The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) mission will be delayed for several months following the conclusion of yesterday’s Flight Readiness Review (FRR). 

A NASA statement on NuStar’s website explains that the FRR concluded that more time is needed to ensure that a new flight computer for the Pegasus launch vehicle will issue commands as intended.  Consequently, the launch will slip past the end of March and thus must wait until the Kwajalein range is available again. The NASA statement said the next opportunity is “anticipated to be within the next couple of months.”

Orbital Science Corp’s Pegasus rocket is dropped from an aircraft that can take off from a number of locations. The Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands is the site of a U.S. missile testing range and was chosen because NuSTAR is headed for an equatorial orbit.

A postponment of the launch was announced by NASA earlier this week,  but its extent was uncertain until after the FRR was completed.  NuSTAR is an x-ray telescope.  Fiona Harrison of CalTech is the principal investigator.

The Commerce-Justice-Science subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee will hear from NASA and NOAA about their FY 2013 budget requests next week.

The NOAA hearing will be on March 20 at 2:30 pm ET in H-309 Capitol.   It was postponed from March 13 because NOAA’s detailed budget justification documents were not ready. NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco is the witness.

NASA’s hearing is on March 21 at 9:00 am in 2359 Rayburn, with NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden as the witness.

The committee earlier had announced an “outside witnesses” hearing for March 22 beginning at 9:00 am in H-309 Capitol. 

Editorial Commentary:   In a news story today, the New York Times bemoans the cut to robotic Mars exploration plans, adding that “There are still a few tidbits left.”   It identifies the “tidbits” as the Mars Curiosity rover currently enroute to Mars and the MAVEN mission scheduled for launch next year.

Curiosity hopefully will make a successful landing on Mars in August, though the novel “sky crane” landing system will have everyone biting their nails during descent.  Twice as long and five times as heavy as the Spirit and Opportunity rovers already on Mars, Curiosity is the size of a mini Cooper and designed to roll over obstacles up to two feet high. Its scientific equipment is 10 times more massive than the earlier rovers. Not to mention — and the New York Times does not — that its life cycle cost is $2.5 billion, a 56 percent overrun according to NASA’s Inspector General.  That’s quite a tidbit.

The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) mission is indeed a less ambitious mission.  An orbiter rather than a lander, it will try to determine what caused “the Martian atmosphere — and water — to be lost to space.”   GAO reports that MAVEN will cost $671 million.  That may be a tidbit in comparison to Curiosity, but certainly not to the average American taxpayer.

Across the land, everyone wants to cut the deficit — as long as it’s not THEIR program that suffers as a result.   It is certainly fair for the Mars community to fight for their program; that’s how the game is played.  One would hope, however, that the news media would refrain from picking favorites except on their editorial pages.   For that matter, what program(s) would the New York Times prefer to have cut instead, or does it believe that NASA should be exempt from cuts?  That is a weighty question on which the esteemed newspaper probably should comment. 

In the meantime, with all due respect, calling a $2.5 billion Mars rover a “tidbit” is laughable. 

Wednesday’s Senate hearing on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was intended to focus on its FY2013 budget request, but Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) used it to voice his opposition to President Obama’s recent proposal to move NOAA to the Department of the Interior.

During his opening remarks, Rockefeller, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation, said that he is “appalled” by the Obama Administration’s proposal to move NOAA from the Department of Commerce into the Department of the Interior.  He explained that his criticism had little to do with jurisdictional concerns, but stemmed from the fact that the proposal “simply does not make any sense.” “I can’t live with the thought of NOAA moved to the Department of Interior,” he emphasized.

The reorganization – part of a larger proposal announced by the White House in January to eliminate the Department of Commerce and create a new department focused on U.S. business and trade that would consolidate parts of Commerce with other federal agencies – was not mentioned again during the hearing.

The Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries, and the Coast Guard hearing was convened to review the FY2013 budget requests for the Coast Guard and NOAA, and most of the Senators’ attention was focused on proposed cuts to the Coast Guard budget and on non-space-related NOAA programs.

During a brief discussion about satellites, several Senators expressed concern that increases to NOAA’s satellite programs – although critical – would have undue impact on smaller programs. Subcommittee Chairman Senator Mark Begich (D-AK) said, for example, that the launch and start of operations of the Suomi NPP satellite “could not come at a better time with a record number [of] billion dollar weather disasters last year.”  Suomi NPP was built and launched by NASA, but eventually will become part of NOAA’s operational polar-orbit weather satellite constellation.  

Nevertheless, with funding for satellites taking up more than 40 percent of the total NOAA budget, Begich said that he remains concerned about the growth in NOAA satellite requirements impacting key ocean science missions. As satellites continue to “crowd out other elements” in the budget, Begich asked NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco what long-term strategy NOAA is taking to control their costs. In her response, she used the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) as an example and reiterated the agency’s commitment to adhere to the program’s $12.9 billion life-cycle cost cap: “that is a reflection of our intent to…put a lid on the total amount” of the program, she said.

Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD), chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology subcommittee that oversees the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA),  expressed “extreme disappointment” that NOAA’s FY2013 budget request puts a priority on satellites and climate research.

At  Tuesday’s hearing of his Energy and Environment Subcommittee, he also chastised NOAA for failing to deliver the detailed budget justification documents that help explain the rationale behind such decisions in a timely manner.  “We’re simply unable to provide a complete assessment of the request,” he asserted, adding that a House Appropriations subcommittee had to cancel its hearing on NOAA last week for that reason.

The agency’s failure to provide the documents fuels a perception on Capitol Hill that “the Administration is not being a good steward of taxpayer money,” he continued.  Apologizing for the delay, NOAA Administrator Dr. Jane Lubchenco explained that it was the result of lateness in finalizing the FY2012 spending plan, which affected the baseline of many programs. She promised to deliver the documents to the committee by March 14.

Harris chided the overall increase for NOAA, which would receive $5.1 billion under the President’s request, a 3.1 percent increase from FY2012, as inconsistent with budget reality. He further criticized the Administration for prioritizing its “political environmental agenda” ahead of core science needs, with climate research being a “big winner,” in addition to satellites, which account for over 40% of the total request. This emphasis, according to Harris, suggests that the Administration has prioritized understanding climate conditions “decades from now” over predicting weather conditions tomorrow, a misplaced proposal that “should be rejected by Congress.”

To correct the assumption that climate research would be useful only decades from now, Lubchenco explained in her testimony that understanding how the climate system works directly connects with helping people prepare for “what will happen in the months ahead, years ahead and decades ahead; all of those.”

Several Members of the subcommittee expressed concern over cuts to NOAA’s National Weather Service (NWS), which issues critical weather warnings and forecasts. Ranking Member Brad Miller (D-NC) worried that “we are eating our seed corn” through cuts that may sacrifice services the public relies upon, such as weather forecasting.

Lubchenco explained that NOAA’s Weather-Ready Nation initiative – which covers data collection, modeling and forecasting, as well as the ability of communities to act in response to these messages – demonstrates that continuing and improving these capabilities remains critical to the agency’s mission. Furthermore, she said that the increase in satellite funding and the decrease in NWS, mostly in administrative efficiencies, is not a contradiction. The requested increase for satellites is due precisely to their importance because they provide 90 percent of the data that feeds into numerical models used by the NWS, she explained.

She emphasized the need to fully fund the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) not just this year but on a sustained basis to minimize the duration of the expected gap between operations of the recently launched Suomi NPP satellite and the launch of JPSS-1 in 2017. The Administration’s “aggressive” calls for sustained funding of the program stem from the fact that there are no “viable alternative options” to obtain equivalent data during the projected gap. “These satellites are too important to not be on the path to success,” she emphasized.

NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden faced off against two congressional committees today, one in the Senate and one in the House.  A common theme was the Obama Administration’s FY2013 budget request for the future of the human spaceflight program and what many see as a competition between commercial crew services to the International Space Station (ISS) and a NASA-developed system to take astronauts further into the solar system.

Both the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee and the House Science, Space and Technology Committee hearings raised questions about other priorities in the NASA budget request — especially funding for robotic Mars exploration — but the focus was firmly on commercial crew versus the Space Launch System (SLS) and Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) space capsule (called Orion) Congress directed NASA to build in the 2010 NASA authorization act.

Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) accused the Obama Administration of blatantly taking money from SLS/Orion for the commercial crew program.  In an unusually testy public exchange, Bolden insisted to Senator Hutchison that no one in the room was more passionate about SLS/Orion than himself.  His confidence that SLS/Orion is on the right track may account for his seeming lack of passion for it, he suggested.

NASA’s decision to use Space Act Agreements (SAAs) instead of traditional procurement methods under the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FARs) also was debated.   Bolden assured both committees that it had sufficient insight under the SAAs to know if companies planning to compete for commercial crew opportunities would meet NASA’s requirements.

The Administration’s decision to cut funding for NASA’s planetary science program, especially the decision to not participate in what was planned as NASA-European Space Agency joint missions to Mars in 2016 and 2018 — was also mentioned.   While clearly a concern of these two authorization committees, the future of the human spaceflight program obviously was center stage.