Bolden Treads Softly On China, Other Issues

The Chinese space officials who NASA Administrator Charles Bolden met in Beijing will not be coming to the U.S. for a reciprocal visit in December, as they had hoped, but there may be a visit in 2011. Nor is Anatoly Permanov, the head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, likely to get much traction soon with a list of possible cooperative projects he discussed with Bolden in Washington Nov. 18. Like Wang Wenbao, director general of the China Manned Space Engineering Office, Permanov will have to wait until the U.S. political climate becomes more stable. In a rare one-on-one interview with a U.S. reporter Nov. 23, Bolden tiptoed around a range of sensitive issues as he looks for bipartisan support in the 112th Congress for the new U.S. space program that is still evolving at NASA. Deeper engagement with foreign space powers will have to go through the cumbersome interagency review process, he said, while NASA must complete its own assessment of how far over budget the James Webb Space Telescope has become before deciding how to tackle the problem. But one thing he made clear, despite some evidence to the contrary. “I have all the support that I want from my higher command, which is the president of the United States.” After a sometimes-contentious year of wrestling with the White House and his own deputy, Lori Garver, over the direction of space policy (see Aviation Week & Space Technology, Sept. 20, p. 24), Bolden says he has been working Capitol Hill to win support in the next session of Congress for an appropriation to go with the compromise authorization bill President Barack Obama signed in October. “I have reached out to all the people elected, without regard to party,” he says. “I tried to call everybody the day after the election, and I continue to communicate with people that I missed personally, because space has always been a bipartisan effort and I would like to keep it that way.” To that end, he is being particularly careful not to alienate Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.), the expected chairman of the appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA in the House. Wolf criticized Bolden sharply for meeting with the China Manned Space Engineering Office (Cmseo) during an October visit to the emerging space power, and the NASA administrator was careful to stress that he made no deals. Chinese officials who were expecting a reciprocal visit to U.S. facilities in December will have to wait, he says. “There is not a delegation coming next month as far as I know,” he says. “A reciprocal visit is something that we continue to work with the interagency organizations, mainly the State Department, trying to figure out the timing for that,” Bolden says. “I wouldn’t even say there is a reciprocal visit planned. I think everyone would like to see one, but everybody’s still in conversations.” Bolden suggested space cooperation has been subsumed in larger financial issues that will be addressed when Chinese President Hu Jintao visits the U.S. in January, with the Executive Office of the President, the White House science office and the National Security Council working to coordinate a bilateral space meeting through the State Department. Similarly, Permanov’s list of possible new space ventures with NASA, including development of a nuclear propulsion system, joint missions to low lunar orbit and asteroids, and a robotic landing on Mercury, is going nowhere fast. The Russian space leader presented the list at a Nov. 18 meeting of the bilateral Space Cooperation Working Group, but Bolden says the most substantive work involved protocols for future meetings. The U.S. hopes to use the list of possible bilateral projects as a way to encourage Russia to take a more active role in the multilateral working group coordinating long-term space exploration plans. “If the international partners think it’s worthwhile, we the United States would be more than happy to do a bilateral effort with the Russians, but we wanted that to be international instead of just the United States and Russia deciding something off on the side.” Republicans will regain control of the House of Representatives through the Nov. 2 elections in part because of fears over government borrowing, which makes domestic discretionary spending for programs like space exploration vulnerable. Bolden told a staff all-hands meeting at the Marshall Space Flight Center Nov. 16 that even if the agency’s spending levels are rolled back to 2008 levels – as some “budget hawks” have suggested, it “would not be devastating.” “We’re going to look at it and we’re going to make determinations as to what we think we can realistically do,” he told the NASA employees. “And what we don’t think we can do is going to come off the table.” One target, however, is the James Webb Space Telescope, recently hit with a finding that it is another year late and $1.5 billion more over budget (AW&ST Nov. 15, p. 50). That report, by an expert panel set up at the direction of Senate appropriations space subcommittee Chair Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), was only “back-of-the-envelope,” Bolden says, and will get more study by a new management organization before NASA decides how to absorb the blow. The authorization bill gives the agency enough flexibility to adjust to the Webb overrun and other issues that arise, he says, and the agency will use it to its advantage. “[The Webb] management team has been asked to go in and do a bottoms-up review of where we are in terms of cost and schedule so we can go back and present a creditable story to the science community as well as all of our stakeholders,” he says. “I’m hoping we can do that in the new year. So I am cautiously optimistic that the changes I have effected so far will all have a positive effect.”