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03.10

BY Barton Reppert

Key members of Congress, as well as the U.S. aerospace engineering community, are expressing strong concerns over the Obama-Biden Administration’s Fiscal Year 2011 NASA budget, which proposes to make major changes in human space flight programs, including halting of the Constellation program.

Rep. Bart Gordon, D-Tenn., chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee, told a hearing on 25 February that “this budget proposal represents a radical change from the approach to human space flight and exploration that has been authorized and funded by successive Congresses over the past five years. This new approach is not clearly traceable to either past legislation or past policy directives, and it has raised as many questions as it has answered.”

Also sharply criticizing the proposed NASA budget was Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., chair of the Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee, who asserted that “I am concerned, as are most of my colleagues here, that outright cancellation of the entire Constellation program would put tens of thousands of engineers out of work and risk the vitality of the manufacturing base.”

“Perhaps when commercial crew services are established there will be a robust industry that can absorb all these workers, but at this time I just don’t see where they will go,” she said. “These are exactly the types of good jobs we’re trying to create. I think in this case it’s a lot easier to save a job than to create a new one. In addition, these are exactly the types of jobs we need to keep here in America to shore up our innovation economy and protect our manufacturing base. I would hate so see American aeronautical engineers emigrating to Europe, India, Russia and China because that’s where the action is.”

Rep. Pete Olson, R-Texas, the subcommittee’s ranking Republican, declared that “I am deeply troubled about the future viability of America’s human space flight program. I want NASA to have clearly defined goals because I believe that is the only way we will make any progress. NASA is a mission-driven organization that produces its best results with clearly defined goals and the resources to achieve them. With the retirement of the Space Shuttle and a plan to cancel the Constellation program, it is more important than ever that we work together to provide NASA with the legislative guidance it needs.”

The Constellation program includes developing the Ares 1 rocket, along with a new crew capsule, Orion, and a future moon rocket, Ares 5. According to NASA, the program this year is slated to employ approximately 11, 500 people across the country, including about 8,600 in the private sector. Shutting down Constellation and terminating contracts will cost an estimated $2.5 billion.

Doug Taggart, chairman of the IEEE-USA Committee on Transportation and Aerospace Policy, said the proposed NASA budget is “of great interest and importance to CTAP, but we haven’t yet come to a consensus. The committee has had preliminary discussion about this on our listserv, and the comments, so far, have fallen on each side of the debate and in the middle. This topic will be on our agenda for the upcoming CTAP meeting on 31 March.”

He added: “I can say that there does seem to be concern about the impact that killing the [Constellation] program will have on engineering jobs, especially in this economy, and the potential abdication of our global leadership in space to the Chinese and Russians, the loss of technical know-how from the men and women who worked on these systems, and the fact that we’ll have to rely on Russia to take our astronauts into space after NASA retires the shuttle fleet this year.”

Taggart said it was his own view that “it is important to maintain a strong investment in our space program at the national level. It goes without saying that any reductions will be damaging to the economy – e.g., tech jobs etc. But not minimizing in any way those immediate impacts, more importantly I believe that we need to remain engaged in challenging technical areas to help stimulate our young people to get interested in the sciences and technologies. . . . To not do this will erode further our national-level scientific/technological intellect, the economy over the long term due to decreased commercial investment, scientific discovery, and last but not least national security.”

According to Taggart, he expects that CTAP will be drafting an IEEE-USA position statement on what it views as appropriate funding levels for NASA. Also, he said, an analysis of the NASA budget and all electrotechnology research and development elements in the FY 2011 budget request will be available on 13-14 May in the AAAS Intersociety Working Group Report on R&D for the coming fiscal year.

The Administration’s space strategy emphasizes the long-term goal of human exploration beyond low Earth orbit, but the moon is just one of several possible destinations. Rather than determining in advance where astronauts will travel, NASA would invest billions of dollars in new technologies and help create a commercial industry in human space flight.

A story appearing in The Washington Post on 11 February quoted veteran space analyst John Logsdon as saying: “I think it is the largest strategic change at least since Kennedy sent us to the moon, and rivals even that in terms of its impact.”

The same story quoted Scott Pace, a former NASA official and currently director of George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute as commenting: “Human space flight is a crown jewel and it resides in the heads of teams of experienced people. If you break up that team, it is hard to re-create it later if you need it.”

At the 25 February hearing, the Science and Technology Committee heard testimony from NASA Administrator Charles F. Bolden Jr., who said that “our mission is to develop the required technology, knowledge and infrastructure to sustainably extend human presence throughout the solar system. NASA’s exploration efforts will focus not just on our moon, but also on near-Earth asteroids, strategic deep space zones called Lagrange points, and the planet Mars and its moons.”

“For me, the ultimate destination in our solar system at present is Mars,” he said. “While we cannot provide a date certain for the first human visit, with Mars as a key long-term destination we can identify missing capabilities needed for such a mission and use this to help define many of the goals for our emerging technology development.”

Bolden emphasized that new capabilities and knowledge are needed “to enable even the most basic of missions. For example, if you gave NASA unlimited resources today, we could not take a human safely to Mars in the near future, because we have not solved the interrelated problems of shielding humans from radiation in space, providing consumables to last the distance, and constructing a rocket to take all of these items into space.”

Rep. Gordon told the NASA chief “it is clear that the Administration’s human space flight proposals have profound implications for the workforce, for our position in the world, and for the future of our space program, and we are going to take a hard look at them. Administrator Bolden, you have a tough job. . . . I must be frank. So far, this plan has not found a lot of support here on the Hill. That could change, of course, but at present I cannot be confident that the votes are there to enact this budget proposal as is, and you shouldn’t be either. So I’m going to ask you to be flexible and open, as changes may be required to this plan if we are to achieve a durable consensus here in Congress.”

Barton Reppert is an independent science and technology writer, mainly focusing on Washington coverage of S&T policy issues. He previously worked for 18 years as a reporter and editor with The Associated Press in Washington, New York and Moscow.

Comments may be submitted to todaysengineer@ieee.org.