Judy Woodruff of PBS’s Newshour interviewed Norm Augustine on Friday, August 14 about the status of his review of NASA’s human space flight program. She opened her report by noting that the committee had reported to the White House and NASA earlier in the day. The following are particularly interesting excerpts, including his assessment that NASA needs $4 billion per year more to have a successful human space flight program.

“Really, we’ve given the White House a dilemma. The space program we have today, the human space flight program, really isn’t executable with the money we have.

“And so either we have to do something with the current program that’s not going to be very successful, I’m afraid, or spend a nontrivial sum more than that to have something that’s really exciting and workable, and that’s the challenge the White House is going to have, is to sort that out.”

“They’re short about $4 billion a year from what it’s going to take to really carry out a successful program. There are also some real technical challenges.

“For example, we don’t really know the effect of galactic cosmic rays on human beings that are in outer space for long periods of time. We think that the effects could be very bad.

“We also know that weightlessness has a serious impact on humans when they’ve been exposed to it for a long time….”

He also commented that he believes commercial space flight will be “an important piece of the future.”

(Editorial note: Mr. Augustine said that he believed the NASA budget is currently 0.7% of the federal budget. According to OMB historical table 4.2, it is 0.5% of federal outlays today, compared to 4.4% at the height of the Apollo program in 1966.)

Most of Washington may be on vacation this month, but two of the National Research Council (NRC) decadal survey committees are busily working away. Six of the seven panels of the Decadal Survey on Biological and Physical Sciences in Space will meet jointly this week (Aug. 19-21), and three of the five panels of the Decadal Survey on Planetary Sciences will meet separately next week. All of the meetings will be at the National Academy of Sciences building, 2100 C Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. See our calendar for more details on these meetings and our “National Research Council” page (on our left menu) for more on the Decadal Surveys themselves.

NASA will conduct a Flight Readiness Review (FRR) tomorrow, August 18, to determine if the space shuttle Discovery is ready for its STS-128 mission. NASA is continuing to assess whether it is satisifed that the foam loss issues that affected the previous shuttle launch are sufficiently well understood and will not recur. Launch is currently scheduled for August 24 at 1:58 a.m. EDT. The mission will resupply the International Space Station (ISS) and drop off astronaut Nicole Stott who will replace astronaut Tim Kopra.

To see who is aboard the ISS now and who is on the STS-128 crew, visit NASA’s spaceflight website.

The Augustine panel had no encouraging words for supporters of the Constellation program or any of the other concepts for sending humans beyond low Earth orbit.

New York Times, NASA Panel Grapples with Cost of Space Plans

The United States cannot afford to send humans anywhere beyond the space station – especially Mars – unless it wants to spend more money.

“You just can’t get there,” Sally Ride, the former astronaut, said over and over again on Wednesday as she presented calculations of the costs and timetables of various proposed space missions, rangng from establishing a base on the Moon to touring asteroids to landing on Mars.

Space.com, NASA Budget Too Slim To Reach Moon by 2020, Panel Says

NASA has a budget of about $80 billion for human spaceflight through 2020, about $28 billion less than projected when it first chose the Orion spacecraft and its Ares rockets to succeed the space shuttle fleet. Orion spacecraft are not expected to begin operational flights until 2015, the committee said.

Augustine said that NASA’s exploration budget has been cut repeatedly since announcing the new space exploration plan in 2005, hindering its progress. Technical and other delays have also led to the current shortfall, he added. Still he and his committee were surprised none of their options fit in NASA’s current budget

Orlando Sentinel, Moon or Space Station? Budget Means NASA Must Pick, Panel Says

“We are on a path right now, for a system that requires [roughly] double the current budget just to operate,” said Jeff Greason, a panel member and co-founder of XCOR Aerospace

“If Santa Claus brought us this [Constellation] system tomorrow, fully developed, and the budget didn’t change, our next action would have to be to cancel it,” he said.

“Yup,” responded Ride.

The National Research Council released an interim report today on strategies for surveying and detecting Near Earth Objects.

The Aerospace Industries Association is sponsoring a one-hour symposium on What’s Next for the International Space Station from 10:00-11:00 am on August 13, 2009 in 2318 Rayburn House Office Building. Scheduled speakers and RSVP info below.

William Gerstenmaier
Associate Administrator, NASA Space Operations Directorate

Joy Bryant
Vice President & Program Manager, International Space Station
The Boeing Company

John Porter
CEO, Astrogenetix

Dr. John Jessup
Chief, Diagnostics Evaluation Branch, Cancer Diagnosis Program, NIH

JP Stevens
AIA Vice President, Space Systems

RSVP to:
Andrew Barber
703-358-1096
andrew.barber@aia-aerospace.org

Congress Daily (subscription required) reports that the Senate is likely to focus on appropriations bills when it returns from its August recess on September 8 since health care legislation is not likely to be ready for floor action. According to the report, first up will be either the Commerce, Justice, Science appropriations bill that includes NASA, or Interior-Environment. The Department of Defense (DOD) appropriations bill is not likely to pass by the first of October when the new fiscal year begins, according to the report. The House passed all 12 appropriations bills before it left for recess. The Senate has passed four (Homeland Security, Legislative Branch, Energy and Water, and Agriculture).

The National Research Council’s Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board (ASEB) has released a study calling for reinstatement of NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC). Established in 1998 to provide grants for external studies of revolutionary aeronautics and space technologies, NASA eliminated NIAC in 2007 because of budgetary pressures. It was funded at approximately $4 million per year as part of NASA’s Exploration Systems Mission Directorate (ESMD).

The report, authored by an ASEB study committee co-chaired by Robert Braun of Georgia Tech and Dianne Wiley of Boeing, was requested by Congress in the FY2008 appropriations bill that funded NASA. The committee concluded that NIAC was “effective in achieving its mission and achieving its stated goals” and thus recommended that NASA reestablish a NIAC-like organization — a “NIAC2”. Noting that NIAC’s reporting relationship changed through its years of operation, first reporting to the agency’s chief technologist and later to ESMD, the committee recommended that NIAC2 report to the Office of the Administrator. It also recommended that NIAC2 address NASA-wide mission and technology needs (not those focused on just one Mission Directorate), fund both internal and external proposals, and allow for “proof of concept” awards. The full report can be downloaded for free from the National Academies Press website (look for the “Download Free PDF” link).