NASA’s leader defended its diminished budget proposal before Congress yesterday, facing accusations that the space agency is “over-prioritizing” its new commercial crew effort.
NASA Administration Charles Bolden told Senate and House committees that President Barack Obama’s $17.7 billion plan for the agency in fiscal year 2013, a slight drop of $59 million from FY ’12 levels, “will enable NASA to execute the balanced program of science, space exploration, technology, and aeronautics agreed to by the president and a bipartisan majority of Congress.”
That includes spending $3 billion to continue developing the Space Launch System (SLS) heavy-lift rocket and the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV). The capsule and rocket, part of Obama’s reworked manned-spaceflight program, are intended to carry astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit and into deep space within the next decade.
“In recent months we have continued to push forward with contracting and design efforts to make this system a reality,” Bolden said in testimony submitted to the two committees that held NASA budget hearings yesterday. He said NASA is “moving forward on a critical effort to develop the technologies and capabilities required to support our ambitious exploration goals,” noting the FY ’13 budget request calls for an uncrewed SLS test flight in 2017 and a crewed test mission by 2021.
Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee Ranking Member Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), though, expressed concerns during a morning hearing about funding these manned-spaceflight efforts compared to that for NASA’s controversial new commercial-crew vehicle program, to help private commercial companies develop systems to carry astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). The FY ’13 budget seeks $830 million for supporting those commercial efforts.
Hutchison slammed a combined $326 million reduction to the SLS rocket and Orion vehicle in NASA’s FY ’13 budget plan, which contains an increase of nearly the same amount–$330 million–to commercial crew efforts.
“I was frankly floored…that it would be so blatant to take it right out of Orion and SLS and put into commercial crew, rather than trying to accomplish the joint goals that we have of putting forward both and making sure that we didn’t take away from the timetables for the future to shore up the commercial crew,” she said.
Hutchison argued NASA is “over-prioritizing the commercial and not being as concerned about keeping the people at NASA who would be able to stay involved to get us to that next level when the space station is going to be decommissioned.”
Bolden, in response, said the NASA workforce is stable “to a certain point.”
He maintained the space agency’s FY ’13 budget proposal would support the current plan for the SLS rocket and Orion capsule. He noted NASA had to make “very difficult choices” because its FY ’13 budget was $2 billion less than it previously projected because of government-wide budget cuts.
He noted NASA has not slowed the development of SLS and MPCV, and actually has “done some things that we did not know we were going to do.” Those include arranging with contractor Lockheed Martin [LMT] a 2014 flight test of Orion that was not previously planned, which will lead up to the 2017 test of the integrated SLS-Orion system.
Hutchison said she is concerned that NASA is not planning to conduct a crewed test of the system until four years later, in 2021.
A “four-years gap doesn’t seem to square with staying on a course for that future when the space station is going to be presumably shut down in 2020,” she said.
Bolden said NASA will have a better sense in the coming year of where it is with developing the systems, and the 2021 date may change.
“The 2021 date is a date that’s affected by budget, and given the budget run-out that we see right now, that is a date that’s there,” he said. “But we still have some more evaluations…in our planning to do before we’re able to actually making a definitive decision on the first date for a crewed launch.”
The NASA administrator also testified late yesterday afternoon before the House Science, Space and Technology Committee.
Its chairman, Rep. Ralph Hall (R-Texas), said in his prepared opening statement that he continues to have “pause” about the commercial crew effort.
“I have yet to be convinced that a viable commercial market will emerge for human orbital missions other than NASA-funded ferry flights to and from ISS,” he said. “Yet NASA continues to subscribe to the theory that there is a sufficient market to sustain at least two commercial crew launch systems, and is putting large sums of tax dollars at risk to pursue this strategy.”
Hall further said is frustrated that the SLS and Orion capsule are not being developed quickly enough, lamenting that they are not pegged to be operational until 2021.