Senators Suspicious Of NASA Planning

Senators who hammered out the three-year NASA authorization bill signed by President Barack Obama Oct. 11 feel they were undercut by the space agency and mid-level White House aides, and will watch them closely as the lame-duck Congress works on legislation to fund the program. Even after the compromise had been reached between the administration’s original Fiscal 2011 budget request and members of Congress worried over its drastic employment impact, White House staffers called key senators asking them to introduce amendments to the draft bill that would tilt the balance back toward the original request. That led to an unusual Senate Commerce Committee hearing Dec. 1 chaired by Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), who heads the panel’s subcommittee that oversees NASA. Nelson said he wanted to get presidential science adviser John Holdren and Elizabeth Robinson, the presidentially appointed chief financial officer at NASA, to promise publicly that they would follow the authorization language Obama signed. “Of course it is; it has to be,” Holdren replied when Nelson asked if the authorization language is being used in drafting the administration’s Fiscal 2012 budget request for NASA. “There is no way that we could meaningfully think about the 2012 budget without taking into account the guidance in that legislation, which is now law.” Nelson’s hearing marked the latest round in a bitter behind-the-scenes dispute that pitted powerful members of Congress with constituents whose jobs depend on NASA human-spaceflight programs, against a cadre of space-policy experts at NASA and the White House who believe the nation would be better served by commercializing “routine” access to low Earth orbit. One issue that remains on the table as the lame-duck Congress decides how to fund the government until after the new Congress takes office in January is legislative language in effect that prohibits NASA from killing any of the programs under the old Constellation Program of shuttle follow-on vehicles, or from starting new ones. Robinson said NASA has been working with Senate and House staffers on language that would remove that prohibition under whatever funding vehicle is found. Senators say the most likely option is a continuing resolution that would run into next year, maintaining funding at Fiscal 2010 levels. Nelson notes that the total funding level for NASA in Fiscal 2010 is only $276 million less than the Fiscal 2011 authorization of $19 billion — a relatively small percentage. At that level, Robinson says, the agency should be able to fly one more space shuttle mission to the space station using the Atlantis orbiter in June. That mission is included in the authorization compromise. Also high on the list of priorities in the authorization language is an immediate start to a heavy-lift launch vehicle, which also could be used as a route to the ISS if the commercial crew vehicles NASA is helping to fund do not materialize. Despite the call for an immediate start, Robinson, a former career official at the White House Office of Management and Budget, was less certain of the schedule for a heavy-lift development. “There is a tremendous amount of uncertainty,” she said.