Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology (SS&T) Committee, made clear at a hearing yesterday and in an op-ed today that he is not convinced the space program is on the right track.

Presidential Science Adviser John Holdren testified to the committee yesterday about the FY2014 budget request for federal research and development (R&D).  The hearing covered all federal R&D agencies, but the first agency Smith talked about in his opening statement was NASA.   Saying that he looks at federal investments in R&D through the prism of ensuring American leadership, he asked a series of questions about NASA’s program, including whether sending humans to an asteroid is the right goal for human spaceflight or should it be the Moon. 

Later in the hearing, Smith asked Holdren why the Obama Administration is not following the advice of the scientific community to return to the Moon instead of going to an asteroid.   He referenced a December 2012 National Research Council (NRC) report that concluded there was a lack of enthusiasm for the asteroid mission initiated by the President in 2010.   Holdren acknowledged that there was “lack of excitement among some” about the asteroid mission at that time, but insisted that much has changed since December.  NASA has developed an “extraordinarily ingenious and cost effective new approach” to the mission, he said, and “I’m now seeing a lot of enthusiasm.”  Smith countered that it was not in any set of recommended missions from the NRC or other panels and it seems like “an afterthought when the first mission didn’t get supported by the international or by the scientific community.”  He did not reject the idea, however, saying “we can weigh it as we go forward.”

Smith also asked why NASA is involved in earth science when there are 13 federal agencies doing climate change research.  He wondered why NASA should not focus on its space mission and let the other 12 study climate change.   Holdren defended NASA’s broadly-based program, asserting that NASA needs to continue applying its unique capabilities to space, earth science, and aeronautics as it has historically.

In today’s op-ed in the Houston Chronicle, Smith focused on NASA’s space exploration mission and called for President Obama to “work with Congress to provide a vision for the agency” adding that for NASA to succeed it needs “continuity of vision and consistency in its budget.”  Conceding that NASA cannot “defy budget gravity” and get a budget increase when others are getting cut, he argued that “we need to play smarter and squeeze as much productivity as we can out the money we have.”

Smith offered no specifics of his own on what to do.  Arguably, the President laid out a vision three years ago — sending astronauts to an asteroid as a steppingstone to Mars — so “continuity of vision” would mean continuing on that path even though a strong contingent wants a return to President George W. Bush’s 2004 vision of sending humans back to the Moon.  That includes eight Members of Congress who reintroduced legislation (H.R. 1446) to direct NASA to develop a plan for landing humans on the Moon and establishing a human presence there.  Smith is not a co-sponsor of that bill.

NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden has warned about changing directions again, telling the NRC last month that NASA is not planning for a human lunar mission and if a future decision is made to do that, it would probably mean that Americans would not be on the Moon, an asteroid, Mars or anywhere in the lifetimes of the people in the room.  “We cannot continue to change the course of human exploration,” he emphasized.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) applauded NASA’s progress in reforming its management of major programs in a report released today.  The congressional watchdog agency said that, excluding the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), cost growth and schedule delays have decreased to about one third of their 2009 levels.

GAO excluded JWST because it has a “disproportionate effect” on the portfolio of programs NASA manages.  “Including the JWST in the calculation would increase the 2013 portfolio’s average development cost from 3.9 percent to 46.4 percent and would double the average launch delay, from 4 to 8 months and obscure the progress the rest of the portfolio has made toward maintaining cost and schedule baselines,” the report says.

In this fifth review of NASA’s program management challenges, GAO looked at 18 NASA projects with an estimated life-cycle cost exceeding $250 million.  It did not make any recommendations, but highlighted areas where NASA leadership needs to remain vigilant:

• managing competing priorities within the context of constrained budgets
• estimating costs associated with large-scale projects
• improving overall cost and schedule estimates, and
• using consistent and proven design stability metrics

Speaking to the Maryland Space Business Roundtable today, Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said that she will support President Obama’s new asteroid retrieval initiative, but expressed concern about the request for the Orion spacecraft and planetary exploration.

Applauding the FY2014 request of $17.7 billion for NASA overall, which she said was a “$200 million increase over last year …we’re going to keep that,” she went on to note the President’s proposal to capture an asteroid and said “we support him on that.”  She quickly added, however, that she is concerned about the proposed cut to Orion and stressed the reality that, with Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) as vice chairman of the full committee, it was not politically possible to cut that program.  Throughout her talk she praised Shelby for working with her in a bipartisan manner to get the final FY2013 Continuing Resolution (CR) passed and their effective working relationship over many years.

She is pleased that the request for earth science is an increase of $80 million, but complained about what she characterized as a reduction for planetary exploration and said “we have to look at that.”  According to her calculations, “planetary science” was reduced $283 million in the FY2014 request and “I know that went into Mars robotics.”   The robotics Mars program is part of planetary exploration, so her meaning was not clear.

Semi-seriously, she said she always asks three questions about budget requests: “what do we need to do for the nation, what do we need to do for Maryland, and … what did you say we were going to do for Maryland?”

Mikulski restated her opposition to the sequester, which remains in place through FY2021 based on the Budget Control Act of 2011.  The final FY2013 CR that she sheparded included the sequester, however — a 5 percent cut to NASA that cost the agency over $1 billion, though NASA seems to be ignoring it in discussions of its FY2014 request.   NASA has not released figures showing what the agency actually got in FY2013, the current fiscal year, making Mikulski’s comparisons of what the agency got last year versus its request for FY2014 all the more obscure.  The upshot is that she is concerned about the amount of funding requested for planetary science and is warning NASA not to cut the Orion program.

Mikulski ascended to chairmanship of the full Senate Appropriations Committee in December following the death of Senator Daniel Inouye (D-HI).  In addition to chairing the full committee, she continues to chair the Commerce-Justice-Science (CJS) subcommittee, which funds not only NASA, but NOAA.  Today she stressed the need to find a replacement for Jane Lubchenco as head of NOAA.  Lubchenco left in February.  Mikulski also emphasized that the National Weather Service (part of NOAA) “must be the best in the world” and create a computer model that will make Europe’s look “wimpy.”  It was the European weather model that correctly forecast Hurricane Sandy making a right turn into New Jersey and New York.