NASA Advisory Council (NAC) Chairman Steve Squyres and retired industry executive Tom Young will testify to the House Science, Space and Technology (SS&T) Committee next week.  The topic of the hearing is the NASA Authorization Act of 2013.

Congress passed the most recent NASA authorization act in 2010 (P.L.  111-267).  The funding provisions expire at the end of this fiscal year, though the policy provisions remain law until and unless Congress changes them.  Both the House committee and its Senate counterpart have indicated that they want to pass a new authorization bill for NASA this year.   This hearing is part of that process.

The hearing is on Wednesday, June 19, at 10:00 am in 2318 Rayburn House Office Building.   Squyres is the Goldwin Smith Professor of Astronomy at Cornell University and is best known as the Principal Investigator of the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity.   Young is a former Executive Vice President of Lockheed Martin.

Space may be a big place, but on May 22 NOAA’s GOES-13 weather satellite was in the wrong place at the wrong time.  A micrometeoroid hit the solar array arm, jolting the spacecraft and causing its instruments to shut down.  NOAA announced that the satellite is returning to normal operations today.

Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-13 (GOES-13) is one of three GOES satellites currently in orbit.   It is in the “GOES-East” position while GOES-15 is the “GOES-West” spacecraft and GOES-14 is an on-orbit spare positioned in-between.   When GOES-13 suddenly stopped working on May 22, NOAA initially used GOES-15 to provide additional coverage of the eastern United States and surrounding waters, but soon activated GOES-14, which is there just for such emergencies.   It filled in for GOES-13 last year during another temporary outage.

NOAA revealed today that “tests showed a micrometeoroid, likely hit the arm for the [GOES-13] solar array panel on May 22, knocking the spacecraft off its delicate, geostationary balance.”   The collision caused the satellite’s instruments to automatically shut down and engineers put the spacecraft into safe mode while they analyzed the problem.  They reactivated GOES-13 on May 29 as part of the troubleshooting process while GOES-14 continued to provide operational service.

Ultimately the engineering team from NASA, NOAA, Boeing and Excelis determined “the collision did not damage GOES-13’s instruments, or the satellite itself.”  GOES-13 is now back on duty and GOES-14 will resume its on-orbit spare status.

As part of its commemoration of the centennials of Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, the National Archives is having a special exhibit on “Nixon and the U.S. Space Program” this month and a panel discussion on Thursday on the roles both presidents played in the space program.

Nixon was President during all of the Apollo lunar landings and the Skylab program, but is best known for his lack of enthusiam for bold new steps in human spacefight like those championed in the 1969 Space Task Group report chaired by Vice President Spiro Agnew — a space shuttle, a permanently occupied space station, and people on Mars by the 1980s.   Instead, he gave only grudging approval of the space shuttle program in 1972.  It was 12 more years before a permanent space station was endorsed by President Ronald Reagan, and human trips to Mars seem as distant now as they did then (unless you don’t care about radiation exposure). 

Nixon resigned in August 1974 and was replaced by his second Vice President, Gerald Ford.  By then, the last Skylab mission was over and the only human spaceflight mission remaining on the books was the July 1975 U.S.-Soviet Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP).  No U.S. human spaceflights took place for six years after ASTP while the space shuttle was built. 

Basically, both presidents oversaw lean years for the space program and the end of the first era of U.S human spaceflight.   On Thursday, June 13, John Logsdon, professor emeritus at George Washington University, and Bill Barry, NASA chief historian, will give a more complete picture of their contributions to space.   The National Air and Space Museum’s Roger Launius is the moderator.   The event will be broadcast on Ustream.

The panel discussion will be held at the National Archives Building in Washington, DC, where the Nixon space exhibit also is located.  The exhibit will be on display through the end of June and includes the telephone Nixon used to talk to the Apollo 11 astronauts after the Moon landing and tongs used by the Apollo 12 crew to collect moon rocks.

Members of a House committee agreed on the need to improve STEM education in the United States at a hearing yesterday, but many are skeptical that the Obama Administration’s proposal fits the bill.

Questions over how the Administration developed its proposed science education reorganization plan dominated the House Science, Space and Technology (HSS&T) Committee hearing Tuesday as several members expressed doubt that the changes would succeed in renewing U.S. leadership in STEM fields.

Several members of the committee are skeptical at the Administration’s proposal to consolidate many of the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education and public outreach activities of 13 agencies – including NASA – under the leadership of the Department of Education for K-12 education, the National Science Foundation (NSF) for undergraduate and graduate programs, and the Smithsonian Institution for informal science education.

The proposed changes were first revealed in the President’s budget request (PBR) for fiscal year 2014, released on April 10, in which the STEM education funding of agencies like NASA and NOAA was severely cut. According to Presidential Science Advisor Dr. John Holdren, who testified at Tuesday’s hearing, the plan seeks to derive “maximum benefit” from government investment in STEM, which would rise by $178 million (6 percent) in FY2014 when compared to FY2012 levels.

The proposal caught the NASA science education community by surprise and has drawn criticism from several organizations and leaders in the space community. In an op-ed published in the June 3 issue of Space News, Nancy Colleton, president of the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES), quotes Bill Nye “the Science Guy,” Executive Director of The Planetary Society, and others who have voiced their concerns and identifies several successful programs that would be “zeroed out.” “The fact is that NASA programs simply could not be reproduced by any other agency,” Colleton writes.

The proposed changes are the outcome of a 2010 congressional mandate to the White House National Science and Technology Council, which reports to Holdren’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), to establish a Committee on STEM (CoSTEM) that would develop a five-year strategic implementation plan for the coordination of federal STEM programs. Yet as House Members repeatedly admonished during the hearing, that Strategic Plan outlining the findings, priorities and strategies behind the reorganization was released just last Friday, several weeks after the PBR came out.

Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX), HSS&T Chairman, asked Dr. Joan Ferrini-Mundy, assistant director for education and human resources at NSF, who helped lead the development of the Strategic Plan, about the timing of the release. He said it made CoSTEM “almost irrelevant” and asked whether changes were made to the Strategic Plan as a result of the PBR.  Mundy responded by saying that development of the plan was “an ongoing process” and that the team was working on it “around the budget release and beyond.”

NASA funds devoted to STEM education and spread across its mission directorates and offices would be cut by nearly $50 million under the reorganization, NASA’s Leland Melvin told the committee.  He said 78 programs were cut out of the Science Mission Directorate alone, but that $26 million would be competitively awarded by the NASA Office of Education to fund the best programs. Melvin is NASA’s associate administrator for education and would be in charge of the restructured activities in the agency.

A major issue of concern during the discussion was just how the Administration went about identifying low priority programs to cut at NASA and elsewhere, with several committee members asking about the specific criteria or metrics used to inform those decisions.

Holdren said it was an “iterative process” within the White House involving his office (OSTP), the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Domestic Policy Council. “It wasn’t fun; those are tough decisions,” he said.

An exchange between Representative Donna Edwards (D-MD), in whose district lies NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and Melvin revealed that NASA was still waiting on metrics to gauge the success of some of its STEM education programs when the decisions to cut many of these were made. She seemed surprised by Melvin and Holdren’s responses that “the experts” at NASA and other agencies did not have direct input in identifying the specific programs that would be cut or maintained.

Although NASA was not the main subject during the two-hour long hearing, several members expressed concern about how the agency would fare under the proposed plan. HSS&T Ranking Member Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX) said that “NASA seems to have taken the biggest hit in the budget proposal and this doesn’t make any sense to me.”

Edwards agreed: “You have to register me as one of the skeptics.”  During an exchange with Holdren, she asked about the STEM capabilities at the Department of Education which has only one staffer tasked to STEM education. Holdren explained that the PBR includes $285 million to build up that capability and draw from “relevant capability” spread across the department; it’s “not as if the Department of Education is starting from scratch,” he said. Edwards did not seem convinced. Alluding to agencies like NASA “who already know what they’re doing in STEM,” she said “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix that.”

Witness statements, opening statements, and the webcast of the hearing are available on the Republican and Democratic committee websites.

The National Research Council’s (NRC’s) Committee on Human Spaceflight is soliciting input from interested individuals and groups on their ideas on the role of human spaceflight and their vision of the future.

The committee was created in response to language in the FY2010 NASA authorization act and is co-chaired by Cornell space scientist Jonathan Lunine and former Indiana Governor and current President of Purdue University Mitch Daniels.  The committee’s website asks respondents to consider the “following broad questions” when formulating their input:

• What are the important benefits provided to the United States and other countries by human spaceflight endeavors?
• What are the greatest challenges to sustaining a U.S. government program in human spaceflight? 
• What are the ramifications and what would the nation and world lose if the United States terminated NASA’s human spacefliht program?

Responses should be no more than four pages long and are due by July 9, 2013.  Other guidelines are explained on the committee’s website.