight access. Asked, though, if the US should close the gap by extending the shuttle program, he disagreed. “The shuttle program has killed 14 people in flight. I don’t know why you would ever fly another one,” he said. Payton, who flew as a payload specialist on a military shuttle mission in 1985, said that mission was worth risking the lives of astronauts, “but I’m not sure microgravity research warrants that.”
Striking a different tone from the other panelists, AIAA executive director Robert Dickman endorsed the idea of commercial crew transportation. While he said suborbital commercial flights like those of SpaceShipOne in 2004 “were a far cry from what I would call spaceflight”, he saw a bright future for commercial human spaceflight. “I have no doubt that private citizens will travel on vehicles other than government rockets, be it for tourism or for some other reason,” he said. “I’m probably much less concerned than some about the prospect of using commercial providers for human access to low Earth orbit.”
By Jeff Foust on 2010 September 9 at 8:40 pm ET With the House set to return from an extended summer recess next week, and presumably try to pick up where they left off on issues such as HR 5781, its version of a NASA authorization bill, opponents of the legislation are stepping up their efforts. The Space Access Society, which had not been actively involved in legislative efforts for quite some time, is now supporting efforts to keep the bill from reaching the House floor. In a bulletin released this afternoon the organization asked people to contact their representatives within the next 24 hours. The message: the representatives should contact House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (if they’re Democrats) or Minority Whip Eric Cantor (if they’re Republicans) and ask that HR 5781 not be brought to the floor for a vote; instead, have a vote on the Senate’s version (S. 3729) or nothing at all. The reason for the urgent request: Hoyer will decide by the end of the week which bills will be placed on the calenda for consideration by the full House between next week and the planned recess in early October before the November elections.
In addition, another web site has emerged to express opposition to the House bill. Yes We Can (Even in Space) is focused on the liberal/progressive community. “Generally liberals, progressives, and Democrats have been ignored, taken for granted, or even scapegoated when it comes to NASA and our space program,” the site claims. Its focus is on stopping HR 5781 because the bill “seeks to preserve all or part of Constellation”, which is inconsistent with their mission: “rejecting the failed Bush Constellation program, or any watered-down Constellation derivatives, and embracing the Obama space plan.” Unlike Reform Space Now, whose creators remain cloaked in anonymity, this site has named some of its supportes, including Steven Andrew, chief science blogger over at Dailykos, and Bruce Bullin, formerly with Scientists and Engineers for Change.
Update 9/10 5 am: A couple more organizations have added their voices to the effort to stop HR 5781. The Space Studies Institute released a letter late Thursday signed by the organization’s leadership, including president Freeman Dyson, asking Congress to defeat the bill. “The present House bill will delay the time when space can make a greater contribution to our national welfare” by not adequately funding commercial crew development and technology programs, it claims. The Space Frontier Foundation also put out a call for “urgent action” to block the bill and instead support the Senate version. “The Senate version isn’t perfect either, but the House version is a disaster,” the Foundation’s executive director, Will Watson, said in the statement.
By Jeff Foust on 2010 September 9 at 7:22 am ET One of the members of last year’s Augustine Committee is urging his fellow panelists to support the Senate version of the NASA authorization bill. Space News reports that Chris Chyba emailed other members of the committee last month to ask them to support the bill. Chyba, a Princeton professor of astrophysics and international affairs, said in the email that the Senate version is more of a “game-evolver” than a “gamechanger”, but is better than the House version that endorses a “business as usual” approach. “Those who want to change the way things have been done as an important step forward to a human future beyond [low Earth orbit] should, in my opinion, strongly support the Senate version of the NASA authorization,” Chyba wrote in an excerpt published by Space News.
The Senate bill also gets support in an op-ed in The Hill by Marion Blakey, president and CEO of the Aerospace Industries Association and a former FAA administrator. The Senate bill “provides a compromise solution” between the administration’s original proposal and “the preference of Congress” to keep some sort of government human spaceflight capability. Meanwhile, “The House version of the bill is still pending, floating tetherless in space and awaiting a final pull” that would lead to a final compromise between the two versions. “As time grows short in the legislative calendar, a final resolution seems less and less likely.”
Tom Jones (the former astronaut, not the singer) tells SecondAct.com he’s working on planning for future human missions to asteroids but worries about the R&D funding needed to support such missions. “Unfortunately, NASA’s R&D budget is the first place legislators go to cut costs or for their own priorities,” he said. “R&D gets zapped unless it’s tied to an objective, and there isn’t that right now.”
Does it take a rocket scientist to solve our nation’s problems? That’s what Ruth McClung thinks: she is the Republican nominee for Arizona’s 7th congressional district running against Democratic incumbent Rep. Raúl Grijalva. Among her other stances on various issues, she tells the Arizona Daily Wildcat that she supports scientific research, even for “garage scientists” not affiliated with universities and corporations. “You can’t ignore anybody when it comes to science,” the self-described rocket scientist (who works as an engineer for Raytheon) tells the paper. And what did the University of Arizona alumna learn from her time in college? “I learned a lot,” she tells the college paper. “College gets hard.”
By Jeff Foust on 2010 September 9 at 6:38 am ET NASA administrator Charles Bolden, as you might expect, didn’t make much in the way of policy pronouncements in a speech Tuesday night at Purdue University. But in a Q&A with the audience after his speech he did stumble upon one issue: how do you refer to Constellation? “Orion and Ares are two components of a program that was called Constellation–or that is called Constellation,” he said, catching himself. He explained that he’s required under the FY10 appropriations bill to continue work on Constellation “although President Obama and I decided that that was not the program for NASA going forward.”
Later Bolden was asked what the problem was with the program that caused the administration to seek to cancel it. “Constellation was an incredible concept. The Vision for Space Exploration, I think, was really good,” he said. But, he said, “a strange thing happened, which is not unusual in our country: neither the Congress nor the administration chose to fund it.” The result, he said, was that when he became administrator Constellation had become a “lunar-focused” program without surface systems and “no vision, no possibility, that we were going to reach Mars or a NEO or anything else other than maybe the Moon in my lifetime. And then, we we got to lunar orbit, no way to get to the surface.”
He warned that in future budgets “we’re going to have to make very difficult choices as to how do we phase the systems that take us beyond low Earth orbit.” A case in point is a heavy lift launch vehicle: do you start on it now, or instead start on other programs, like a crew vehicle? “Those are decisions that we agonize over right now,” he said. However, earlier in his speech he indicated that decision had been made—or, perhaps, was being made for him, contrary to original plans. “A heavy lift rocket that can get us out into deep space seems likely to be one of our priorities,” he said in a discussion of technologies needed for exploration.
By Jeff Foust on 2010 September 8 at 7:41 pm ET A reader informed me today about a web site called Reform Space Now whose raison d’être appears to be to oppose the House version of the NASA authorization bill, HR 5781. The web site features a one-minute narrated video that first builds up the administration’s new direction for NASA and then states, “But to some in Congress, pork for special interests is more important than the future of space travel.” The site builds upon that theme with sections like “The Broken Rocket Bailout” (about the bill’s support for Ares 1, or at least a launch vehicle that looks similar to it) and “20 Years Stuck Circling the Earth?” (which argues that Constellation, without an infusion of additional funding, would prevent humans from returning to the Moon “until well past 2030″). The site is nothing short of a broadside against the House bill.
The question is, though, who’s making this attack on HR 5781? The site is professionally done, as is the video; the statements in the various sections are detailed, citing sources ranging from trade publications to NASA and other government documents. Nowhere, though, is there any indication of who developed the site: there is no “about us” section or other contact information. The domain name “reformspacenow.com” is registered privately with a proxy service, providing no information about who obtained the domain name beyond the fact that the name was registered on July 13. The video is hosted on Vimeo, where the user “reformspacenow” joined this month and uploaded the video three days ago. Whoever developed this site clearly wants to remain behind the scenes.
By Jeff Foust on 2010 September 6 at 6:46 pm ET Last week a group of 30 people, including 14 Nobel laureates, sent Congressman Bart Gordon (D-TN) a letter asking him to reconsider elements of the NASA budget proposal that were cut in the authorization bill approved by the House Science and Technology Committee, chaired by Gordon, in July. Late Friday Gordon replied with a letter of his own to Stanford professor and former NASA Ames director Scott Hubbard, suggesting that, if anything, Gordon remains as strongly committed as ever to his committee’s plans for NASA.
Gordon, in the letter’s introduction, says that while his committee “fully supports” a number of initiatives in the administration’s budget proposal, it had questions about some aspects of it which it found hard to get answers about from NASA. “Reluctantly, the Committee came to the conclusion that the president’s new human space flight program, much like the current Constellation program, was unexecutable under the current budget projections and the other NASA priorities we all agree must be addressed,” Gordon wrote. The problem was exacerbated by the administration’s decision in April to keep the Orion program alive as a crew return vehicle for the ISS without increasing the agency’s budget or specifying what offsets would pay for the program. “The hard reality is that the Administration has sent an unexecutable budget request to Congress,” he wrote, “and we now have to make tough choices so that the nation can have a sustainable and balanced NASA program.”
Gordon then touched on several specific areas addressed by Hubbard and others in their original letter, including commercial spaceflight. He defended the committee’s support for commercial spaceflight, arguing that “Contrary to the suggestion in your letter, the Committee’s bill ‘invests’ no more in the Russian launch industry than the president’s budget request.” (In fact, the Hubbard et al. letter noted that the House bill authorizes over $900 million in purchasing seats on Soyuz flights versus $450 million for commercial crew development.) Gordon wrote that concerns that it may be “premature” for NASA to rely on commercial crew providers, plus “tight budgets”, forced them to limit the amount of support they could provide and thus “explore creative mechanisms” for providing it. That is a reference to a loan guarantee plan in the version passed by the committee, but Gordon confirms earlier reports that the plan will be reworked since the Congressional Budget Office found that the financial risk of such a program “is so high that it makes the program unviable”.
On other issues, Gordon defended the committee’s support for technology development, criticized in the Hubbard et al. letter. Gordon noted that funding for the Exploration Technology Program was moved to the Space Technology account to keep it “from being ‘raided’ to pay for other Exploration-related activities, as has happened in the past.” He also defended the lack of funding for exploration-related robotic precursor missions, saying it was better to wait until the overall human exploration program was better defined. “One only has to look at the Administration’s robotic precursor budget request to see that it is ill-defined,” he wrote, referring to a proposed lunar lander mission when there are no plans by the White House to return humans to the Moon as one example.
All this suggests that Gordon doesn’t seem particularly inclined towards a compromise with either the administration’s proposal or the Senate’s authorization bill, which provides more money for exploration technology development and commercial crew development than the House bill, when Congress returns from its summer recess next week.
By Jeff Foust on 2010 September 5 at 2:51 pm ET Many people who are opposed to the administration’s proposal to invest up to $6 billion over the next five years to develop commercial crew transportation capabilities insist that they’re not opposed to the concept of commercial crew, only the approach. If a company develops a commercial crew system on their own dime, they argue, they’d be happy to support buying services from them—they just don’t want their development subsidized by the federal government. However, one industry official warned last week that such an approach threatens to repeat the history of another program.
George Sowers, vice president of business development for United Launch Alliance, noted during a panel session at the AIAA Space 2010 conference in Anaheim, California, last Thursday that the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) program had a mixed outcome. The program was a technical and programmatic success, he noted, and “an even bigger success” for the US government, in that it invested $1 billion into the program ($500 million each to Boeing and Lockheed Martin), while the two companies put about $4 billion of their own money to develop the Atlas 5 and Delta 4 launch vehicle families. However, it was “a business failure” for the two companies, he said, as they failed to recoup their investment into the vehicles, especially as anticipated commercial launch demand failed to materialize. He noted that at one point in the 1990s Lockheed had a conservative forecast of 19 Atlas 5 launches a year; current launch rates are instead about five a year, virtually all for government customers.
Sowers noted the parallels between the EELV and commercial crew debates are “kind of eerie”. Because of that, he argued, repeating the same approach of the EELV program, with private ventures picking up most of the costs of developing systems on the basis of capturing promised commercial markets, is unwise. “Assuming the existence of a commercial market to entice or extort the companies to invest is the wrong way to go,” he said. Having the government invest in developing commercial crew capabilities is better for several reasons: the government needs the capability, a commercial approach can reduce costs over an all-government system, and the government can get a long-term benefit as commercial markets do emerge and cost go down as flight rates increase. “The government should invest” up front, unlike the EELV case, he said, “and if the government does invest, then a commercial market can be established and then the government can get its return on investment.”
By Jeff Foust on 2010 September 2 at 10:51 am ET In a luncheon speech Tuesday at the AIAA Space 2010 conference in Anaheim, California, NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver sounded an optimistic and even a bit of a conciliatory note about the ongoing debate in Congress about the future direction of the space agency. “All four bills, I believe, do acknowledge that there are things in our budget proposal that are important to do,” she said, mentioning the extension of the ISS and increased funding for Earth sciences as two examples of items supported in House and Senate versions of NASA authorization and appropriations legislation. However, she added, “we clearly still have priorities like fully funding the commercial crew element of the budget, like fully funding our technology portion of the budget.” Those elements, she said, were essential to a sustainable, affordable program.
One additional area of concern she mentioned that has not gotten as much publicity is funding the transition and closeout of the Constellation program. The budget proposal includes $2.5 billion over two years for that, but Garver noted that no funding for that is included in any of the current Congressional legislation. “Just because you don’t have that in the budget doesn’t mean we’re not going to have to spend that money,” she warned. “Those dollars will have to be embedded in some of the other programs if it is not singled out in a line item.”
On heavy-lift, she said that NASA was “working with Congress to get a broader, deeper understanding” on how to go forward on this. She suggested that the agency didn’t feel it should be restricted on the design of an HLV by language such as that in the report accompanying the Senate’s authorization bill, which mandates a specific shuttle-derived approach. “We don’t feel that the best way to make those technical decisions is at the level of political leadership” but instead where the technical expertise resides at NASA and in industry. Political leadership, she said, can instead drive the “figures of merit” for such a system, such as affordability.
She also said that the debate does not appear to be as fierce now as it was earlier this year. “There is a lessening of tensions in Washington,” she said, noting that “we really don’t feel that we are now questioning each other’s intentions.” While unsure about when a compromise might be reached, she said she was confident “there will be a program coming together”. One positive aspect of the debate, she noted, was the debate was about not about how much to spend on NASA: “I don’t believe I heard a speech about cutting the $19 billion” overall NASA budget proposal for FY2011.
By Jeff Foust on 2010 September 1 at 11:32 am ET A letter released late yesterday signed by 30 people, including 14 Nobel laureates and seven former astronauts, asks Congress to restore funding for key elements of the FY2011 NASA budget proposal. The letter, directed specifically to House Science and Technology Committee chairman Rep. Bart Gordon, specifically discusses technology development, commercial crew, robotic precursor missions, and university and student research as key areas that require funding. “These are the key elements of the President’s new plan for NASA that must be retained in any consensus solution reached by Congress and the White House,” the letter states (in bold) in the introduction.
The letter makes several specific requests. For technology development the signatories ask that funding “be increased to levels significantly closer to the President’s request”. They also ask for full funding of the commercial crew development program and the CRuSR suborbital program, as well as “adequate funding” for the robotic precursor mission program.
The letter is particularly targeted at the House, whose authorization bill severely cuts (“substantially underfunded”, in the language of the letter) many of these programs compared to both the original budget request and the Senate authorization and appropriation legislation. “These investments,” the letter concludes, “will help ensure continued American space leadership.”
By Jeff Foust on 2010 August 31 at 9:11 am ET In a recent speech in the Houston area, Congressman Pete Olson blamed “an insurance item” for the House’s inability to pass the NASA authorization bill before going on recess nearly a month ago. According to local paper The Citizen, Olson told the Clear Lake Chamber that “the California delegation had a problem with an insurance item in the legislation” which kept the bill from going to the full House for a vote. The article isn’t more specific about that concern: previous reports had indicated that the bill’s sponsors planned to shift a proposed loan guarantee program for commercial crew development into a more conventional grant program, while House members from California and Ohio wanted to restore funding for technology and commercial crew development programs. (The same article also states that the bill had been approved by the “Houston Committee on Science and Technology”; not sure if that’s a typo or a Freudian slip.)
The University of Nebraska College of Law will be hosting a free one-day conference on national space policy on Friday, September 10, at the Newseum in Washington. Keynote speakers include Gen. James Cartwright, vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver.
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