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. All meetings are in Washington, DC and all times are EST unless otherwise noted.

During the Week

• Congress still needs to pass an extension of expiring legislation, including the Satellite Home Viewer Extension and Reauthorization Act. It and other laws bundled in H.R. 4691 will expire at midnight tonight (Sunday).

Wednesday, March 3

• House Science and Technology Committee hearing on the FY2011 budget request for the Department of Energy (DOE), which includes funding to restart production of plutonium-238 for certain NASA planetary exploration missions. 12:00-2:00, 2318 Rayburn

Wednesday-Friday, March 3-5

• 2010 International Commercial Remote Sensing Symposium, Reagan Building

Thursday, March 4

• Women in Aerospace (WIA) breakfast with NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver, 7:30 – 9:00 am, Hyatt Regency Capitol Hill
• SASC Hearing on FY2011 Air Force Budget Request, 9:30 am, 216 Hart
• Senate CJS Appropriations Subcommittee Hearing on FY2011 Department of Commerce Budget Request, 10:00 am, 138 Dirksen
• House CJS Appropriations Subcommittee Hearing on FY2011 Department of Commerce Budget Request, 2:00 pm, 2359 Rayburn

In 2008, Congress directed NASA to ask the National Research Council (NRC) to conduct a review of NASA’s suborbital activities, including balloons, sounding rockets, aircraft, and suborbital reusable rockets. The NRC released its report – Revitalizing NASA’s Suborbital Program: Advancing Science, Driving Innovation, and Developing Workforce – on Friday, championing a reinvigoration of the program.

It wasn’t so long ago that suborbital space-related research seemed to be on the verge of extinction. For decades, the space and earth science communities considered suborbital research such a fundamental aspect of NASA’s science programs that little effort was made to explain or defend the money spent for it. The abrupt cutbacks in NASA’s research and analysis (R&A) funding, which includes suborbital programs, proposed in the FY2007 budget set off alarm bells not only for the scientists who rely on the suborbital program for flying experiments but for others who recognize the role of the suborbital program as a training ground for future scientists, systems engineers, and project and program managers. Although NASA began to change course soon thereafter, the interest in justifying and reinvigorating the program took hold.

The NRC’s study committee, chaired by Steven Bohlen of Texas A&M, made five recommendations:

• restore the suborbital program by reordering its priorities and increasing funding;
• assign a “program lead” reporting to the head of the Science Mission Directorate to coordinate the suborbital program;
• use the suborbital program as an integral part of on-the-job training and career development for engineers, experimental scientists, systems engineers, and project managers;
• invest in stabilizing and advancing suborbital capabilities, including the development of ultra-long-duration super-pressure balloons; and
• continue to monitor commercial suborbital space developments.

NASA’s current leadership seems particularly keen on the prospects for purchasing commercial flight services through its Commercial Reusable Suborbital Research (CRuSR) program. NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver said on February 18 that NASA is planning to spend $2.5 million in FY2010 for those services and is requesting $15 million per year for FY2011-2014.

Aaron Cohen, 79, who served the space program tirelessly in NASA, academia and the private sector, passed away yesterday according to a press release from NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC). Mr. Cohen was JSC Director from1986-1993, a term that included recovering from the 1986 space shuttle Challenger tragedy. He was a highly respected NASA engineer and manager, who took his skills to Texas A&M University, his alma mater, after retiring from NASA in 1993. He also was a technical adviser to Kistler Aerospace — which almost succeeded in building a commercial reusable space launch vehicle — when that company was getting off the ground in the 1990s. According to the NASA statement, he died after a lengthy illness.

The number of jobs that will be lost if Congress goes along with President Obama’s plan to cancel the Constellation program — on top of terminating the space shuttle — has not been officially revealed by NASA, but one county that will be hard-hit is estimating 23,000 in its community alone.

NASA says only that while it does not plan to cut its own civil servant workforce, there will be job losses for contractors but they do not yet know how many. One hard-hit community will be the area around Kennedy Space Center, Florida, especially Brevard County. Florida Today reports that the county’s workforce president now estimates the loss of 23,000 jobs: 9,000 direct jobs (7,000 from shuttle termination, the remainder if Constellation “and other initiatives” in the FY2011 budget request are cancelled), and 14,000 indirect jobs from area businesses such as restaurants, hotels, etc.

The newspaper reported an estimate of 2,400 jobs that could be gained if potential commercial crew companies could be “lured” to Brevard County, but also quoted a representative of United Space Alliance as warning that Florida should not assume it has a “birthright” to human spaceflight, that companies would choose where to conduct launches based on market forces. NASA Administrator Bolden asserted in recent testimony to Congress that the agency expects commercial space to be a source of new jobs: “An enhanced U.S. commercial space industry will create new high-tech jobs, leverage private sector capabilities and energy in this area, and spawn other businesses and commercial opportunities, which will spur growth in our Nation’s economy.”

The effect on jobs and the aerospace workforce as a whole has been a major topic of questioning in Congress about the President’s new plan for NASA.

Congressman Frank Wolf (R-VA), ranking member of the House Appropriations Commerce-Justice-Science (CJS) subcommittee, has posted the text of correspondence he had about the President’s proposal to terminate the Constellation program with Burt Rutan and several former astronauts and NASA officials. He quoted from the letters and emails in his statement to the CJS subcommittee during a hearing on Wednesday with Presidential Science Adviser John Holdren. They are available on the Congressman’s website and include correspondence with:

• Burt Rutan, Scaled Composites, perhaps best known today as the designer of SpaceShipOne, winner of the Ansari X-Prize
• Former astronauts Walter Cunningham, Charlie Duke, and Harrison Schmitt (also a former U.S. Senator)
• Former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin and former Johnson Space Center Director Chris Kraft

Presidential Science Adviser John Holdren was busy testifying on Capitol Hill yesterday about the federal R&D budget, including NASA. In the morning he appeared before the House Science and Technology Committee, and in the afternoon before the House Appropriations Commerce-Justice-Science (CJS) subcommittee.

The appropriations hearing revealed the positions being taken by NASA’s appropriators, the Members of Congress who are most directly involved in deciding how much money NASA will get for FY2011. While many of NASA’s authorizers have been quite vocal in reacting to the plan in NASA’s FY2011 budget request – almost all somewhere between skeptical and strongly opposed – less has been known publicly about the appropriators. (Not sure of the difference between authorizers and appropriators? See our “What’s a Markup?” fact sheet.)

Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), chair of the Senate CJS subcommittee, laid out her core principles in a letter last week and the ranking member of that subcommittee, Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL), has not been shy about his strong support for Constellation and skepticism about commercial crew. Apart from that, however, the only hint has been the three Republican House CJS appropriators (Aderholt, R-AL; Bonner, R-AL; and Culberson, R-TX) who were among the 27 House Members who signed a letter to NASA warning that the agency might be violating the law by taking actions to terminate Constellation before Congress has given it permission to do so.

Yesterday, it became clear that many of the House appropriators are just as unenthusiastic as the authorizers. According to a summary in Space News (subscription required), subcommittee chairman Alan Mollohan (D-WV) complained about the lack of detail in NASA’s budget request about the proposal, and cited concerns by many in Congress that the plan relegates the United States to second place in human spaceflight. Two other Democrats, C.A. “Dutch” Ruppersberger (D-MD) and Adam Schiff (D-CA), also expressed doubts about the human spaceflight elements of the budget request even though Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Schiff’s district both stand to gain from increased funding for robotic space science and exploration missions.

Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), ranking member of the CJS subcommittee, complained that the plan appears to have been “hastily developed without proper vetting from NASA’s scientific, engineering and human spaceflight experts” and that the President himself has been silent about it. According to the Space News account, Wolf also was highly irritated by the expressions on the “smug” faces of three White House staff members sitting behind Dr. Holdren saying that “you really bring a degree of arrogance here that is just almost offensive.”

Wolf’s opening statement incorporates quotes from a variety of experts including Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites, former astronauts and NASA officials (including former NASA Administrator Michael Griffin), and James Lewis from CSIS. Perhaps most interesting is Rutan’s objection to the commercial crew concept. A strident critic of NASA and champion for commercial space activities – including his own SpaceShipOne, which won the Ansari X-Prize – Rutan is quoted by Wolf as saying that while an observer might assume that he would applaud NASA’s decision “he would be wrong.” Among Rutan’s criticisms is that “Manned spaceflight and exploration is one of the last remaining fields in which the U.S. maintains an undeniable competitive advantage over other nations. To walk away is shortsighted and irresponsible.”

Rep. Aderholt posted his opening statement on his website saying he is strongly opposed to what he called a “reckless” plan that “could cripple U.S. human spaceflight for an unknown number of years.”