Space Access Update
#118 8/30/10
Copyright 2010 by Space Access Society
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The NASA Authorization Battle:
Why It Matters
A week ago we asked you all to actively support the Senate version FY 2011 NASA Authorization bill. We described it as not great, but acceptable compared to the extremely bad House bill. The response we've seen so far has been pretty lukewarm.
Partly our fault, we expect - we'd done considerable puzzling over the legislative fine print before concluding our best immediate tactic is to support the Senate version, but last week's Update presented a rather condensed version of that thinking. We didn't want the thing to turn into a novel. Nor to tip our hand on tactics unduly, since the opposition is way too well financed and organized already, while our side is still scrambling to shake off rust and rebuild an effective coalition. (It's been years since there was anything much at NASA we thought worth volunteering to fight for.)
Then too, we'd forgotten how far we gradually came around during that bill-reading session. Our position going in was, fight the Senate bill too, kill the continued in-house NASA launcher boondoggle, do or die, right now! We concluded that wasn't a useful approach over the course of a couple of weeks; we can't blame anyone who got whiplash being asked to make that course change in a couple of paragraphs.
But we do understand how you feel. A few weeks ago we too were happily anticipating the revolution implicit in the Administration FY 2011 NASA budget request: Shut down unaffordably bloated in-house NASA launcher developments, encourage many-times-cheaper commercial launch options, and spend the (substantial) difference refilling the (bare) NASA exploration technology cupboard, so in a few years NASA might be ready to begin putting together some real exploration missions. We knew we had a fight on our hands over the House bill, but that was so outrageously bad it was easy to get motivated.
Then the Senate surprised us with a bill that roughly split the difference - about a 60/40 compromise between the House's rejection of reform and the original Administration proposal. Our first reaction: NASA had been serving up a crap sandwich for a lot of years, and we were just getting used to their new plan to switch to caviar. The Senate suddenly compromising on a 60/40 blend of the two didn't thrill us. We were pumped to attack it too.
Then we started remembering our previous years of fighting such fights. Once the House and Senate have staked out their positions on something like this, the final result is almost always in the range bounded by those two positions. Moving significantly outside that range takes extraordinary outside pressure, especially once the White House and NASA already have admitted they can live with the Senate version. We don't think that our coalition (yet) has the kind of political firepower it'd take to get a better Authorization than the Senate version in the next couple of weeks. (Frankly, the only way we'll ever have the clout to push this toward a good final outcome is if a whole bunch of you decide we're making sense.)
After calming down, we spent some time reading the fine print in the different versions of the NASA budget, trying to figure out how they really compare, and how that fits into the tactical situation. (Tabular results, with commentary, follow below.)
To sum up, the House Authorization effectively kills the good Exploration options, largely defunding them, and also strewing their path with poison-pill requirements. This House bill steers 92% of all Exploration funding to a sort of Constellation-Lite - even more full of fatal contradictions, more underfunded, and less likely to ever fly than Constellation - blatantly sacrificing NASA's future for a political jobs program.
The Senate version tries to split the difference. It keeps all the good options from the Administration proposal alive and more or less funded, so we don't have to fight the next round from a zero base. It doesn't contain as many internal contradictions and poison pills. It doesn't spend as much as the House on a new in-house NASA heavy booster and capsule, and it gives NASA wiggle room on how to execute that booster that the House doesn't. So NASA might eventually end up with a usable (albeit probably horribly expensive) new heavy lifter, and if not (as still seems most likely) at least less money is wasted. We think it's a considerably better bill than the House version (mediocre rather than disastrous) even in the unlikely event it ends up precisely defining what NASA is doing a year from now. (As for two and three years from now, we advise not taking the out-years too seriously - those numbers tend to be highly mutable.)
We don't want to go into too much tactical detail, but while the final NASA Authorization bill is a lot more important than usual this year, the actual checks still get cut by Appropriations. There has been a lot of speculation as to whether an Appropriations bill for NASA will be passed before the Congress leaves town again, or if NASA will be funded for some months at last year's levels under a "continuing resolution". Our view: It doesn't immediately matter. The thing to focus on right now is avoiding an unacceptable NASA Authorization. If we can do that in the next two weeks, an acceptable final result is a lot easier to achieve.
The bad news is, without your active and energetic help, we may yet end up a few weeks from now with much or all of the House version in a final NASA Authorization. And that would be a far, far worse place to continue the fight from than the alternatives.
Budget Numbers
For context, NASA's overall budget in recent years has been around $18-$19 billion. Of that, about $9-$10 billion goes to human spaceflight, about $4-$5 billion to science, about $3 billion to overhead and miscellany, about a half billion to aeronautics, and a couple hundred million to everything else.
One mistake a lot of people reading federal budgets make is paying undue attention to "the outyears", the notional numbers given for years after the one year actually being funded. Both House and Senate versions of this Authorization give numbers for FY 2011, 2012 and 2013. The 2011 numbers are what the Appropriators will consider cutting checks for starting October 1st. The 2012 and 2013 numbers are more expressions of hope about what the next Congress might fund.
Our Five Budget Columns
- "Actual '10" gives the amounts actually appropriated for the current FY 2010.
- "Old '11" gives the "outyear" notional numbers for 2011 from the 2010 budget proposal (written in 2009) to give you an idea of what planned 2011 Constellation business as usual looked like back then.
- "Admin '11" gives the Administration FY 2011 NASA budget proposal numbers.
- "Senate '11" gives the Senate FY 2011 NASA Authorization numbers.
- "House '11" gives the current House FY 2011 NASA Authorization numbers.
- All figures given are in millions.
We'll mark with a "*" budget items where we think a reasonable fraction of the money will be spent usefully for our purposes. (NASA is a large government agency; "a reasonable fraction of the money spent usefully" is about as good as it gets. This is, by the way, the core of why we think routine functions should be done commercially.) For each budget column, we'll do a final total of the in-our-view good stuff, as one way to compare the different budgets.
The Budgets Compared
Our first table gives the overall NASA totals for our five budgets. There's apparently consensus on 1.5% growth next year, which is likely about as good as it gets for the forseeable future. (The wild card here is potential government-wide deficit reduction moves. Stay tuned.)
|
|
Actual'10 |
Old'11 |
Admin'11 |
Senate'11 |
House'11 |
|
NASA total |
$18,724M |
$18,631M |
$19,000M |
$19,000M |
$19,000M |
Next, some of the big-ticket NASA budget lines we're not directly concerned with. Note that Science and Aeronautics both grow substantially (and non-controversially) from this year's totals.
Space Operations varies a lot, meanwhile - almost entirely from varying timing of Shuttle program shutdown. The Actual '10 total includes $3,139M for a full year of Shuttle ops, while the Old '11 guesstimate from back in '09 assumed no more flights by '11, just $383M in shutdown expenses. The Shuttle flight schedule has since slipped into '11, and there's talk of adding one more mission later in '11 - the Senate version funds this additional mission, while the House version says just nice things about it.
We then give subtotals (in parens) within Space Ops for Shuttle, Station Ops, and Station Crew/Cargo Services. Note the $857 million Admin '11 item for Station Crew & Cargo services. This is also embedded in the House and Senate '11 Station totals, though they don't break it out. This is roughly how much we'll be sending out of the country for foreign crew and cargo services every year for the remaining life of Station until we get US commercial Crew and Cargo services online.
|
|
Actual'10 |
Old'11 |
Admin'11 |
Senate'11 |
House'11 |
|
Science |
$4493M |
$4747M |
$5006M |
$5006M |
$5016M |
|
Aeronautics |
$507M |
$514M |
$580M |
$580M |
$580M |
|
Space Ops |
$6181M |
$3664M |
$4888M |
$5509M |
$4591M |
|
(Shuttle) |
($3139M) |
($383M) |
($989M) |
($1,610M) |
($989M) |
|
(Station Ops) |
($1689M) |
($2548M |
($1923M) |
($2780M |
($2802M |
|
(Crew/CargSvc) |
($628M) |
combined) |
($857M) |
combined) |
combined) |
Now we get to our first "good stuff" budget line, the interesting new Space Technology program, outside of the Exploration budget. This seems to be a direct descendant of the current IPP Program, which includes SBIR, STTR, Centennial Challenges, etc. IPP will be replaced in 2011 by the new Space Technology line, paired with Aeronautics rather than under the catchall Cross-Agency Support line where IPP lived. Note that this is one line where the House version is actually better than the Senate - the House goes along with the Administration in nearly tripling this line, while the Senate merely doubles it (assuming we haven't missed other existing items being pulled into it.)
|
|
Actual'10 |
Old'11 |
Admin'11 |
Senate'11 |
House'11 |
|
IPP |
$175M* |
$185M* |
|
|
|
|
Space Technology |
|
|
$572M* |
$350M* |
$572M* |
That brings us to the big kahuna, the Exploration total. Notice the Old '11 total's $2.3 billion jump - this was the lion's share of the expected Shuttle shutdown dividend, and marked the start of a serious decade-long rampup for Constellation. Probably more money than was actually going to be there, in hindsight.
Senate '11's lower-than-House '11
Exploration total, meanwhile, is much better distributed, as we'll see in the
next two tables.
|
|
Actual'10 |
Old'11 |
Admin'11 |
Senate'11 |
House'11 |
|
Exploration |
$3780M |
$6077M |
$4263M |
$3868M |
$4535M |
Now, the major line items within the Exploration total:
First, the various launcher/capsule project budget lines. Old '11 again shows the start of the planned big Constellation ramp-up compared to Actual '10.
More interesting and less well-known, the Admin '11 request actually has nearly $2.5 billion for Constellation program shutdown and future Heavy Lift Vehicle engine development - one reason we're not all that upset about Senate '11's $2.8 billion funding for HLV & Orion next year - there's less than $300 million difference.
House '11 meanwhile has $4.2 billion for their HLV and Station Transport program, 92% (!) of their Exploration total - not much left for anything else there. Note that the House bill fine print implies two boosters - one unspecified unfunded booster is needed by 2015 to carry the House Station Transport on its mandated first mission, plus there's the official House HLV due to fly by 2020. Note too that this House '11 total is $1.4 billion less than the Old '11 Ares/Orion line that the Augustine Commission found was already unrealistically low for the two in-house NASA vehicle developments planned.
|
|
Actual'10 |
Old'11 |
Admin'11 |
Senate'11 |
House'11 |
|
Ares I and Orion |
$3326M |
$5531M |
|
|
|
|
Constellation Shutdown |
|
|
$1900M |
|
|
|
Heavy Lift Propulsion Technology |
|
|
$559M |
|
|
|
HLV & Capsule |
|
|
|
$2751M |
|
|
HLV & Station Transport |
|
|
|
|
$4156M |
And now, we get to a bunch of useful stuff - admittedly, useful from our perspective.
Human Research (deep-space mission related) is essentially level under Senate '11, up sharply under Admin '11 and House '11. We can live with level for a year.
Commercial Crew/Cargo development support funding varies all over the place. The Senate '11 total is a bit down from the Admin '11 request, but still far far better than the House '11 chop job. (The questionable $100 million in the House line was a last-second loan guarantee program add-on that may or may not have been turned into some sort of development grant program by the time this bill hits the full House again.)
Exploration Technology is more than doubled from this year under Admin '11, and a mild decline under Senate'11. A mild decline is still a lot better than House '11's zero.
Robotic Exploration (probe missions as precursors for future human exploration) gets increased five-fold under Admin '11, four-fold under Senate 'll. Not bad, and again miles better than House '11's zero funding.
|
|
Actual'10 |
Old'11 |
Admin'11 |
Senate'11 |
House'11 |
|
Human Research |
$152M* |
$152M* |
$215M* |
$155M* |
$215M* |
|
Commercial Crew/Cargo |
$39M* |
$12M* |
$812M* |
$612M* |
$64M* (+$100M?) |
|
Exploration Technology |
$283M* |
$381M* |
$652M* |
$250M* |
$0* |
|
Robotic Exploration |
$19M* |
$0.2M* |
$125M* |
$100M* |
$0* |
Finally, a total for each budget's funding of "good stuff" - things we consider likely to significantly advance routine low-cost access. Admin '11 more than triples this year's total, Senate '11 more than doubles it. Even House '11 provides a modest increase, though note that's almost entirely in the (apparently non-controversial) $572 million Space Technology line - the House version really hammers Commercial Crew/Cargo, and zeroes the Exploration Technology and Robotic Precursors needed to give the House HLV and Capsule actual missions (in the unlikely event they ever even fly.)
|
|
Actual'10 |
Old'11 |
Admin'11 |
Senate'11 |
House'11 |
|
Total Good Stuff* |
$668M |
$730M |
$2376M |
$1467M |
$851M (+$100M?) |
Our bottom line: The Senate version makes up 40% of the difference in good stuff between the Administration's request and the House's counter-attack. The Senate version also keeps all the major useful line items alive, with enough funding to make useful progress. It also makes a far better starting point for the eventual NASA Appropriation than the House version. Worth supporting vigorously over the House version? We think so. Agree with us? Then read Space Access Update #117 again, and go rattle some Congressional cages!
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________________________________________________________________________
Space Access Society
space.access@space-access.org
"Reach low orbit and you're halfway to anywhere in the Solar System"
- Robert A. Heinlein