The House Science, Space and Technology Committee will hold a hearing on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) program next week.

The program, which has experienced significant cost growth and schedule delays, was saved from cancellation in the final version of NASA’s FY2012 appropriations bill.  The House Appropriations Committee wanted to terminate the program.   Its counterpart in the Senate, however, approved an increase in funding for FY2012 so the telescope can be launched in 2018 instead of years later.  The Senate Appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA is chaired by Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), an ardent supporter of NASA’s space and earth science programs, especially those managed at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, including JWST.

The projected lifecycle cost for the program is up to $8.8 billion.   The price has risen substantially over the years and an independent review just last year estimated the cost at $6.5 billion assuming launch in 2015 (a two-year slip).   To launch in 2015, however, substantial additional money would have had to have been spent on the program in FY2011 and FY2012, money that NASA did not have.   Thus, the launch date slipped even further, increasing the cost yet again.  The independent review, chaired by John Casani, blamed poor program management at NASA, not technical issues, as the reasons for the cost growth.  Northrop Grumman is the prime contractor.

JWST supporters have been waging a campaign to build support for the project which obviously has been successful so far.  Conferees on the appropriations bill adopted the Senate position, adding $156 million to the program’s budget for FY2012.   NASA says that an additional $1.067 billion will be needed for FY2013-2016 and other parts of NASA are worried that their budgets will be cut in order to pay for the JWST overruns.

The hearing is scheduled for December 6 at 10:00 am EST in 2318 Rayburn House Office Building.   Witnesses are:

• Mr. Rick Howard, Program Manager, James Webb Space Telescope, NASA
• Dr. Roger Blandford, Professor of Physics, Stanford University, and chair of the National Research Council”s recent Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics
• Dr. Garth Illingworth, Professor & Astronomer, UCO/Lick Observatory, University of California, Santa Cruz
• Mr. Jeffrey D. Grant, Sector Vice President & General Manager, Space Systems Division, Northrup Grumman Aerospace Systems

Editor’s Note:

I was privileged to be a guest on David Livingston’s The Space Show yesterday.  David has posted the audio and a short summary of the show on his website for anyone who is interested.

Marcia Smith

UPDATE:  CSIS’s event on Friday re the defense industrial base has been added.

The following events may be of interest in the coming week.  Check our calendar on the right menu or click the links below for more information.   The House and Senate both are in session this week.

During the Week

The Senate is scheduled to resume consideration of the Department of Defense (DOD) Authorization bill, S. 1867, on Monday.  

At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) will send its “passbacks” to the various federal departments and agencies on Monday.  Each year, usually in September, agencies tell OMB what they want their budgets to be for subsequent years. OMB considers these proposals and then “passes them back” (hence, a “passback”) with whatever modifications OMB deems necessary.  The agencies can negotiate with OMB or even take an issue to the President if they are sufficiently determined.  The end result is the President’s budget request to Congress that is submitted on the first Monday in February of each year.  The budget request now being developed is for FY2013.  Passbacks used to be sent to agencies on Thanksgiving eve — never a pleasant holiday experience.  According to the Washington Post, current OMB Director Jack Lew decided to wait until the Monday after Thanksgiving so government officials could enjoy time with their families.

Monday-Tuesday, November 28-29

• NASA Advisory Council Planetary Protection Subcommittee, Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, FLWednesday, November 30

• Senate Commerce Committee hearing on nominees for the Federal Communications Commission(LightSquared may be one of the issues that comes up), 253 Russell Senate Office Building, 2:30 pm EST

Thursday, December 1

• 6th Eilene M. Galloway Symposium on Critical Issues in Space Law, Cosmos Club, 2121 Massachusetts Ave., NW, Washington, DC, 8:30 am – 4:30 pm EST
• NASM/APL Space History and Policy Seminar Series:  Update on Russia, China and India in Space (Speaker:  Marcia Smith), Applied Physics Lab (APL), Laurel, MD, 4:00 – 5:00 pm EST (contact: Nathan Bridges, nathan.bridges@jhuapl.edu )

Friday, December 2

• CSIS seminar on Deficits, Defense and the Industrial Base — What’s Next, 1800 K Street, N.W., B1 Conference Center, Washington, DC, 10:00-11:30 am EST
• Panel on U.S. Space Exploration in the Next 50 Years, part of DuPont Summit on Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy: Pressing Issues, Little Time, Carnegie Institution of Science, 1530 P Street, N.W., Washington, DC  (the summit has many panels throughout the day; this one is from 10:15 am – 12:45 pm EST)

Space Studies Board (SSB) Chair Charles Kennel believes the National Academies — the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council (NRC, of which SSB is part) — need to “adjust to the revolution in communications and the new media.”   His comments were part of a workshop held by the SSB in November 2010; a summary of the workshop has just been published.  (Editor’s note:  in the interest of full disclosure, I was the rapporteur for the workshop and have been eagerly awaiting publication of the report for quite some time as it worked its way through the lengthy, but thorough, NRC review, editing and printing process.)

The workshop, Sharing the Adventure with the Public:  The Value and Excitement of “Grand Questions” of Space Science and Exploration,” was held by the SSB to encourage interaction between the space science and engineering communities and professional communicators about how to better engage with the public about NASA activities.

In a keynote address, Miles O’Brien, formerly with CNN and now with PBS’ NewsHour, noted that few major media outlets have science correspondents today and social media tools like Twitter offer new ways for the public to learn about NASA and the space program.  He congratulated the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for pioneering the use of Twitter to portray planetary science missions in the first person as was first done by Veronica McGregor for the Mars Phoenix mission.   While some of the scientists at the workshop already were avid social media users, others were reluctant.    Christie Nicholson of Scientific American later implored everyone to at least try Twitter and Facebook to see if they could help in communicating with the public rather than rejecting them out of hand.

The remainder of the two-and-a-half day workshop consisted of six sessions in which scientists presented papers on five “Grand Questions” identified by the workshop organizers and interacted on panels with professional communicators about how to better engage with the public about NASA’s efforts to answer them.   The tables were turned for the final two sessions, where the professional communicators presented papers and then interacted on panels with scientists. NRC workshops like this are not allowed to present findings or recommendations.  Instead, the report simply describes what transpired, including the individual viewpoints of participants, which varied widely.

Kennel cited the Climategate controversy as “a dramatic lesson” of where scientists did a poor job of communicating with the public.  He said that the climate science community thought it had “discovered the key for communicating with decision-makers” through the “elaborate peer review process” of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  Instead, after hackers released email exchanges among climate scientists questioning each other and a lapse in fact checking regarding snow melt in the Himalayas, there was “a profound loss of confidence in the whole process.”   That showed “how fragile the trust had been,” said Kennel, and the “weaknesses in what the scientists thought was a perfectly wonderful way to communicate.”

The idea for the workshop predated Climategate, and climate was only one topic discussed.  The five “Grand Questions” were:  

• Understanding the universe-how did it begin and how it is evolving?
• Are we alone?
• Understanding the solar system-how did it begin and how is it evolving?
• The Earth:  Will it remain a hospitable home for humanity in the future?
• What could the future hold for humans in space?

Joan Johnson-Freese, a political scientist and professor at the Naval War College, and an SSB member, asked a key question — what are scientists really seeking to do in sharing the adventure with the public?   Linda Billings, a research professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University who works with NASA’s astrobiology program stressed that there “is no monolithic public.”   She disagreed with those who believe that better communications might translate into more public support for NASA.  “Public information, public education, public interest, public engagement, public understanding, and public support are all different social processes and phenomena, and one does not necessarily lead to another,” she said.  Billings advocates including the public in decision-making about NASA including “community consultations, citizen advisory boards, and policy dialogues,” while acknowledging that it would be “complicated and time-consuming” and require “power sharing.”

As for the human exploration program at NASA, Marc Kaufman of the Washington Post said he could not imagine a worse scenario than what has transpired over the past 10 years, starting with the Columbia tragedy.  He said that President George W. Bush’s Vision for Space Exploration, though endorsed by Congress, was not adequately funded, which implies the government was not serious about it.  When the Obama Administration determined there was not enough money it “understandably decided to blow up the whole process,” he said.   SSB member Joan Vernikos added that actions speak louder than words and if they are disparate the result is “disastrous,” which was her assessment of the situation.  Some participants were excited about the prospect of commercial crew and believe that it will help engage the public’s interest; others bemoaned the confusion and discord that followed the Obama Administration’s abrupt cancellation of the Constellation program.

As many of the scientists criticized themselves and their colleagues for poor communications with the public — not only about Climategate, but in other areas, such as why Pluto no longer is a planet — some of the non-scientists gave them a break.   Johnson-Freese said the scientists “have been way, way too hard on themselves….I think you’ve been doing a heck of a job, but we can always get better.”

In his remarks at the end of the workshop, Kennel said that over the last 20 years there has been a revolution in communications, which he believes “has the potential, combined with science, … to produce a second Enlightenment” in this century.  Hence his clarion call to the National Academies to embrace new communications technologies and “adjust to the revolution in communications and the new media” or risk the fate of institutions that “did not react to this revolution and have failed….”

UPDATE 2:  Step two — done:  The Centaur upper stage successfully completed its two firings and separated from the spacecraft.  Mars Curiosity is now on its way to Mars with arrival in August 2012. The “Sky Crane” landing is the next big excitement.  

UPDATE:  On-time launch of the Atlas V-Centaur with Mars Curiosity.  The first step of this long journey is a success.

ORIGINAL STORY:  NASA plans to launch its Mars probe Curiosity in less than an hour, at 10:02 am EST.  Launch preparations are AOK for now.

The launch window this morning is open for 1 hour and 43 minutes.   Clouds come and go over the launch site at Cape Canaveral, FL, but forecasters expect the weather to be within specs at 10:02 for launch of the Atlas V-Centaur.

Follow us on Twitter for frequent updates: @SpcPlcyOnline

NASA is hoping for better luck than Russia tomorrow when it launches the next U.S. Mars probe — Curiosity.  But for this mission, launch may be the easy part.

While Russia continues to try and ascertain what went wrong with its Phobos-Grunt spacecraft, NASA plans to launch the Mars Science Laboratory, Curiosity, Saturday at 10:02 am EST.   The launch window that day is open for 1 hour and 43 minutes.   Overall, the launch window for this mission remains open through December 18.   It will be launched on an Atlas V from Cape Canaveral, FL.

Curiosity is a rover, but much larger than its immediate predecessors Spirit and Opportunity, and is dedicated to studying the “habitability” of Mars — could the Martian environment, now or in the past, support life.   Spirit and Opportunity, which landed on Mars in 2004, were designed to investigate Mars’s geology.   Spirit ended its mission last year; Opportunity continues to operate.  Both were designed to work for only 90 days.   Curiosity is designed for a one-year mission lifetime — that’s one Martian year (687 Earth days).  

From a series of Mariner probes in the 1960s and early 1970s, to Viking 1 and 2 (the first Mars landers) that landed in 1976, to Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Pathfinder, Mars Odyssey, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Phoenix, and Spirit and Opportunity, data from NASA Mars orbiters and landers literally have rewritten the textbooks about the Red Planet.   Scientists hope Curiosity will follow suit.

The United States has had its share of failed Mars missions, too, however — Mariner 3, Mariner 8, Mars Observer, Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander.   Russia has had only one partial success (Phobos 2) in the more than a dozen missions it has launched to Mars since the 1960s.  If Phobos-Grunt fails, it will also count as a failure for China, whose first Mars probe (an orbiter, Yinghuo-1) is aboard.

Europe also has sent a spacecraft to Mars.  Launched on a Russian launch vehicle in 2003, the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) Mars Express is a success; it has been orbiting Mars since 2004.   However, a small lander from the United Kingdom that it carried, Beagle 2, was lost.   Japan attempted to send a probe, Nozomi, to Mars, but it failed.

The significant number of Mars mission failures has given rise to the legend of a “Galactic Ghoul” that devours spacecraft headed there.

Assuming Curiosity survives launch and the Galactic Ghoul, it still faces a big challenge in landing on Mars.   It is too massive to use previous landing methods such as airbags, so NASA devised an innovative “sky crane,” which is better viewed than described in words.  The launch of Curiosity was delayed by two years while engineers worked to remedy unexpected problems and conduct additional tests.    If the launch goes tomorrow, Curiosity will arrive at Mars in August 2012 and the nail-biting will begin in earnest.