President Obama decided yesterday to “jettison” the Ares 1 launch vehicle, build a new heavy lift launch vehicle, but not Ares V, and focus human space exploration on the Moon, asteroids and the moons of Mars, according to Andrew Lawler of ScienceInsider. Lawler, a veteran and highly respected reporter on the space program for Science magazine, published a story on ScienceInsider this evening quoting unnamed officials on the outcome of the Obama-Bolden meeting yesterday. In short, according to Lawler:

• “the new program would jettison Ares 1”;
• a new heavy lift launch vehicle would be built “to take astronauts to the moon, asteroids, and the moons of Mars” but it would not be Ares V: “the White House is convinced that scarce NASA funds would be better spent on a simpler heavy-lift vehicle that could be ready to fly as early as 2018”;
• the “commercial sector would take over the job of getting supplies to the International space station,” although Lawler does not mention commercial crew transport, the topic of considerable debate this year; and
• the President agreed to request “an additional $1 billion for 2011” for NASA to proceed with this program.

That may sound like a lot, but the Augustine committee stressed that the space shuttle is likely to need FY2011 funding — as much as $1.1 billion (page 111). Under the current budget plan, shuttle funding ends in FY2010. The committee concluded that NASA needs the flexibility to let launches slip into FY2011 if necessary to ensure safety. It also highlighted the desirability of continuing the International Space Station (ISS) through 2020, at a cost of an additional $13.7 billion (the fiscal years involved were not specified). Thus, a $1 billion increase in FY2011 could easily be consumed by legacy programs rather than spent on new activities.

Lawler says that it is not clear when a formal announcement will be made. Congress included language in the bill that provides FY2010 funding to NASA that the current Constellation program could not be changed, or a new program initiated, without congressional approval.

The Senate is scheduled to be in session this weekend, too, as it tries to complete work on the health care reform bill and other measures before Christmas. It will be a White Christmas in Washington, too! Senators will have to battle a major winter snowstorm to get to Capitol Hill tomorrow morning for a scheduled vote on the final version of the FY2010 Department of Defense appropriations bill (H.R. 3326). If they make it, they may be stuck there for a while. The current forecast is for 10-15 inches in the immediate Washington area, and up to 20 inches in some locations. For Washington, that is a HUGE snowstorm, especially for December. For most of us, it’s great that it’s a weekend and we don’t have to worry about commuting to work. Not so for the Senators and their staffs, unfortunately. Whether the weather will make them more or less amenable to agreement remains to be seen.

The next International Space Station (ISS) crew is scheduled to launch from Kazakhstan on Sunday, December 20, at 4:52 p.m. EST (December 21, 3:52 a.m. local time). The three men — Russia’s Oleg Kotov, America’s T.J. Creamer, and Japan’s Soichi Noguchi — will join the two men currently aboard ISS: NASA’s Jeff Williams and Russia’s Maxim Suraev. Those two have been holding down the fort themselves since the departure of three colleagues several weeks ago. NASA plans to begin launch coverage at 4:00 p.m. EST Sunday on NASA TV.

Little information has been released about what transpired in the Obama-Bolden meeting yesterday. The few glimpses suggest that the President is supportive of NASA, but not what path he wants the agency to follow.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was asked about the results of the meeting at the daily press briefing yesterday (see it on C-Span beginning at minute 44:15), but he made it clear that he did not yet have a “readout” from the meeting. His comment that “The President believes that NASA plays a vital role going forward” is a nice sentiment, but seemed to be a standard response about NASA rather than anything related to the meeting.

Florida Today’s Flame Trench blog quotes another White House spokesman as saying that :

“‘The President confirmed his commitment to human space exploration, and the goal of ensuring that the nation is on a sustainable path to achieving our aspirations in space,’ said White House spokesman Nicholas Shapiro. …

‘Against a backdrop of serious challenges with the existing program, the Augustine Committee has offered several key findings and a range of options for how the nation might improve its future human space flight activities,’ Shapiro said. ‘The two spoke about the Administrator’s work at NASA and they also discussed the Augustine Committee’s analysis.'”

President Obama will meet with NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden today, according to the Orlando Sentinel’s Write Stuff blog. The two are expected to discuss the Augustine committee report on the future of the human space flight program according to the report.

No word on who else will be at the meeting — Office of Management and Budget (OMB) staff, for example. It will be up to OMB to determine how to implement the financial aspects of whatever decision is made in the FY2011 budget request and its 5-year “runout” (i.e., FY2011-2015). Then, of course, the request will have to be deliberated by Congress, so there is a long way to go. But every journey starts with the first step — perhaps that Presidential decision is close at hand.

Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL), ranking member of the Senate appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA, is calling for an investigation by the NASA Inspector General (IG) of the staff of the Augustine committee that recently submitted its report on the future of the human space flight program.

In a December 14 letter to NASA IG Paul Martin available on his Senate website, Sen. Shelby asserts that several members of the committee’s staff were registered lobbyists and some “have taken advantage of their temporary roles on the Commission [sic] to further their personal business.” The report, Seeking A Human Spaceflight Program Worthy Of A Nation, contains a three-page listing of “committee staff” in Appendix B, but Sen. Shebly states that there were other lobbyists who worked as committee staff that “are not even acknowledged in the report. This is both disturbing and unconscionable.”

Sen. Shelby represents the State of Alabama, home to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and the Ares I and Ares V launch vehicle programs that are part of NASA’s Project Constellation. NASA initiated Constellation in response to a 2004 directive from President George W. Bush to return humans to the Moon by 2020 and someday send them to Mars.

The Augustine committee report was not favorable towards Ares I, whose primary function is to take astronauts back and forth to the International Space Station (ISS). The Augustine committee did not make recommendations — it only offered options — but between the words in the report and congressional testimony by the committee’s chair, Norman Augustine, the message clearly was that the comparatively routine task of delivering people and cargo to ISS should be handed off to the commercial sector while NASA focuses on more challenging destinations beyond low Earth orbit (LEO).

If that course were chosen, there would be no need for Ares I. On the other hand, the committee stressed the need for a larger “heavy lift” launch vehicle like the Ares V for the beyond-LEO missions. Defending Ares I, Sen. Shelby offered a blistering assessment of the commercial sector’s ability to assume responsibility for ISS transportation during a May 21 congressional hearing (read a SpacePolicyOnline.com summary of that hearing). His criticism of the Augustine committee has continued since then.

Representative Bart Gordon (D-TN), chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee, announced today that he will not seek reelection next year. A Member of Congress since 1985, he said in a statement that “Turning 60 has led me to do some thinking about what’s next.” Noting that he has an 8 year old daughter and is the only child of his 83 year old mother, and has a wife with a demanding job, he said “They made sacrifices to allow me to do what I love by serving Congress, and now it’s my turn.” His full statement is available on the committee’s website.

The plutonium-238 (Pu-238) needed to power spacecraft that travel to the distant reaches of the solar system is in scarce supply, and Russia reportedly is taking advantage of the situation. Earlier this year, Congress refused to provide $30 million requested by the Department of Energy (DOE) to restart production of the fuel as recommended by the National Research Council (NRC). Now Russia is withholding Pu-238 it promised to sell DOE, asking for a new deal. Space News reports the story in this morning’s edition.

Jim Green, Director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division, broke the news to scientists at a November 16 meeting of the steering committee for the NRC’s Planetary Science Decadal Survey (his presentation is available on SpacePolicyOnline.com’s NRC page). The requirement for more Pu-238 for Radioisotope Power Systems (RPSs) needed to carry out NASA’s lunar and planetary exploration plans was highlighted by an earlier NRC report “Radioisotope Power Systems: An Imperative for Maintaining U.S. Leadership in Space Exploration.”

Pu-238 has been used since the earliest days of the space program to provide power for spacecraft systems and instruments on probes traveling too far from the Sun to rely on solar power or that will be on the Moon on planetary surfaces where extended periods without solar energy would imperil the mission. Five of the six Apollo missions that landed on the Moon left scientific packages powered by Pu-238, for example, and NASA plans to use it for future lunar landers as well.

DOE is the only federal agency authorized to produce or own nuclear fuel and provides Pu-238 to NASA. DOE signed an agreement with Russia to obtain Pu-238, but Green’s presentation to the Decadal Survey committee revealed the the Russian government is now seeking a new government-to-government level agreement and delivery of the fuel may slip beyond 2011. Space News quotes Green as saying that NASA is proceeding with its current plans expecting that DOE will resolve the situation in a timely manner. A one-year delay reportedly would not be a problem, but “If the first delivery is delayed much beyond 2011 … mission schedules could suffer….”