The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) mission will be delayed for several months following the conclusion of yesterday’s Flight Readiness Review (FRR). 

A NASA statement on NuStar’s website explains that the FRR concluded that more time is needed to ensure that a new flight computer for the Pegasus launch vehicle will issue commands as intended.  Consequently, the launch will slip past the end of March and thus must wait until the Kwajalein range is available again. The NASA statement said the next opportunity is “anticipated to be within the next couple of months.”

Orbital Science Corp’s Pegasus rocket is dropped from an aircraft that can take off from a number of locations. The Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands is the site of a U.S. missile testing range and was chosen because NuSTAR is headed for an equatorial orbit.

A postponment of the launch was announced by NASA earlier this week,  but its extent was uncertain until after the FRR was completed.  NuSTAR is an x-ray telescope.  Fiona Harrison of CalTech is the principal investigator.

The Commerce-Justice-Science subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee will hear from NASA and NOAA about their FY 2013 budget requests next week.

The NOAA hearing will be on March 20 at 2:30 pm ET in H-309 Capitol.   It was postponed from March 13 because NOAA’s detailed budget justification documents were not ready. NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco is the witness.

NASA’s hearing is on March 21 at 9:00 am in 2359 Rayburn, with NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden as the witness.

The committee earlier had announced an “outside witnesses” hearing for March 22 beginning at 9:00 am in H-309 Capitol. 

Editorial Commentary:   In a news story today, the New York Times bemoans the cut to robotic Mars exploration plans, adding that “There are still a few tidbits left.”   It identifies the “tidbits” as the Mars Curiosity rover currently enroute to Mars and the MAVEN mission scheduled for launch next year.

Curiosity hopefully will make a successful landing on Mars in August, though the novel “sky crane” landing system will have everyone biting their nails during descent.  Twice as long and five times as heavy as the Spirit and Opportunity rovers already on Mars, Curiosity is the size of a mini Cooper and designed to roll over obstacles up to two feet high. Its scientific equipment is 10 times more massive than the earlier rovers. Not to mention — and the New York Times does not — that its life cycle cost is $2.5 billion, a 56 percent overrun according to NASA’s Inspector General.  That’s quite a tidbit.

The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) mission is indeed a less ambitious mission.  An orbiter rather than a lander, it will try to determine what caused “the Martian atmosphere — and water — to be lost to space.”   GAO reports that MAVEN will cost $671 million.  That may be a tidbit in comparison to Curiosity, but certainly not to the average American taxpayer.

Across the land, everyone wants to cut the deficit — as long as it’s not THEIR program that suffers as a result.   It is certainly fair for the Mars community to fight for their program; that’s how the game is played.  One would hope, however, that the news media would refrain from picking favorites except on their editorial pages.   For that matter, what program(s) would the New York Times prefer to have cut instead, or does it believe that NASA should be exempt from cuts?  That is a weighty question on which the esteemed newspaper probably should comment. 

In the meantime, with all due respect, calling a $2.5 billion Mars rover a “tidbit” is laughable. 

NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden faced off against two congressional committees today, one in the Senate and one in the House.  A common theme was the Obama Administration’s FY2013 budget request for the future of the human spaceflight program and what many see as a competition between commercial crew services to the International Space Station (ISS) and a NASA-developed system to take astronauts further into the solar system.

Both the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee and the House Science, Space and Technology Committee hearings raised questions about other priorities in the NASA budget request — especially funding for robotic Mars exploration — but the focus was firmly on commercial crew versus the Space Launch System (SLS) and Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) space capsule (called Orion) Congress directed NASA to build in the 2010 NASA authorization act.

Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) accused the Obama Administration of blatantly taking money from SLS/Orion for the commercial crew program.  In an unusually testy public exchange, Bolden insisted to Senator Hutchison that no one in the room was more passionate about SLS/Orion than himself.  His confidence that SLS/Orion is on the right track may account for his seeming lack of passion for it, he suggested.

NASA’s decision to use Space Act Agreements (SAAs) instead of traditional procurement methods under the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FARs) also was debated.   Bolden assured both committees that it had sufficient insight under the SAAs to know if companies planning to compete for commercial crew opportunities would meet NASA’s requirements.

The Administration’s decision to cut funding for NASA’s planetary science program, especially the decision to not participate in what was planned as NASA-European Space Agency joint missions to Mars in 2016 and 2018 — was also mentioned.   While clearly a concern of these two authorization committees, the future of the human spaceflight program obviously was center stage.