UPDATE, February 27:   Additional differences between the old version and new version of the bill are identified in this update.

ORIGINAL STORY, February 26: A day before a hearing before the House Science, Space and Technology (HSS&T) Committee, a revised version of the Space Leadership Preservation Act has been introduced.

The text of the new bill, H.R. 823, is somewhat different from the version introduced in the last Congress.   Key changes are that:

• the NASA Administrator would be appointed for six years rather than 10;
• a new provision was added under which the Deputy Administrator could serve as Acting Administrator for no more than 45 days, after which the Associate Administrator would become Acting Administrator (the Deputy Administrator is a political appointee like the Administrator while the Associate Administrator is the top ranking civil servant in the agency — currently Lori Garver and Robert Lightfoot, respectively);
• the Board of Directors for NASA created by the bill would still recommend nominees for Administrator and Deputy Administrator, but instead of requiring (“shall”) the President to choose among them, the new bill makes it permissive (“may”) to choose among them;
• a provision in the old bill is omitted in the new bill that would have required the President to appoint a new administrator no later than 3 months after the list of nominees is provided by the Board of Directors; and
• a provision under which the Board of Directors could recommend removal of the Administrator for cause is expanded to include the Deputy Administrator and Chief Financial Officer.

The co-sponsors of the bill, Rep. John Culberson (R-TX) and Frank Wolf (R-VA), will testify before the Space Subcommittee of the HSS&T Committee tomorrow morning at 10:00 to explain what they hope the bill, if passed by the House and Senate and signed into law, would accomplish.

Wolf chairs the House Appropriations Commerce-Justice-Science subcommittee that funds NASA.  Culberson is a member of that subcommittee.

Correction:  An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified Rep. Wolf’s state.  He is, of course, from Virginia.

Picking up from where it left off in the 112th Congress, the House today passed a bill to rename NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center after Neil Armstrong.

On December 31, 2012, the House passed a bill to rename Dryden FRC after the late Neil Armstrong, a test pilot long before he became famous as the commander of the first human landing on the Moon, Apollo 11.   Time ran out before the Senate could pass the bill in the 112th Congress, however, so today the House passed a new bill, H.R. 667, with the same purpose.  It renames Dryden FRC after Armstrong, while redesignating the Western Aeronautical Test Range as the Hugh L. Dryden Aeronautical Test Range. 

The bill passed the House 394-0.

Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) and John Culberson (R-TX) will testify about their Space Leadership Preservation Act on Wednesday at a hearing before the Space Subcommittee of the House Science, Space and Technology (HSS&T) Committee.

Wolf, who chairs the House Commerce-Justice-Science (CJS) appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA, and Culberson, a member of that subcommittee, introduced the bill in the last Congress and are expected to reintroduce it soon. 

The other two witnesses at the February 27 hearing are Tom Young and Elliot Pulham.   Young is a highly respected retired industry executive who is often called upon to chair studies about programmatic or organizational failures in the space program.   Pulham is the Chief Executive Officer of the Space Foundation, which recently published the report Pioneering: Sustaining U.S. Leadership in Space.

The hearing is scheduled for 10:00 am ET in 2318 Rayburn House Office Building.   The committee’s hearings usually are webcast (http://science.house.gov).

SpacePolicyOnline.com appreciates the insight shared by several Washington insiders on how to interpret NASA’s letter to Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) last week on the impact of the sequester.  It is no easy task for anyone not steeped in intricate budget details and who must rely only on documents in the public domain.  Based on the new information, we need to clarify an article we published on Thursday about the impact on NASA’s budget for space technology.

Mikulski chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee and published letters from many government agencies last week in connection with a hearing on what will happen if the sequester goes into effect on March 1 as scheduled.  NASA was one of the agencies providing a letter in response to her questions.

NASA’s letter includes an attachment that lays out the cuts budget account by budget account.  Anyone can look at that attachment and calculate the percentage reductions in funding.  Space technology, which was the subject of our article Thursday, for example, will suffer an approximately 20 percent cut.  Exploration will take about a 10 percent cut, and science about one percent.  That is what we reported on Thursday.

The key to understanding the letter, however, is that the cuts displayed there are not only because of the sequester even though that was the topic of the hearing and associated letters.

As they are, the numbers imply that choices were made by the Administration about where to cut, rather than applying the sequester on an across-the-board (“meat-axe”) basis of reducing each account by the same percentage — in NASA’s case, 5 percent.  NASA’s letter also repeatedly states that the cuts are expressed in comparison to the FY2013 budget request.  That request reflects Obama Administration priorities, not congressional priorities since Congress has not completed action on that request. Thus, the letter further implies that cuts were based on Obama Administration priorities in the FY2013 request.  Since some budget accounts were cut more than others by percentage, it appeared that someone was choosing winners and losers.

That is not exactly the story, however.

This is our clarified understanding of this complicated situation.  (To simplify matters in the following discussion, we omit nuances, exceptions and other fine details that are important, but add to the confusion.  Kudos to the budget experts who keep track of every one of them.) 

The sequester applies to FY2013 appropriations levels. Congress has not completed action on the FY2013 appropriations bills, however. Instead, the government is being funded through a 6 month Continuing Resolution (CR) that expires on March 27.  The betting is that Congress will extend that CR through the end of the fiscal year — a “full-year CR” — meaning that the FY2013 funding amounts will be roughly the same as FY2012.

In its calculation of the impact of the sequester alone, SpacePolicyOnline.com is now convinced that NASA did in fact apply a 5 percent across the board cut to its FY2012 funding levels for each account, not favoring one over another.

In the letter, however, NASA did not show simply the impact of the sequester.  Instead, it showed the impact of the sequester PLUS the impact of a full-year CR and compared the result to the agency’s request for FY2013.  Consequently, for accounts where the agency requested a big increase for FY2013 (like space technology), the “impact of the sequester” looks really large, while accounts that were level or going down (like science) are shown with a minimal impact.  But that is not due to the sequester alone.  It is the sequester and the full-year CR expressed in comparison to the FY2013 request.

Using space technology as an example, this is how the math works.  (For simplicity, we are going to ignore a 0.612 percent increase for all agencies that was included in the CR).

Space technology’s FY2012 appropriation was $574 million. Remove 5 percent because of the sequester and the new total is roughly $545 million.  For FY2013 NASA requested $699 million. Thus, compared to the FY2013 request, space technology is cut about $150 million or approximately 20 percent.

That is not a 20 percent cut from its current budget, though. It’s a 20 percent cut from what NASA wanted for FY2013.  The reduction is the result of the sequester plus a full year CR.  That was not clear in the Mikulski letter.

Because the letter includes not only sequester cuts, but a full-year CR, all compared to the FY2013 request, the list of programs impacted by the cuts is not very helpful since in some cases it was clear Congress would not approve the requested funding anyway.  Commercial crew is an example.  NASA requested $830 million for FY2013, but the House-passed version of NASA’s FY2013 appropriations bill reduced that to $500 million and the Senate Appropriations Committee approved $525 million. Under the sequester plus a full year CR, it would get its FY2012 appropriated level of $406 million minus 5 percent or about $386 million. That’s a significant cut from the FY2013 request, but it is due more to the full-year CR than to the sequester. NASA and its partners have known for quite some time that they would not get even close to the $830 million they wanted.  If the sequester disappeared tomorrow, they would do better, but not dramatically better.

As for space technology, our article is accurate that creating the Space Technology Mission Directorate is a sign that the Obama Administration considers that an important area for investment, but we stand corrected that it apparently decided to cut it more than other NASA programs as part of the sequester process.  We are now convinced that all the NASA accounts were cut equally in the sequester calculations.  The variations shown in the Mikulski letter are due to calculating the impact of the sequester plus a full-year CR and NASA’s decision to compare that to its FY2013 request rather than to its current operating levels.  We regret the misunderstanding.

NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) praised the team managing the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) project today for successfully avoiding pitfalls that plagued other programs.

The last of NASA’s Mars Scout missions, MAVEN is scheduled for launch next year to orbit Mars and study its atmosphere.  Bruce Jakosky of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado-Boulder is MAVEN’s principal investigator and David Mitchell of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center is the Project Manager. 

The OIG decided to look at MAVEN to see if the agency is managing it to meet cost, schedule and performance goals after a 2012 OIG report identified shortcomings in other NASA projects.  Today’s findings are refreshingly positive.  

The report praises MAVEN’s project manager for “strong leadership and project management skills” and the project management team overall for closely following NASA acquisition policies and using other effective and innovative management tools.  “Collectively, these efforts controlled Project costs, proactively managed risk, and established adequate reserve levels” that put the project on a good path to meet its November 2013 launch date. 

The report also notes that MAVEN was not subject to funding instability, which can wreak havoc on an otherwise well-planned program: “In fact, MAVEN consistently received funding at or above requested amounts throughout its life cycle, unlike many other NASA projects.”

CLARIFICATION:  This article was modified February 24.  See Editor’s Note below for details.

The long awaited formal announcement of a new Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) at NASA Headquarters was made on February 21.   The move should help put space technology on a more equal footing with science, exploration, and aeronautics organizationally, although looming budget cuts due to the sequester and the likelihood of a full-year Continuing Resolution (CR) may constrain its activities.

On the one hand, the Obama Administration has been a champion for space technology investments, expanding the role of the Office of the Chief Technologist (OCT) and giving it more progammatic responsibility.   Under the new structure, STMD will oversee many of those programs while Chief Technologist Mason Peck leads efforts in technology transfer and commercialization.  OCT will also continue to develop strategic partnerships, manage agency-level competitions and prize activities, and document and communicate the societal impacts of NASA’s technology efforts.  Mike Gazarik will be STMD’S Associate Administrator.  He had been serving as director of the Space Technology Program under Peck. 

On the other hand, space technology would suffer a 20 percent cut in funding compared to the level NASA sought in its FY2013 budget request if the sequester goes into effect and NASA is held to its FY2012 funding level for all of FY2013.   NASA and the rest of the government is currently operating under a 6-month Continuing Resolution (CR) that expires on March 27.  Generally it holds agencies to their FY2012 funding levels and there is a broad expectation that Congress will extend the CR through the rest of the fiscal year (a “full year CR”).

The across-the-board spending cuts known as the sequester would cut 5 percent from each of NASA’s budget accounts, but for space technology the larger impact would come from being held to its FY2012 funding level.    Space technology’s FY2012 appropriation was roughly $574 million, while the FY2013 request was $699 million.

The overall 20 percent reduction is shown in a letter NASA sent to Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee.  The committee held a hearing on February 14 on “Impacts of Sequestration” and also published letters from many agencies detailing how the sequester would affect their portfolios. 

NASA’s letter states that space technology would be reduced by $149.4 million from the FY2013 request of $699 million.   At that level of funding, STMD “cannot maintain its technology portfolio as several projects underway require increased funding in FY 2013 to proceed.  Thus NASA would likely have to cancel one of these projects or be able to offer no new awards for programs that vary in scope from research grants, to public-private partnerships, to in-space demonstrations during FY 2013.”  The letter goes on to list additional reductions or cancellations that might be needed. 

It is not obvious in the letter, however, that the potential reductions are not only due to the sequester, but to the anticipated full year CR.  The sequester calls for a 5 percent reduction, which would be about $29 million from space technology’s FY2012 appropriated level of $575 million.  The larger impact is the difference between that and the $699 million NASA sought for FY2013.

Whether space technology gets 20 percent less than it hoped for in FY2013 thus is dependent not only on whether the sequester goes into effect, but the details of what action Congress takes on FY2013 appropriations for the rest of the year.  Even if Congress does pass a full year CR, it is possible it will make exceptions for some activities so the impact is difficult to gauge at this point.

EDITOR’S NOTE:   The original version of this article, published February 21, 2013, was modified on February 24 based on additional information we received on how to interpret NASA’s letter to Senator Mikulski concerning the effects of the sequester as explained in a companion article we published last night.  Briefly, our original article contained paragraphs stating that, based on the figures in the Mikulski letter, the Obama Administration had singled out space technology for a 20 percent cut, more than other NASA accounts, when applying the sequester, rather than applying it equally to all its budget accounts.  Subsequently, however, we learned that the figures in the Mikulski letter reflect not only the sequester, but the impacts of a full year CR.   We are now convinced that the Administration applied the sequester equally to all its budget accounts, not favoring one versus another.