Former astronaut Piers Sellers and Mike Freilich, head of NASA’s earth science program, will headline an event on “Earth from Space” held by the American Astronautical Society (AAS) on November 13, 2013.

Sellers, who is currently Deputy Director of the Science and Exploration Directorate at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, will introduce a condensed version of NOVA’s “Earth from Space” film.  Freilich then will moderate a panel discussion among Sellers, Jon Malay of Lockheed Martin, Jeff Puschell of Raytheon, and Paula Wamsley of Ball Aerospace.   Malay is a past president of AAS and a past president of the American Meteorological Society (AMS).

The event will be held at the U.S. Navy Memorial (Naval Heritage Center), 701 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Washington, DC.   Doors open at 5:30 pm ET, with the film beginning at 6:00 pm and the panel discussion from 6:30-7:30 pm, followed by a reception at 7:30 pm.  RSVP by November 6 to dthompson@astronautical.org.

Sellers has a lot of personal experience viewing the Earth from space.   He flew to the International Space Station (ISS) three times, in 2002, 2006 and 2010, and made six spacewalks.

NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden told a National Research Council (NRC) committee this week that there are two main reasons for extending the lifetime of the International Space Station (ISS) beyond 2020:  business and science.   He also said that the Space Launch System is actually a NASA design.

Bolden spoke to the NRC’s Committee on Human Spaceflight.  The committee was set up in response to a provision in the 2010 NASA Authorization Act that directed NASA to contract with the NRC in FY2012 for a study on the future of the human spaceflight program.  NASA provided the funding to the NRC late in FY2012 and the committee began meeting last December.   It heard from Bolden at that time.  This week’s meeting was an opportunity for him to update the committee and respond to questions that emerged in the  past 10 months.  It also was the first time committee co-chair Mitch Daniels heard from him.  Daniels, a former Republican Indiana Governor and now the President of Purdue University, replaced former defense secretary Bill Perry as co-chair this spring.   Jonathan Lunine, a Cornell space scientist, is the other co-chair.  The committee’s task is to articulate the value proposition for human spaceflight — what does the nation get for the money it expends. 

Under current plans, the ISS partners (the United States, Russia, Japan, Europe and Canada) will keep the space station operating until 2020.  NASA, however, is making the case for extending it to 2028, a year that will mark the 30th anniversary of the launches of the first two ISS modules.  The modules have a 15 year design life, but NASA is confident they can operate for twice that.

The burning question is whether there is sufficient value to justify eight more years of spending.  NASA’s budget for the ISS is about $3 billion a year, not including the costs for developing the commercial crew systems or purchasing services once they become available.   Commercial crew development is expected to be completed around 2017 and presumably the price for U.S. commercial crew flights will not exceed what NASA currently pays the Russians for such services, so that may not add much to the annual operating costs post-2020.  Nonetheless, $3 billion a year is a lot especially as NASA’s budget is increasingly constrained and trade-offs inevitably will have to be made between maintaining today’s programs versus future space exploration.

Bolden’s business argument is that the companies who are investing their own funds in commercial crew need to be assured of recouping those costs and the longer NASA needs those services, the more revenue they will make.   NASA is hoping that commercial crew will become available in 2017.  Though one goal of commercial crew is for the companies to find non-NASA users, the NASA business is a staple.   If ISS is terminated in 2020, NASA business will represent a very small market, however.  If ISS is extended to 2028, the market looks somewhat better.   NASA is paying a large percentage of the development costs and how much the companies are investing of their own money is proprietary, so it is not possible to know how much revenue they need to achieve a decent Return on Investment (RoI), but it is obvious that the longer time frame is more advantageous.

As for science, Bolden argues that scientists need 5-10 years to come up with ideas for experiments and implement them.  They need to know that the ISS will be available for more than just a few years or they are not likely to utilize it.  The ISS is a scientific laboratory and while a great many experiments have been conducted over the past 13 years of permanent human occupancy, to date none has been a “killer app” that unambiguously demonstrates the value of performing research in a microgravity environment. Committee member Pascale Ehrenfreund made the same point, noting that she has several ISS experiments but is wondering whether to propose any more since the future of the ISS is uncertain.

Ehrenfreund wanted to know when a decision would be made.  Bolden exclaimed that ISS is a steppingstone to the universe, but that if we are not going to move foward in exploring space, there is no point in continuing ISS.   One decision point will be when the NRC committee makes its report, he said, because it all gets back to the value proposition that the committee is expected to articulate.

Bolden also defended the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) and, in response to a question, remarked that the design of the Space Launch System (SLS) originated at NASA.  SLS is new rocket being developed by NASA to enable space exploration beyond low Earth orbit, including the ARM and eventually human trips to Mars.

In February 2010, as part of the FY2011 budget request, President Obama terminated the Constellation Moon/Mars program initiated under the George W. Bush Administration and proposed that the United States spend 5 years developing “game changing” space technologies before deciding what rocket to build and where to go.  Congress disagreed and in the 2010 NASA Authorization Act directed NASA to build SLS with an initial capability of 70 tons to low Earth orbit, growing to 130 tons.  Senators Bill Nelson (D-FL), Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) and Richard Shelby (R-AL) were seen as instrumental in insisting on NASA developing a new rocket immediately, not in 5 years, and including those specifications in the law.  Detractors of the rocket sometimes derisively refer to it as the Senate Launch System — one designed not by NASA but by Senators.

Bolden, however, made clear that SLS is a NASA design.   A committee member referred to SLS as being “old technology”  and wanted to know why Congress told NASA to pursue “the old stuff.”   Bolden replied that “Congress didn’t pick the vehicle, we did.  We picked it based on many decades of going over and over and over…what we need.”  He described SLS as an open architecture that can incorporate new game-changing propulsion technology if it emerges, with nuclear propulsion as an example. 

A proposed alternative — to rely on rockets developed by the commercial sector that would be refueled in orbit at fuel depots — is not realistic in his view.  Turning the nation’s deep space human exploration program over to the commercial sector is “a risk that I don’t think I am willing to undertake for the nation. To say that we’re going to turn the nation’s exploration program over to private enterprise.   I’m not ready for that yet.”

He also eschewed the notion of a five-year hiatus before picking what launch vehicle to build, as the Administration proposed in 2010.  He said industry’s response was that when NASA came back in five years, it might well find an empty room.  Human space exploration “is not something from which you can take a break,” Bolden emphasized.

Established and entrepreneurial space companies met last week at the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight  (ISPCS), where innovation was touted as one solution to budgetary constraints both in industry and the government.

NASA was not represented at the symposium because of the government shutdown, but Gwynne Shotwell, President of SpaceX, expressed the constraints on NASA’s budget by comparing it to how much the nation spends yearly on beer — $18 billion for NASA versus about $100 billion on beer.  Industry faces similar funding challenges, but Jon Gertner, Editor-at-Large of the magazine Fast Company, and others said that has one good side-effect: innovation.

In his keynote address, Gertner used a narrative about the development of the transistor at Bell Labs as a metaphor for how innovations are often under-rated at the beginning:  “Even when we think we understand the value of a breakthrough, we probably don’t.”  During a session entitled “Environments that Foster Innovation,” panelists Cassie Kloberdanz of Sierra Nevada, Makenzie Lystrup of Ball Aerospace, and Chris Boshuizen of Planet Labs discussed various elements of their current and past work environments that led to better innovation.  (Planet Labs is a small start-up that is planning to launch a constellation of 28 earth imaging cubesats and provide free, real-time data about the planet.) They include promoting inclusivity, allowing workers to find their passion and grow into their positions, and modeling the business practices and faster turnaround time after other industries that are experiencing success.

Unexpected breakthroughs like the ones Gertner mentioned are a subset of the “unknown unknowns” that were discussed at ISPCS.  Failures encountered along the way are another.  Safety and reliability are paramount in the commercial and personal spaceflight business, participants emphasized.  There seemed to be consensus that human fatalities would be difficult for the industry if they happened relatively early on.  Alan Ladwig, who recently retired from NASA and founded To Orbit Productions, spoke of the inherent risks of spaceflight in his keynote address, and recommended that the space tourism industry develop a comprehensive contingency plan in case of an accident.  He also wondered aloud why deaths related to spaceflight are perceived so differently from deaths due to automobile accidents or military activities.  Perhaps, he suggested, equating space tourism with more commonplace activities would reduce that disparity.

One area of debate at the symposium was whether space is inherently interesting to the average person.  Some believe it is.  Pat Hynes of the New Mexico Space Grant Consortium mentioned an upcoming reality show where contestants will compete for a ticket to space.  Sean Mahoney from Masten Space Systems said that people are excited about space worldwide: “[space] is our new exploration story.”

Others, however, lamented that the public no longer feels the excitement of the space race era.  Duane Ratliff of the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS) and Shotwell remarked that in the 1960s and 1970s, things were different; the public was much more engaged with the space program.  Ratliff noted that in that era, children owned lunchboxes with astronauts on the side. These days, he said, it is harder to generate excitement among the public about the International Space Station, for example, because they cannot see or touch it and therefore it must be made more accessible.   CASIS is a non-profit whose purpose is to find non-NASA users for the ISS.

Although “international” is part of the symposium’s title, there was no obvious international showing in attendees or presenters.  Even in the dialogue, the American focus was evident: Ratliff talked about how decisions on what experiments will fly on the ISS should benefit U.S. citizens; Paul Guthrie of the Tauri Group discussed how innovation contributes to the U.S. economy; and Bob Allen of Innovation, Design, Entertainment, Art and Storytelling (IDEAS) exclaimed at one point that “We [Americans] own space. Like it or not, we do.”  About the only mention of international space activities was by Boeing’s John Elbon, who praised the international partnership that built and operates the International Space Station.

ISPCS 2013 is a familial symposium, and break times certainly hummed with both greetings from friends and acquaintances and networking powwows.   Although many attendees were from large, well-known corporations, there was also a strong showing of emerging small startups, eager to find their niche and make their mark on the field.

It is difficult to say whether the tone would have been different if NASA representatives had been present, but perhaps it is symbolic that even with government shut down, the symposium went on and was a success.The symposium agenda can be found on the ISPCS website and videos of the sessions should be uploaded there soon.