Bad Astronomy's take on the new NASA authorization.

[SirNitram]

Because they do this better than I kid myself I can do.

Link

The US House of Representatives is slated to vote on a NASA funding bill WEDNESDAY. The bill is essentially the same the Senate passed recently. The House had a compromise bill up for debate, but decided yesterday there wasn’t time before Congress goes on vacation. So they are going to vote on the Senate version instead.

What follows below is some detail.

The quick version: I support this bill, and I urge people to call their Representative and ask them to vote for it. I’ve already called my Congressman and asked him to support it.

The longer version:

This bill, called "The National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Act of 2010" doles out authorizes funding for NASA from 2010 – 2013, and advises NASA on what to spend that money on.

The bottom line is the funding:

For fiscal year 2011: $19,000,000,000

For fiscal year 2012: $19,450,000,000

For fiscal year 2013: $19,960,000,000

Note that the amount goes up every year, an indication that Congress is willing to not only support NASA’s work, but make it sustainable.

They make this clear right up front:

LONG TERM GOAL. —The long term goal of the human space flight and exploration efforts of NASA shall be to expand permanent human presence beyond low-Earth orbit and to do so, where practical, in a manner involving international partners.

That stresses human spaceflight, but the bill funds robotic Earth, space, and solar science strongly as well. I can always wish for more funds for unmanned exploration (and have it part of the long-term goal), but the money is there and I’m glad.

As for the Shuttle and Constellation, that gets interesting. From what I can tell, this bill axes Constellation. I support that, as I have all along. I think that some progress has been made in a follow-on rocket system, but Constellation is bogged down, over budget, and behind schedule. There are lots of reasons for that, but the bottom line is that while some things have been learned, the rocket system itself will take far too long and cost far too much.

So in this bill Constellation is gone and new system is required. I like that, but then the bill goes into details of what this new system should do — like how much payload it can carry into orbit, and so on. I’m not thrilled with that. I think Congress should give general goals and leave the details to NASA experts. The bill does mention the Moon, Mars, and near-Earth asteroids, so that makes me happy. There are indeed bottom-line requirements to explore these three goals, but the bill doesn’t need to delineate them.

As for the Shuttle, I am not thrilled to see that the bill supports the Shuttle through fiscal year 2011. I don’t know if that’s really necessary given the current launch manifest, and I have a sneaky suspicion it’s a jobs program to keep NASA people employed. I want to see them employed, but it should be done the right way. Immediate funding to move their expertise to the new launch system might be a better way to do this. But again, this is just a suspicion of mine, and certainly not enough to detract from the rest of the bill.

Still, overall I think the bill does the right thing here. It also reinforces NASA’s commitment to private launch vehicles, which is critical. SpaceX is on the thin edge of getting their Falcon 9 rocket capable of flights to the space station, and they need to influx of funding to keep that up.

Speaking of ISS, the bill also support it to 2020. As I have said many times, I am not a huge fan of the station, but it’s built now, and it would be a waste of money to let it lie fallow. It costs far less now to do things with it than it did to build it, so we can continue to work on it and perhaps get some good science and knowledge out of it.

There are lots of smaller projects supported in the bill — I was surprised and happy to see support for a suborbital research program, as well as restarting the radioisotope thermoelectric generator program to supply power to deep space science missions — but I’m not too concerned over those as yet. The important bits are about supporting science, supporting manned missions, and doing both the right way. Defunding Constellation, restarting the follow-on launch system, and putting money into science is the right way to do this.

So again, I support this bill in general, and think the House should pass it. Mind you, Friday is the last day for session; after that everyone goes home to start campaigning. As things stand now, NASA has no budget and no future. The House must pass this bill if NASA is to get the funding it needs. The fiscal year ends on Thursday!

So I ask that you contact your Representative and ask them to vote yes on this bill. Say it by name: S.3729, the NASA Authorization Act of 2010. That way you can be clear. From what I understand, it needs a 2/3 majority to pass, so it needs every vote it can get.

For my part, I’ll try to stay up on this news as it occurs Wednesday. Stay tuned.

The bill itself: Link

Constellation fans: You'll hate it.

NASA in general fans: You'll like it.

Shuttle fans: You get another year. Also, what's wrong with you people?

ISS fans: It stays up. We should get use out of it before we sound the abandon ship, frankly.

[Aaron]

The disillusioned cynic in me wonders (if this passes) how long it will survive. If Obama becomes a one term wonder will the next Administration come out with a new plan and "vision", sending us back to square one again?

[Big Phil]

The disillusioned cynic in me wonders (if this passes) how long it will survive. If Obama becomes a one term wonder will the next Administration come out with a new plan and "vision", sending us back to square one again?

Maybe you should get your Canuck government to start CASA (Canuckistani Aeronautics and Space Administration) instead of hitching your horse to the US of A...

[Aaron]

Maybe you should get your Canuck government to start CASA (Canuckistani Aeronautics and Space Administration) instead of hitching your horse to the US of A...

I think we'd be going backwards even faster if we let the CSA do it. Maybe we should partner up with China.

[Serafina]

Maybe you should get your Canuck government to start CASA (Canuckistani Aeronautics and Space Administration) instead of hitching your horse to the US of A...

I think we'd be going backwards even faster if we let the CSA do it. Maybe we should partner up with China.

Or with the ESA. You know, they are there, too

[Phantasee]

Yeah, let's team up with the ESA who have been hitching rides with the Yanks and Russkis, or we can join the Chinese and actually accomplish something.

All we need is for the Soviets to come back and we can establish the galactic version of COMINTERN.

[Uraniun235]

As for the Shuttle, I am not thrilled to see that the bill supports the Shuttle through fiscal year 2011. I don’t know if that’s really necessary given the current launch manifest, and I have a sneaky suspicion it’s a jobs program to keep NASA people employed. I want to see them employed, but it should be done the right way. Immediate funding to move their expertise to the new launch system might be a better way to do this.

I'm pretty sure a goodly proportion of those jobs are the thousands of people required to check and re-check each Shuttle exhaustively before it is cleared for another flight, and that they basically work year-round on inspecting and repairing the Shuttles. What is it exactly that they're supposed to be doing with the "new launch system" when it hasn't even been designed yet?

[Aaron]

Yeah, let's team up with the ESA who have been hitching rides with the Yanks and Russkis, or we can join the Chinese and actually accomplish something.

All we need is for the Soviets to come back and we can establish the galactic version of COMINTERN.

Exactly. But hey, if the ESA wants to hook up with China and us, go nuts. Its not like Canada has the cash to be building rockets.

[MKSheppard]

For fiscal year 2011: $19,000,000,000

For fiscal year 2012: $19,450,000,000

For fiscal year 2013: $19,960,000,000

Note that the amount goes up every year, an indication that Congress is willing to not only support NASA’s work, but make it sustainable.

NASA's budget in 2009 was $19.1 billion; and of course of this "increase" about $3 billion is going to contract termination payouts for constellation.

As for the Shuttle and Constellation, that gets interesting. From what I can tell, this bill axes Constellation. I support that, as I have all along. I think that some progress has been made in a follow-on rocket system, but Constellation is bogged down, over budget, and behind schedule. There are lots of reasons for that, but the bottom line is that while some things have been learned, the rocket system itself will take far too long and cost far too much.

Huhhhn. Huhhhhn. And watch as this new system develops the same problems -- over budget, and behind schedule that Constellation had, and are endemic to any program.

The famed Apollo Program was orginally scheduled and budgeted by NASA to cost no less than $10 billion. To provide some 'oomph', they bumped the number up to $13 billion and gave that to Webb.

Does Webb go and use that figure?

Hell no.

He goes onto the hill and says "Over twenty billion." to Kongress, and explains it to his underlings as

"I put an administrator's discount on it."

Final cost as reported to Congress in 1973?

$25.4 billion.

Still, overall I think the bill does the right thing here. It also reinforces NASA’s commitment to private launch vehicles, which is critical. SpaceX is on the thin edge of getting their Falcon 9 rocket capable of flights to the space station, and they need to influx of funding to keep that up.

Which is insane.

Why are we wasting so much money on SpaceX and "NewSpace" or "ObamaSpace?"

$1.4 billion a year in NewSpace would buy us ten Atlas V Heavy launches a year from an already established commercial launch provider -- ULA.

[Cecelia5578]

I find myself boggled that American liberals would support the privatization of space travel, without any real competition/funding for the government.

I think we quite rightly mock the fetish the right has for markets and the private sector, but space exploration seems to be an exception?

[Skgoa]

Yeah, let's team up with the ESA who have been hitching rides with the Yanks and Russkis, or we can join the Chinese and actually accomplish something.

All we need is for the Soviets to come back and we can establish the galactic version of COMINTERN.

Exactly. But hey, if the ESA wants to hook up with China and us, go nuts. Its not like Canada has the cash to be building rockets.

ESA is already working with the Russians. "We" are also working on manned an unmanned capsules RIGHT NOW. Oh and we have a launch system that was designed for a manned vehicle - these rockets are launching regularly and are proven safe. Now if the powers that be would just restart the Hermes II (our space plane) program...

[Sarevok]

Why does not ESA fund Skylon beyond meager 1-2 million Euros annually ? If Skylon does work it will change space travel as we know it. And ESA would be in possession of technology that can rightfully compare itself to a true scifi like space plane.

[Temujin]

I find myself boggled that American liberals would support the privatization of space travel, without any real competition/funding for the government.

I think we quite rightly mock the fetish the right has for markets and the private sector, but space exploration seems to be an exception?

That's always bothered me as well, and I seem to always be hearing a lot of quips in that regard from a number of scientist about how we just need to get private industry involved.

Oh well, in related news:

'Franken-ship' proposed from space shuttle scraps
Shuttle-derived rocket is one of several options under review

Ditch the space shuttle orbiters. Stretch their rocket boosters. Add more main engines. Put a capsule on top. What do you have? Franken-ship — the quickest route to a new rocket for NASA.

Briefing charts obtained by the NASA Watch website show a new vehicle that puts three disposable shuttle main engines on a shuttle fuel tank, a pair of solid rocket boosters on either side of the tank, and a capsule on top, replacing the side-mounted shuttle orbiter.

That incarnation can carry 70 tons into orbit, says the Human Exploration Framework Team, an in-house NASA advisory panel.

Add a fifth segment to the shuttle boosters and two more hydrogen-fueled main engines and you have a 100-ton lifter. Version 3.0, the 130-ton option, adds an upper-stage engine, a different propellant in the solid-fuel rockets and lighter-weight booster casings instead of steel.

A Senate blueprint for NASA — up for a vote by the House of Representatives today — directs the agency to begin work immediately on a new rocket, with the aim of flying in 2016. After testing, it would be used to fly astronauts into deep space, fulfilling the Obama administration's goal of sending a crew to an asteroid and then to Mars.

John Olson, who is overseeing the NASA's Human Exploration Framework Team that is fleshing out future space mission plans, says the shuttle-derived rocket is one of several options under review.

"There's pros and cons to all the variants we're looking at," Olson told Discovery News. "We still have some key studies to do."

Using elements of the space shuttle in different ways is not a new idea. Shortly after the shuttles began flying in 1981, NASA started looking at ways to morph the elements into unmanned cargo launchers, a program known as Shuttle-C.

The version under consideration by Olson's group is similar to a family of rockets known as Jupiter, developed over the past few years by an ad hoc group of engineers who recast shuttle parts in a configuration that could fly directly to Mars.

NASA had planned to follow up its retiring space shuttle program with a rocket known as Ares, part of the moon-bound Constellation program that would end under the NASA blueprint now pending before Congress.

Ares was built around a shuttle booster as well.

In addition to a NASA-developed rocket, the pending bill expands government investment in aspiring commercial launch firms.

With the shuttle program ending, crew transport to the space station has been turned over to Russia, which currently charges the U.S. government $51 million per person.

It's alive!

[Skgoa]

Should the government send expeditions to other continents? Should the government build diesel trains?
No, of course not. Then why should the government haul junk into orbit? "Been there, done that" has never been so appropriate. Letting a number of private entities compete and drive commercialization is the best way to do it.
Lets use the (already rather low) space budgets for actual science. edit: Scientificaly speaking, things like sending humans to the moon again are relatively uninteresting. (if thats even a word. )

Why does not ESA fund Skylon beyond meager 1-2 million Euros annually ?

Because they are sane? Its only a slightly outlandish - though at first glance feasible - idea that made a couple of alarm bells ring in my head when I read the wiki article. I will have to read up on it, but amongst other things it would be the first single-stage-to-orbit design EVER, if it achived what the marketing bullshit on their website claims.
And there are very good reasons why we design rockets with several stages, if they are meant to do anything worthwhile. So basicly, their whole idea hinges upon whether or not they can actually build the engines. Thats what they got 1 million euro for from ESA. IF they can make it work, we might see more funding going towards then. But even then I would be surprised, if the french - who are paying into ESA more than anyone else - would let it threaten whatever version of Ariane ESA is flying at that time.

If Skylon does work it will change space travel as we know it.

As would a space elevator any one of the other barely feasible ideas out there.

And ESA would be in possession of technology that can rightfully compare itself to a true scifi like space plane.

ESA is looking at severall space planes at the moment. But more importantly: this is mostly a private venture, meaning that ESA won't possess anything.

[Skylon]

As for the Shuttle, I am not thrilled to see that the bill supports the Shuttle through fiscal year 2011. I don’t know if that’s really necessary given the current launch manifest, and I have a sneaky suspicion it’s a jobs program to keep NASA people employed. I want to see them employed, but it should be done the right way. Immediate funding to move their expertise to the new launch system might be a better way to do this.

I'm pretty sure a goodly proportion of those jobs are the thousands of people required to check and re-check each Shuttle exhaustively before it is cleared for another flight, and that they basically work year-round on inspecting and repairing the Shuttles. What is it exactly that they're supposed to be doing with the "new launch system" when it hasn't even been designed yet?

This is more of a back door way to get one more shuttle mission. The final scheduled mission was pushed back to early 2011 (the flight to deliver the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer to ISS, it was delayed when they payload developed a fault during processing). However, that mission had a rescue flight slated to be processed in the event the shuttle was damaged and stranded at ISS. With all the talks of extending ISS's operational life to beyond 2020, it started to look prudent to use the hardware for that rescue flight to add one more shuttle flight to the manifest, and load it with as many supplies as possible to ship up to ISS. NASA hopes to fly it in June of 2011.

After that, the rest of 2011 is final servicing in preparation to send Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour to museums.

[MKSheppard]

My immediate thoughts on the aftermath of this bill?

We've already lost a year of development time as contracts were put into "hold" mode and people worried more about their job and updating their resumes than working on rockets, following Obama's space speech that started all this back in the early Spring when he said he was cancelling Constellation.

Follow that with the Summer of Reductions at various NASA centers; including MSFC; that was instigated by Obama's appointees.

A friend of mine, Scott Brim, whose expertise is in the Nuclear Industry compared it quite rightly to the way that Obama shut down Yucca Mountain:

This is the same strategy that was used for the Yucca Mountain shutdown last year -- get rid of the contractor staff and the contractor support infrastructure so quickly and so thoroughly that the project can't be revived any time soon regardless of what Congress might decide in the near-term future.

With the work on a new HLV that must fly by 2016; quite a few of those people will be coming back -- the economy isn't in the best of shape, and the market for the type of engineering done by those types is pretty limited.

But quite a few of those people -- having been burned before -- will be gun-shy about jumping onto any "new" NASA contract, and a lot of those who come back will always be keeping their resume and CV's up to date, and making calls and emails to people outside of the NASA contracting world as a 'fall back' in case a new president comes in in 2012 and decides to change course AGAIN -- so they won't be 105% committed.

While a lot of stuff that was done for Constellation can be recycled into the new program rapidly and easily; such as the reconstruction of test stands across NASA for static engine firing tests -- the "clean-out" of one LC39 pad to it's near-Apollo configuration -- technical validation of concepts such as new methods of welding and tank forming...designing a new vehicle is going to take time.

Ares I was nearing it's first CDR after four to five years or so of development.

With the current budget of NASA ($19~ billion for the next couple of years, strangely similar to the FY09 budget)...there's not going to be enough money to parallelize the development of whatever design NASA picks...so we will see a CDR by about 2014 or 2015, and a first flight probably by 2018-19.

That puts it well into the "danger zone" for any future president to cancel or "Restructure" it, particularly as metal is being cut and problems are found, leading to further delays and budget spirals.

Mike Griffin had it right when he called the Ares I haters out by pointing out that their magical designs like DIRECT's JUPITER were paper rockets, so they didn't have problems.

Short version?

Obama has delayed our space program by a good five to six years easily with his ill-thought out decision to cancel Constellation, forcing us to go back to where we were in 2005.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

I find myself boggled that American liberals would support the privatization of space travel, without any real competition/funding for the government.

They don't do it out of any real love for space. Space travel and exploration in the United States is largely a function of the military-defense industrial complex (as the rockets, rocket motors, vehicles, and rad-hard electronics are produced by/designed by/designed for/had their origins in the defense sector.) And we all know just how much love progressive/liberal politicians hold for the military-defense industrial complex . . . they tend to see American space travel as yet another taxpayer handout to defense that could be much better spent on social interests.

This is why Republicans are much more willing to, at least, pay lip service to the American space program than the Democrats are . . . and why the Democrats want to "privatize" space by throwing lots of money at newcomers like SpaceX.