Russian cosmonaut Yuri Baturin will speak at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars tomorrow (Tuesday, June 1) from 12:00-1:00 on “New Paradigms for International Space Programs: Prospects and Forecasts.” The event will be in the 6th Floor auditorium of the Wilson Center, located at the Ronald Reagan Building, 1300 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Washington, DC. No reservations are required; seating is on a first come first served basis. A photo ID is required for entrance to the building.

In an op-ed for The Washington Times yesterday, Paul Spudis and Bob Zubrin joined forces to oppose President Obama’s new human space flight plan and support President Bush’s Vision for Space Exploration. Spudis is a senior staff scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute and well known advocate for lunar research. Zubrin is an ardent supporter of human exploration of Mars and is President of the Mars Society. President Obama sees no need to return to the Moon “because we’ve been there before” and wants to focus on sending crews to orbit Mars first, with a landing only sometime within his lifetime. Thus it may not be as surprising as it would seem at first blush to see Spudis and Zubrin working together to support the Bush plan despite their past differences.

(This story has been updated to add the undocking and landing times.)

Three of the six members of the International Space Station (ISS) crew will return to Earth today (June 1). Oleg Kotov, T.J. Creamer, and Soichi Noguichi will come home on Soyuz TMA17. Undocking is scheduled for 8:08 pm EDT and landing in Kazakhstan for 11:27 pm EDT.

That will leave three crew aboard the station: Alexander Skvortsov, Tracy Caldwell Dyson, and Mikhail Kornienko. They will be joined by three new colleagues in two weeks: Doug Wheelock, Fyodor Yurchikhin, and Shannon Walker. For more on ISS comings and goings, visit NASA’s ISS website.

UPDATE: Space News has published a story quoting SpaceX official Larry Williams as saying that Mr. Musk’s financial situation is “irrelevant to the company and our future” because although he is the largest shareholder, “he is only one of a number of investors at this point.” The focus of the article is that SpaceX told NASA that it would be eight months instead of five months between the first and second test flights of Falcon 9 that are part of NASA’s COTS subsidy program. The first test launch of Falcon 9, with a Dragon mockup, is currently scheduled for June 4 but does not count as part of COTS, according to the article.

ORIGINAL STORY: Elon Musk, the man behind SpaceX and Tesla Motors, is out of cash according to CNN. The story is about his personal situation and that of Tesla Motors, his electric car company, and does not mention SpaceX. CNN bases its story on court fillings Musk reportedly made in connection with his divorce trial and quotes Musk as having told the court that ‘”About four months ago I ran out of cash” and “I had to obtain emergency loans from personal friends.”

Editor’s note: an earlier version of this story did not specify that it is the first two launches of the Falcon 9 that are part of the NASA COTS program.

If you’re not on vacation next week, you should be! Congress is in recess and apart from the last day of the National Space Society’s International Space Development Conference in Chicago on Monday, we couldn’t find any space policy-related events to list. Enjoy the break! Congress will be back June 7.

SpacePolicyOnline.com is never on vacation of course, so keep checking back for any and all breaking news in the world of space policy.

NASA’s decision to “reassign” Constellation Program Manager Jeff Hanley prompted two key Senators to ask for an investigation by NASA’s Inspector General. Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), chairman and ranking member of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee respectively, sent a letter to NASA’s Inspector General, Paul Martin, asking him to look into the reassignment. Senator George LeMieux (R-FL) made a similar request according to the Orlando Sentinel’s Write Stuff blog.

Some consider the reassignment to be a firing, though Hanley was elevated to the position of Deputy Director of Johnson Space Center for Strategic Capabilities. Hanley’s reassignment was revealed to the public by Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) on Wednesday as NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden was testifying to the House Science and Technology Committee. Saying she had just learned of it, she asked Bolden if it was true. Bolden replied that it was his understanding Hanley was being told that very morning. The Orlando Sentinel reported that after the hearing Bolden said Hanley was reassigned “because he was ‘conflicted’ and had become a lightning rod for controversy.” NASAWatch published an email from Hanley to others in the Constellation program telling them that he had been told his services no longer were required as program manager.

Congress has been relentlessly questioning NASA about whether the agency is complying with the FY2010 Consolidated Appropriations Act that prohibits NASA from spending any funds to terminate Constellation or begin a replacement program. A recent GAO ruling found that NASA has not violated the law but cautioned the agency to be “mindful” of the language. Nonetheless, actions like this cannot help but fuel criticism that NASA is trying to kill Constellation without direction from Congress to do so. The timing of Hanley’s reassignment — when the NASA Administrator was testifying to Congress — adds to the perception that the agency is in a confrontational mood with regard to Capitol Hill critics.

Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the Moon and commander of the Apollo 11 mission that took him there, said he found “mystifying” comments made by President Obama on April 15 that there is no need to go back to the Moon because “we’ve already been there.” During the second part of Wednesday’s House Science and Technology Committee hearing on the President’s plan for NASA’s human spaceflight program, Mr. Armstrong was accompanied by Captain Eugene Cernan, the last man to walk on the Moon, and Mr. A. Thomas Young, Lockheed Martin (Ret.). All three had previously testified against the Obama plan, and they did so again.

In his statement, Mr. Armstrong wondered what effect a similar attitude would have had on revisiting places like the New World or west of the Mississippi, stressing that there is “much to be learned on the Moon.” It offers “many of the challenges” in flying beyond low Earth orbit, but is close enough for a fast trip back to Earth in case of an emergency, being only three days away. Returning to the Moon is part of the three priorities Armstrong believes should guide NASA’s human spaceflight plans:

• Maintaining American leadership in space
• Guaranteeing access to space, and
• Pursuing exploration

Captain Cernan criticized the FY2011 budget request for not allocating “one penny…to support [human] space exploration,” and focusing instead on technology development. He called it “a blueprint for a mission to ‘nowhere.'” He is skeptical that the technology investments will result in any “game-changing,” arguing that the investment made in the Ares I/Orion system should continue and the shuttle should keep flying until that system is available. He agrees that the long term goal of human spaceflight should be Mars and that a date for achieving that goal is not important as long as the program moves in that direction, but apparently disagrees on the intermediate steps. He argues that as Ares I/Orion evolves, “that’s when we decide the exploration plan to follow.” Interestingly, his comments sounded similar to the original Obama plan that did not include timelines or destinations.

Mr. Young restated his opposition to the commercial crew option because he does not believe industry can conduct such a program by itself. As a veteran of both government and industry jobs, he is adamant that the two must work together, with government bringing its continuity of experience and industry providing the implementation capability. He described the success of the recent test of the Orion launch abort system as “the best of NASA” and “the best of industry” working together. He believes that industry alone, lacking NASA’s continuity of expertise, will probably fail in its attempt to develop commercial crew vehicles. The panel agreed that following the commercial crew route would result in an “atrophying” of the aerospace workforce and lead to the United States abdicating both its only crew access to space and, consequently, its leadership in this field with negative national security implications.

To a direct question over whether they believed the President’s plan to be executable, Mr. Young said “no,” Captain Cernan said “absolutely not,” and Mr. Armstrong said it would be “highly unlikely.”

When asked about his opinion of the Augustine Committee Report, Mr. Armstrong said he believed it to be “very good,” but he thought the conclusion that Constellation was “unexecutable” was based on the FY2010 budget, which he said was substantially smaller than either the FY2009 or FY2011 budgets. He suggested that if “the ground rules had been different, their findings would have been different,” adding that he believed this was a “built-in barrier to making … an equitable judgment.”

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), the only vocal advocate of President Obama’s plan on the committee, expressed his admiration for the panel of witnesses, but asked committee chairman Bart Gordon (D-TN) if there could be another hearing at which witnesses in favor of the plan would have an opportunity to present their views. Rep. Gordon reminded Rep. Rohrabacher that NASA Administrator Bolden had just testified to the committee for more than two hours, but also said that this would not be the last hearing before the committee puts forward a NASA authorization bill.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) wants the President’s Science and Technology Adviser to establish and implement an interagency strategy to ensure avialability of environmental satellite observations, including space weather, for the long term.

In a report released today, Environmental Satellites: Strategy Needed to Sustain Critical Climate and Space Weather Measurements, GAO called on the White House to expand and complete a report that was drafted last summer by an interagency group led by the White House on near-term earth observation opportunities. The report has not been approved by key Executive Branch entities and there is no timeline for doing so, according to GAO. In addition, that report falls short in many ways, including a lack of long-term planning.

Similarly, GAO found that an interagency space weather group had drafted two reports that were submitted to the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP, headed by the President’s Science Adviser) in 2009, but there is no schedule for those to be completed either.

In short, GAO made the following conclusions:

• Without a strategy for continuing environmental measurements over the coming decades and a means for implementing it, agencies will continue to independently pursue their immediate priorities on an ad hoc basis, the economic benefits of a coordinated approach to investments in earth observation may be lost, and our nation’s ability to understand climate change may be limited.
• Until OSTP approves and releases the [space weather] reports, it will not be clear whether the reports provide a strategy to ensure the long-term provision of space weather data-or whether the current efforts are simply attempts to ensure short-term data continuity. Without a comprehensive long term strategy for the provision of space weather data, agencies may make ad hoc decisions to ensure continuity in the near term and risk making inefficient investment decisions.

The report was requested by two subcommittees of the House Science and Technology Committee — Energy and Environment, and Investigations and Oversight — because of the loss of capabilities that were to be aboard the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS). In a press release, the committee said it would continue to press for “the development of an appropriate strategy.”

Today the House passed the reauthorization of the America COMPETES Act, H.R. 5116. Two previous attempts failed as we reported earlier. Though the bill does not directly affect NASA, the trouble it encountered in winning approval may presage what the remainder of the 111th Congress holds in store for science and technology issues in this hyper-political year.

The final vote was 262-150. According to Congress Daily (subscription required), success was due to a Democratic strategy that allowed members to vote on nine separate sections of the bill before the final vote. It reported that —

“Those measures included a vote on the provision to prohibit funds going to federal workers disciplined for viewing pornography and another provision to bar funds in the bill from going to colleges or universities that are prevented from receiving federal grants and contracts because they deny or restrict ROTC or other military recruiting on campus. Both of those sections passed.”

Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL) wrote a letter to President Obama yesterday arguing again in favor of launching the “launch on need” mission even if it isn’t needed to rescue the final space shuttle crew. Sen. Nelson and others have been pressing the case in favor of the launch for some time.

Under the current schedule, only two more shuttle launches remain: STS-133 in September and STS-134 in November, though the launch dates remain a bit iffy. NASA plans to have a shuttle on standby in case anything goes wrong with the final shuttle mission and the crew needs to be rescued. Called the “launch on need” (LON) mission, or STS-135, the idea is that if everything goes well, that shuttle would not be launched.

The question then is why not launch it anyway? The biggest issue, of course, is money. It reportedly costs $200 million a month to keep the shuttle program going. NASA already has to absorb the costs of President Obama’s decisions to build a crew rescue version of the Orion spacecraft ($5-7 billion over 5 years) and spend $40 million to help displaced space workers in Florida. NASA Administrator Bolden made it clear at yesterday’s House hearing that the agency’s budget would not be increased to accommodate those activities, so the money must come from other NASA programs.

More months of shuttle funding could further deplete those other NASA programs unless Congress appropriates additional sums. Sen. Nelson’s letter said that he plans to include language in an authorization bill to add this flight, but NASA would only get funding if it is included in an appropriations bill. (Not sure of the difference between an authorization and an appropriation? See our What’s a Markup? fact sheet.)

Another issue is what would happen if something went awry with STS-135. There would be no rescue mission for it. The answer is to launch that mission with a mininum crew complement of four. If the shuttle could not safely return to Earth, those four astronauts could remain on the International Space Station (ISS) until sufficient Russian Soyuz spacecraft could be launched to bring them home. It is not a risk-free strategy since there would be a period of time when there were too many crew members to evacuate in an emergency. Two Soyuz are typically docked at the ISS as lifeboats, each of which can carry three people and there might be 10 people aboard. Decisions would have to be made as to whether that is an acceptable risk.

Sen. Nelson’s letter identifies the reasons he finds the idea so important, revolving around the additional logistical support it would provide for the ISS and retaining jobs a bit longer. Other shuttle supporters hope that the shuttle will continue flying even past this potential final mission. Cost pressures on the federal budget make that unlikely, however.