By Emelie Rutherford

A week after President Barack Obama announced he will not completely kill NASA’s Orion space capsule, the space agency’s director yesterday faced senators angry about the administration’s plans to still end most of the overall Constellation exploration program.

Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies subcommittee (SAC-CJS), highlighted concerns about transitioning away from Constellation and toward the Obama administration’s new program, which entails helping commercial companies develop human-spaceflight vehicles and pursuing new technology-development programs.

During a hearing on the agency’s FY’11 budget proposal, she voiced qualms about retaining technology and the industrial base during the transition away from Constellation, and also about contract terminations.

“Are we going to be paying down one set of contracts to close them out and then paying to start new contracts?” she asked NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. “It is very complex, and I am puzzled, quite frankly, about how we are going to do it.”

NASA’s FY ’11 budget request initially called for eliminating all of Constellation, a space-shuttle-replacement effort intended to return astronauts to the moon that has included the developmental Ares I launch vehicle and Orion crew capsule and future Ares V heavy-lift rocket.

Obama, though, announced on April 15 that he directed Bolden to immediately begin developing a crew-rescue vehicle based on the developmental Orion, which can be used as a backup to bring astronauts home from the International Space Station. During a speech in Florida, he pledged to finish designing and begin building a new heavy-lift rocket, a replacement to Ares V, by 2015.

Mikulski, who will play a significant role in shaping the FY ’11 NASA budget, emphasized yesterday she needs to learn more about the administration’s new plans and has many unanswered questions.

“I want to know if this is the program that the Congress and the American people are going to support from one administration to the next,” she said. “We cannot reinvent NASA every four years.”

Other senators at the hearing whose states are impacted by the Constellation changes–including SAC-CJS Ranking Member Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), full SAC member Sen. Bob Bennett (R-Utah), and non-committee member Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah)–were more forceful than Mikulski in criticizing the proposed Constellation cancellation.

Bolden responded to the accusation that the new NASA plan would decimate the solid-rocket motor industrial base, which Bennett charged could not recover in time for work on a new heavy-lift rocket in 2015.

“Unfortunately, the solid-rocket industry has been over-capitalized for many many years,” Bolden said, because far fewer shuttle missions were flown than initially planned. “It was overcapitalized for shuttle, it would have been grossly overcapitalized for Constellation. And, so the business decision…it needs to be made, by the only company that’s legitimately in that industry right now, is how do I downsize if I want to be competitive.”

Bolden added he is “concerned about the industrial base and we’re doing everything we can to work with our counterparts in (the Department of Defense) DoD, to work with ATK, to help them in any way we can. Because we still need solid-rocket motors.”

Shelby charged that the latest NASA plan unveiled last week shows the agency’s “leadership team still does not understand the issues at stake” and essentially kills the U.S. human spaceflight program by relying on an “unproven commercial option.”

He claimed the new plan would “set up a welfare program for the commercial space industry,” where “the taxpayer subsidizes billionaires to build rockets that NASA hopes one day will allow millionaires, and our own astronauts, to travel to space.”

Shelby maintained NASA has “no verifiable data” to support its assertion that by aiding the commercial rocket industry the companies will create more-expendable and lower-cost launches than Constellation would have.

“When troubles mount and a commercial rocket market again fails to materialize, the taxpayers will be called on to bail out these companies and their investors, a recurring theme within this administration,” he said.

For Constellation, ATK [ATK] has been the prime contractor for the Ares I first stage, Boeing [BA] has developed the Ares I upper stage, and Lockheed Martin [LMT] has been making Orion.