Space Access Update #133 6/4/13
Copyright 2013 by Space Access Society
________________________________________________________________________
In this Issue:
- Followup: The Sequester And NASA's Budget
________________________________________________________________________
Followup: The
Sequester And NASA's Budget
No sooner do we go on record
in SAU #132 that
NASA's FY'14 budget is likely to be cut by the Sequester to $16.2 billion from
its White House requested level of $17.7 billion, than the Administrator of
NASA shows up in print saying the cut will only be to $16.6 billion. See the Aviation Week story NASA
Chief Repeats Warnings On Commercial Crew Delays, final paragraph.
On the theory that Administrator
Bolden might know something we don't, we took a look around, and as best we can
tell this is what's going on:
The House Appropriators
recently set their FY'14 "Non-Defense Discretionary" (NDD) spending
totals at $967 billion, the amount needed to meet the FY'14 Sequester NDD
cap. They did not trim the dozen or so
major Federal spending accounts equally, however. Their cuts (relative to the FY'13 budget,
pre-sequester) ranged from 22.2% (Labor, HHS, Education) to 1.5% (Homeland
Security). The Commerce, Justice,
Science (CJS) account where NASA lives did a bit better than average, with a
6.5% cut.
The Senate Appropriators,
meanwhile, haven't set their FY'14 spending totals yet, but when they do, they
reportedly will set their NDD accounts total at $1,058 billion - almost the
same as the White House $1,059 billion FY'14 request, and 8.6% higher than the
FY'14 Sequester cap. (Which should make
following this year's budget process doubly fun, as Senate numbers will all be
pre-Sequester, House number post.)
If we apply the House's 6.5%
CJS account cut to NASA's nominal FY'13 budget, we get $16.7 billion. Not precisely the $16.6 billion Administrator
Bolden mentioned, but within rounding error.
Bottom line, it's closer to a 1% cut from actual post-Sequester FY'13
NASA funding, rather than the ~4% cut we'd expected. Good news, if so.
Will the House in fact give
NASA that? Will the Senate go
along? As we said, it's entirely
possible Administrator Bolden knows something we don't. It's also possible he's being an optimist
about the odds that the better-than-expected initial House numbers will survive
the process intact. We'll know more
later this month, when the Senate Appropriators publish their CJS numbers.
________________________________________________________________________
Followup: Commercial
Crew
We've had some interesting
responses to last issue's discussion of Commercial Crew.
First a quick technical correction:
CPC, Certification Products Contracts, is only the preliminary paperwork phase
for NASA certification of the Commercial Crew vehicles to carry NASA
employees. CPC covers just the
preliminary $10 million FARs-based contracts to the
three Commercial Crew competitors that we mentioned; those finish next year,
2014. The second FARs-based
phase of certification, the one intended to replace the SAA-based CCiCap optional flight-test milestones, so far is called
"the second phase of certification."
(The FARs are the traditional Federal
Acquisition Regulations, while SAAs are more flexible
and many-times lower-cost Space Act Agreements.)
We also got a pointer to a
very good in-depth piece about certification at nasaspaceflight.com. It is particularly interesting to read
between the lines of this interview with some awareness of the intense
pressures on Commercial Crew to hobble the program in ways that will make it
fit various old-NASA agendas better.
Which brings us to another
correction, and also a disclaimer. Last
issue, in describing various old NASA pressures on Commercial Crew, we
described the source as "HSF", the NASA Human Spaceflight establishment. This is technically incorrect, as they've yet
again changed the alphabet soup - it's now HEO, Human Exploration and
Operations.
More importantly, it's
imprecise and potentially misleading, which is why we're switching back to the
term "old NASA" to describe the source of these harmful
pressures. HEO contains (as do most of
the diverse flock of organizations that make up NASA) numerous good people
working hard to accomplish useful things for the country (often despite the
dysfunctional bureaucracies they're embedded in.) We mentioned "factions within HSF"
at the start of the section, but then just referred to "HSF", which
is misleading. Current-day NASA HEO
overlaps with but is far from identical to the problem, and we apologize for
the imprecision.
The Problem
The problem, now, boils down
to this: We've retired Shuttle. We've laid off many (but not all) of the
Shuttle contractors. But most of the
federal bureaucrats who ran the Shuttle program remain at NASA (with
significant regional Congressional backing) but now seriously underemployed and
casting about for some way, any way, to revive and perpetuate their fading
bureaucratic empire.
Forty years after imposing
crippling overhead on Shuttle by keeping as many of themselves as possible on
the payroll post-Apollo, this entrenched "old NASA" carries a heavy
burden of institutional prejudices and impossibly expensive operating
procedures. It is a mature bureaucracy,
powerfully resistant to making any real changes in its organizational structure
or operational approach. Its remaining
flagship programs, SLS and MPCV, barely support its overhead, with little
prospect for the billions a year in new funding needed to fly actual useful
missions. SLS in particular is in
growing danger of being seen for the dead-end jobs program it is.
The success of COTS and soon
CCP in flying new commercial ships at a tenth or less old NASA costs is a
deadly threat to this remnant bureaucracy's future. Old NASA depended for decades on the defense
that "space is hard" (true) and that all the billions they consumed
every year to produce a handful of missions were the essential minimum to do
the job (false, but hard to prove.)
COTS has now provided graphic
proof of old NASA's obsolescence, and CCP will soon provide far more if not
contained and controlled. In order to
understand the growing fight over CCP funding and policy, we think it essential
to understand old NASA's not very hidden CCP agendas:
- To avoid CCP conspicuously and
embarrassingly flying commercial test pilots (as called for in the CCiCap options) years before NASA astronauts are allowed on
board.
- To downselect CCP
early, so old NASA can more easily capture the one "winner" as their
next massively overstaffed meal-ticket, and so there's less danger of any
purely commercial rivals surviving to show up how badly old NASA capture then
works.
- In support of that same
goal, to attempt to capture the commercial human spaceflight regulation job
away from FAA AST. (We'd overlooked this
one in our last Update, as being such a blatant conflict of interest with such
huge scope for old NASA bureaucratic turf-defense mischief-making that nobody
could possibly take it seriously. We've
now been reminded that far too many don't yet understand this.)
- To avoid any more conspicuous demonstrations
that the new COTS/CCP approach is ten or more times cheaper than old NASA's
traditional development process, by imposing as much of that process as
possible (FARs-based contracts) as soon as possible.
So, that's who we are unhappy
with at NASA, and why. Anyone else hit
with our overly broad brush last issue, no offense intended.
________________________________________________________________________
New ITAR Reform Problem
We've been supporters of ITAR
reform for a long time now. The State
Department-administered International Traffic in Arms Regulations
export-control rules were expanded to include just about anything space-related
in the late '90s. The results were to
cripple US satellite hardware exports, and to make international commercial
space cooperation of any sort extremely difficult for US vendors.
A set of proposed ITAR rules
modifications has been published now at federalregister.gov
that finally removes some of the satellite export restrictions. At the same time, however, it adds new items
to the export-restricted munitions list.
One of these items is "man-rated suborbital spacecraft."
This is, we expect, causing
consternation at Virgin Galactic and XCOR, both US suborbital spacecraft
developers that have been counting on overseas-based commercial suborbital
flight operations for significant slices of future business. (We first saw this issue mentioned in twitter
coverage of XCOR COO Andrew Nelson's talk at the Next-generation Suborbital
Researchers Conference yesterday.) It's
worth pointing out that while the US currently has a lead in developing
vehicles for this market, it's not that much of a lead. Credible foreign competitors exist, and could
quickly dominate world markets if US suborbital companies are held back by ITAR
the same way US satellite exporters have been.
It strikes us that most of
the military-related things a manned suborbital RLV might be used for (chiefly
regional reconnaissance) require additional hardware that's already on the
munitions list separately, and thus including the vehicles themselves on the
list is overkill. The public comment
period for the new proposed rule runs through July 8th 2013, and comments can
be submitted via this
link on the above website.
For considerably more detail
on all this, see Jon Goff's post at Selenian Boondocks.
Final thought: The proposed
new ITAR munitions list also includes "Man-rated orbital spacecraft",
which seems likely to create pointless difficulties for the US Commercial Crew
competitors in any future commercial operations involving foreign customers, or
eventual foreign-controlled orbital destinations. (ITAR restrictions go well beyond just
physical export of hardware, to cover all sorts of interactions with foreign
persons.) Whoever came up with this one
may have just sold more Russian Soyuz seats than the entire Roscosmos
sales staff...
________________________________________________________________________
Space Access Society's sole purpose is to promote
radical reductions in the cost of reaching space. You may redistribute this
Update in any medium you choose, as long as you do it unedited in its entirety.
You may reproduce selected portions of this Update if you credit this Space
Access Update as the source and include a pointer to our website.
________________________________________________________________________
Space Access Society
space.access@mindspring.com
"Reach low orbit and you're halfway to anywhere in the Solar System"
- Robert A. Heinlein