Current NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and former NASA Administrator James Beggs will discuss the past 30 years of the space shuttle program and what lies ahead for human spaceflight at the State of the Agency meeting at NASA Headquarters on Friday. The meeting is sponsored by the NASA Alumni League and several other space organizations. Mr. Beggs, who was NASA Administrator from 1981-1986, is chairman of the NASA Alumni League.

Mr. Beggs was the driving force behind what is now known as the International Space Station (ISS) program, convincing President Ronald Reagan to back the program despite a lack of enthusiasm from just about everyone in his Cabinet. President Reagan announced that he was directing NASA to build a space station, and to invite other countries to join us, in his 1984 State of the Union address. The goal was to complete it within a decade. Beggs’s next hurdle was to convince Congress, which agreed to authorize the program in NASA’s FY1985 authorization act.

The space station program has survived myriad challenges since that time, with construction completed only now — a decade and a half late. For most people, the space station’s travails are just memories, if that. Attention today is consumed by what the future holds for human spaceflight with the shuttle program ending just as the ISS is hitting its stride and the next step in human spaceflight a work in progress.

Administrator Bolden is, of course, a veteran space shuttle pilot and commander, who now is charged with bringing that program to a conclusion and initiating both government and private sector replacements for it in a highly constrained budget environment.

The Bolden-Beggs discussion will cap a day-long event that features NASA associate administrators or their designees discussing the details of the FY2012 budget request. The meeting is open to the public, but an RSVP is required. See the announcement for details.

The House is expected to pass a two-week Continuing Resolution (CR) today that would extend government spending at FY2010 levels for most agencies through March 18. The bill, H. J. Res. 44, contains $4 billion in spending reductions.

The $4 billion reduction is achieved by eliminating earmarks and cutting spending by small amounts in a variety of government agencies. NASA is not affected by those cuts. The bill does not contain language lifting the restriction on terminating the Constellation program that was in the FY2010 Consolidated Appropriations Act.

Under the rule approved by the House Rules Committee yesterday the bill can be debated on the floor for only one hour and no amendments are permitted.

What the Senate will do this week remains unclear. It could agree to the House-passed bill or pass one of its own. Rumors are that the White House wants a 30-day bill instead of a two-week bill. The two chambers have until midnight Friday to reach agreement or force a government shutdown.

What will happen for the rest of FY2011 remains up in the air. It is conceivable that Congress would continue to pass short-term CRs if they cannot reach agreement on a version to last through the end of September. That would pose problems for all the government departments and agencies who would have no certainty about their funding levels. Compared to the deep cuts passed by the House on February 19, however, it might be preferable for some agencies if a series of short-term CRs meant they could retain their FY2010 funding levels. Under the February 19 bill, for example, NASA would lose $601 million compared to its FY2010 level.

Whether the government shuts down on Friday at midnight is now in the Senate’s court. The House just passed the two-week Continuing Resolution (H. J. Res. 44) that would fund the government through March 18. It contains $4 billion in cuts, but none directly affects space activities at NASA, NOAA or DOD.

The White House was hoping to get the bill extended to a 30-day CR instead of two weeks. It is up to the Senate at this point to decide whether to agree with the House or pass a bill with different language.

Thanks to Jeff Foust of spacepolitics.com who is doing a splendid job tweeting from the Next Generation Suborbital Researchers conference that is going on right now in Orlando. For those of us who couldn’t make the trip, it’s almost like being there. Check him out on Twitter: jeff_foust.

The National Research Council’s (NRC’s) Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board (ASEB) is holding a workshop next week to gather ideas on gaps and possible directions for NASA’s Micrometeoroid and Orbital Debris (MMOD) Programs. The public is invited to attend.

The workshop will be held March 9-10, 2011 at the Mason Inn Conference Center and Hotel in Fairfax, VA. The agenda and more details can be found on the ASEB website. One of the more interesting sessions is how to retrieve and remove orbital debris as called for in President Obama’s National Space Policy.

The workshop is part of an NRC study that is assessing NASA’s orbital debris activities.

Kenneth Chang at the New York Times has a good article today about the suborbital researchers conference going on in Orlando. The article focuses on how scientists can use suborbital flight opportunities provided by companies like Virgin Galactic, XCOR, Blue Origin and Masten Space Systems. In some cases, scientists can go along for the ride if they have about $200,000 for a ticket.

“Scientists currently have a few options for investigating weightlessness. They can drop the experiment from a tall tower, which provides a couple of seconds of zero gravity before it goes splat on the ground. They can send the experiment up in an airplane that flies an arcing trajectory known as a parabola, which provides up to half a minute of apparent weightlessness. Or they can get something to the International Space Station, where the pull of gravity is continuously absent.

“The suborbital flights will offer an opportunity that falls between the parabolic plane flights and the space station.”

Space programs at DOD, NASA and NOAA escape pretty much unscathed in the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO’s) new report on how to reduce duplication in government programs.

“Opportunities to Reduce Potential Duplication in Government Programs, Save Tax Dollars, and Enhance Revenue” is a 340 page report from GAO issued today in response to a congressional directive that each year the congressional support agency tell Congress about programs, agencies, offices and initiatives in the government that have duplicative goals or activities. This is the first of those reports. GAO also decided on its own to identify other “opportunities” for agencies or Congress “to reduce the cost of goverment operations or enhance revenue collections for the Treasury.”

Space programs are hardly mentioned at all in the report. DOD is even given credit for saving $10 million on a satellite contract by not paying an award fee to a contractor whose performance did not merit one. DOD’s Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities include space-based systems and is one of the areas GAO identified as ripe for streamlining, but the space-based systems were not singled out for special attention; it is primarily an organization and management issue.

Ten agencies including DOD and NASA have a combined total of 82 programs to improve teacher quality and GAO concludes that the resulting fragmentation “can frustrate agency efforts to administer programs in a comprehensive manner, limit the ability to determine which programs are most cost-effective, and ultimately increases program costs.” It notes, for example, that 9 of the 82 programs are for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education administered in five different departments or agencies (Departments of Education, Defense and Energy plus NASA and the National Science Foundation).

Federal data center and server consolidation could save an estimated $150-200 billion over the next decade, GAO states, and could involve two dozen agencies and departments, including DOD, NASA, and the Department of Commerce (of which NOAA is a part).

The only other space-related topic mentioned in the GAO report is the State Department’s organizational arrangement for arms control and nonproliferation — which includes space policy. In 2006, the Department merged three bureaus into two: Verification, Compliance and Implementation (VCI) and International Security and Nonproliferation (ISN). (There are space policy elements in both.) A State Department report written afterwards concluded “mission redundancies persisted for chemical weapons, missle defense and space policy, nuclear nonproliferation, and bioterrorism among 14 offices” in the new structure. State announced a new reorganization in October 2010 and GAO says that the Department should implement previous GAO recommendations that could reduce personnel and other overhead costs in the two bureaus.

Somewhat surprisingly, export controls are barely mentioned, and not in the context familiar to SpacePolicyOnline.com readers — the impact of ITAR on defense and aerospace companies. GAO talks about collecting “antidumping and countervailing duties,” but not about streamlining the government’s export control bureaucracy. President Obama has been taking steps in that regard for the past two years. Also no mention of streamlining salmon regulations, which the President humorously raised in his State of the Union address.

The National Research Council’s (NRC’s) Decadal Survey for planetary science will be released on March 7, 2011. The study was conducted under the auspices of the Space Studies Board.

Decadal Surveys are studies conducted by the NRC on behalf of NASA and other space science agencies. The NRC committees that write the reports use a consensus-based approach to determinig priorities for scientific research in various disciplines. The surveys are conducted about every 10 years — a decade — looking forward to the next decadal of research, hence their name. The most recent Decadal Survey for astronomy and astrophysics was released last year. The NRC is currently conducting another one for the field of solar and space physics (heliophysics).

The agencies that sponsor the Decadal Survey, in this case NASA and the National Science Foundation, typically tell the NRC’s study committee how much money they expect to be able to devote to new missions and research in the upcoming decade. The Decadal Survey committee then is asked to create and prioritize a list of research missions that need to be undertaken to answer the most compelling scientific questions in that discipline.

Prognosticating future budgets is always problematical, especially so today. The planetary science community has been expectantly awaiting the release of the Decadal to see what their community has determined to be the most compelling research priorities. The report will be released in conjunction with the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference being held in The Woodlands, TX, outside Houston, from March 7-11.

UPDATE: A link to the agenda for Friday’s “State of the Agency” meeting at NASA Headquarters has been added.

The following events may be of interest in the coming week. For more information, check our calendar on the right menu or click the links below. Times, dates and witnesses for congressional hearings are subject to change; check the relevant committee’s website for up to date information.

During the Week

Hopefully the House and Senate will reach agreement on at least a short-term Continuing Resolution (CR) to keep the government operating past midnight on March 4 when the current CR expires. Check back throughout the week for our continuing coverage of this issue, critical to the nation as well as the space program.

Monday-Wednesday, February 28-March 2

• Next Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference, University of Central Florida, Orlando FL

Tuesday, March 1

• NASA Advisory Council (NAC) Planetary Science Subcommittee, Virtual (via telephone and WebEx — see Federal Register notice on how to participate), 1:00 – 3:00 pm EST

Tuesday-Thursday, March 1-3

• National Research Council (NRC) Committee on Human Spaceflight Operations, Keck Center, Washington DC. Some sessions may be closed.

Wednesday, March 2

• House Science, Space and Technology Committee hearing on NASA’s FY2012 budget request, 2318 Rayburn House Office Building, 10:00 am EST
• House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee hearing on FY2012 DOD budget request, 2359 Rayburn House Office Building, 10:00 am EST

Wednesday-Friday, March 2-4

• NRC Commiittee on the Origins and Evolution of Life(COEL), Keck Center, Washington, DC. Some sessions are closed; see agenda for details.

Thursday, March 3

• House Appropriations Commerce-Justice-Science subcommittee hearing on NASA’s FY2012 budget request, 2362A Rayburn House Office Building, 10:00 am EST

Thursday-Friday, March 3-4

• NAC Science Committee, NASA Headquarters, Washington DC
  • Thursday, March 3, 8:30 am – 5:00 pm EST, room 9H40
  • Friday, March 4, 8:30 am – 2:00 pm EST, room 3H46

Friday, March 4

• NASA Alumni League et al conference on State of the Agency: NASA Future Programs Presentations, NASA Headquarters Auditorium, 7:30 am – 5:30 pm EST

UPDATE: The launch has been rescheduled for March 4.

ORIGINAL STORY: The launch of NASA’s Glory earth observation satellite has been postponed again, this time until March. Engineers still have not determined why the Vehicle Interface Control Console (VICC) sent a “hold-fire” command to the Taurus XL rocket 15 minutes before its intended launch early yesterday morning.

NASA reports that the VICC is located in a mobile launch support van a few miles from the launch pad. More time is needed to determine the cause of and remedy the problem. NASA now is looking at launch dates in early to mid-March.