Space Access Update #115 7/14/10

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.)

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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

http://www.space-access.org

[email protected]


“Reach low orbit and you’re halfway to anywhere in the Solar System”
                             
– Robert A. Heinlein