NASA will be allowed to cancel unwanted contracts from the defunct Constellation manned-spaceflight program if Congress passes the massive fiscal year 2011 budget deal reached late last week.
The full-year appropriations act for the entire federal government repeals leftover statutory language, crafted by Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) in NASA’s FY ’10 appropriations act that banned the space agency from ending those business pacts. Congress and President Barack Obama already agreed to kill Constellation, former President George W. Bush’s underfunded program to return astronauts to the moon.
For Constellation, Lockheed Martin[LMT] has been developing the Orion capsule and firms including ATK [ATK] and Boeing [BA] have worked on the Ares I rocket. NASA officials have lamented being forced, because of the so-called Shelby language, to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on unwanted Constellation contracts since FY ’11 started last October.
Yet House Republicans and Senate Democrats agreed last Friday on a long-delayed FY ’11 federal budget, and the lengthy bill does away with the Shelby language; the office of Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), a one-time astronaut who chairs a NASA subcommittee, happily touted this change.
The House is expected to take up on the omnibus government appropriations bill tonight, followed by Senate action before Friday night, when temporary federal funding expires.
NASA Inspector General Paul Martin said in January that NASA would be forced to spend up to $575 million on Constellation contracts through the end of FY ’11 if Congress never passed a budget with corrective language.
Overall, the final FY ’11 budget plan cuts $38.5 billion in spending across the government, compared to FY ’10 levels, and $78.5 billion from Obama’s FY ’11 budget proposal.
It contains $18.5 billion for NASA for the final six months of FY ’11, a drop from the $18.7 billion it received in FY ’10 and that Obama requested for it in FY ’11 as well. The House and Senate appropriations committees say the $18.5 billion will allow NASA to proceed with its new exploration program.
NASA is planning to develop a new heavy-lift rocket and crew vehicle, to replace the previously planned Ares V rocket and Orion capsule, though a scaled-back Orion program is being used to develop the new vehicle. The agency is working on a report to Congress detailing its work on the new space hardware, with some information expected as soon as this week. Some lawmakers are concerned NASA won’t be able to build the new rocket and capsule on time, because NASA’s $18.7 billion budget request for FY ’12 has less funding for the efforts than the NASA Authorization Act of 2010 does.
Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) hinted at a NASA budget hearing on Monday that she wants to change NASA’s FY ’12 budget to protect existing jobs. Mikulski chairs the powerful Senate Appropriations Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies subcommittee.