The House Foreign Affairs Committee will kick off the second session of the 111th Congress by holding a field hearing on “Impact of Export Controls on National Security, Science and Technological Leadership.” One of the witnesses will be John Hennessy, President of Stanford University, and the hearing will be held at Stanford on January 15, 2010 at 11:00 am PST (2:00 pm EST).

Hennessy was co-chair, together with former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, of the National Research Council’s (NRC’s) study on export controls released last year. The study — Beyond “Fortress America”: National Security Controls on Science and Technology in a Globalized World — concluded that current export controls “undermine our national security and our national economic well-being.” The House Science and Technology Committee held a hearing on the topic last year at which Gen. Scowcroft testified.

Another witness at the House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing will be William Potter, Director of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Other witnesses may be announced later.

Space and defense experts have contended for the past decade that current implementation of U.S. export controls negatively impacts U.S. national security and industrial competitiveness. Called ITAR, for International Traffic in Arms Regulations, some joke that it is the biggest four letter word in the space business. Congress mandated strong scrutiny of space-related exports in the wake of allegations that U.S. satellite manufacturers were aiding China in developing missile technology by helping them analyze Chinese launch failures of U.S. built satellites. A congressional investigation resulted in the “Cox committee report” and subsequent legislation returning commercial communications satellites to the stricter oversight of the State Department’s “munitions list” instead of the Department of Commerce’s dual-use list in 1999. A 2006 Congressional Research Service report summarizes the Cox committee and other congressional activity up to that time (beginning on page 10).

A number of reports by expert groups have been written over the past decade, each raising the alarm about the impact of ITAR on the ability of U.S. companies to compete with “ITAR-free” products from other countries and other negative impacts. Among them, the NRC’s Space Studies Board issued a workshop report on the impact of ITAR on space science in 2008, and another in 2009 on international cooperation and competition in space that addressed ITAR. On the other side of the issue are those committed to ensuring that U.S. technology does not get into the wrong hands regardless of the impact on corporate profits. The issue is quite polarized.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) has awarded three 5-year contracts for commercial satellite synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery, data products, and direct downlink services. Each is an IDIQ (“indefinite delivery indefinite quantity) contract for a miminum of $10,000 and maximum of $85,000,000. The three winners are MDA Geospatial Servies, EADS North America, and Lockheed Martin Space Systems. The contracts were awarded yesterday, just a tad bit late for Christmas.

President Obama yesterday signed into law the Commmercial Space Launch Liability Indemnification extension. That was the last space-related law waiting for signature from the first session of the 111th Congress. Check out SpacePolicyOnline.com’s updated fact sheet on major space-related legislation of the 111th Congress, first session.

The Senate passed legislation on Wednesday extending government indemnification of third party liability for commercial space launches for three more years. The bill passed by unanimous consent without debate. As passed by the Senate, H.R. 3819 is identical to the version earlier passed by the House, so no further action by Congress is required; the President is expected to sign it.

As SpacePolicyOnline.com reported earlier, the government indemnifies commercial launch services companies against liability for third party claims between $500 million and $2 billion. That means the government will pay those sums to settle claims by third parties if a commercial launch vehicle were to crash into a populated area, for example. The commercial company is responsible for purchasing insurance for amounts up to $500 million and over $2 billion if required by the FAA’s regulations. The current version of the legislation expires on December 31. This bill extends the provision through December 31, 2012.

The U.S. space launch propulsion industrial base faces significant challenges according to a report submitted to Congress on Tuesday by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). The report was required by the 2008 NASA Authorization Act.

“Despite the current adequacy of the space launch propulsion industrial base to meet identified space launch needs in the near and medium term, there are a number of significant challenges that pose concerns for the long-term health of this industrial base. Specifically, the current low level of demand for launch services combined with significant production overcapacity (and the fact that reliance on foreign suppliers has further limited dependence on the U.S. industrial base) creates challenges regarding:

Supplier retention and quality levels.
Workforce retention, as well as insufficient practice and learning opportunities necessary to sustain workforce skills.

“Significant challenges also exist on the development side. In particular, known long-term U.S. space launch requirements likely are not sufficient to justify significant U.S. private sector investment in developing new propulsion capabilities and technologies. At the same time, only limited funds are currently being invested by the U.S. Government for U.S. space launch propulsion-related R&D activities.

“Taken together, these factors raise important issues regarding:

The nation’s ability to identify potential breakthrough cost-savings or performance opportunities in launch vehicle propulsion.
The industry’s ability to attract the new talent required to create capabilities for future generations of U.S. space launch vehicles.

“Both sets of challenges are potentially significant and appear to warrant further analysis and review on the part of involved U.S. Government agencies and the U.S. private sector as the nation considers how best to sustain and ultimately advance this important technology area that is vital for maintaining access to space.”

The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee approved the Commercial Space Launch Indemnification Extension Act (H.R. 3819) today. Committee chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) said that “Normally I do not support indemnifying the private sector for liability, but I recognize that our commercial space industry needs this federal protection in order to compete with others around the globe.”

The Senate still must vote on the legislation. If no changes are made to the version passed by the House, the bill could clear Congress and be signed into law by December 31 when the current law expires.

The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee will mark up legislation to extend third party liability indemnification for commercial launch services companies on Thursday. The agenda for the markup session is posted on the committee’s website.

Included is H.R. 3819, which passed the House in October. Under legislation originally passed in 1988 and subsequently renewed several times, the government indemnifies commercial launch services companies against liability for third party claims between $500 million and $2 billion. That means the government will pay those sums to settle claims by third parties (i.e. anyone other than the government or the commercial company involved) if a commercial launch vehicle were to crash into a populated area, for example. The commercial company is responsible for purchasing insurance for amounts up to $500 million and over $2 billion if required by the FAA’s regulations. The current indemnification provision expires on December 31.

Update

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting and not entirely flattering take on the SpaceShipTwo story.

Original Story

Virgin Galactic rolled out its SpaceShipTwo last night. Heralding it as the “first commercial spaceline,” Sir Richard Branson and Burt Rutan were joined by the governors of New Mexico and California at a press conference where Branson’s daughter named it VSS Enterprise. Suborbital flights from Virgin Galactic’s spaceport in New Mexico could start as early as 2011 at a price of $200,000 per ticket.

The Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) sent a letter to President Obama on Wednesday spelling out changes its members want to the export control system. The President ordered a review of expert controls in August.

The AIA letter lists five areas that are “ripe for early action” including —

• establishing criteria to identify the most sensitive technologies in need of the most rigorous controls
• facilitating timely flow of technologies between the United States and its closest allies and partners
• adopting procedures so that DOD reviews “properly balance both policy and technical considerations, and are completed in a timely and consistent manner”
• updating treatment of next-generation technologies under U.S. and multilateral export regimes, and
• reviewing export control compliance requirements, and resource requirements

See AIA’s website for more information.

The House passed H.R. 3570, the Satellite Home Viewer Reauthorization Act of 2009, yesterday. (For clickable links to that and other legislation mentioned in this article, see SpacePolicyOnline.com’s Fact Sheet on Major Space-Related Legislation in the 111th Congress.)

As Representative John Conyers (D-MI) stated during floor debate on December 2, “we must have this reauthorized without delay to avoid the immediate loss of service to tens of thousands of satellite consumers.”

As passed, the bill combines H.R. 3570 as reported from the House Judiciary Committee (H. Rept. 111-319) and H.R. 2994 as reported from the House Energy and Commerce Committee (H. Rept. 111-349). Action now moves to the Senate, where S. 1670 was reported (S. Rept. 111-98) from the Senate Judiciary Committee on November 10 and S. 2764 was ordered reported from the Senate Commerce committee on November 19.

Every 5 years, Congress needs to renew (or not) legislation that regulates the reception of television programming via satellite. It is a mixture of copyright law and telecommunications law and the issues involved are very complex, all the more so this time because the original laws were written for analog signals and television is now broadcast digitally for the most part.

Examples of the issues that surround this quincennial debate include:

• rural lawmakers want to ensure that satellite television is as available to their constituents as it is to people in more populated areas, while satellite TV service providers argue that it is prohibitively expensive to build satellites with sufficient capacity to provide the signals in remote areas with few potential customers;
• local network broadcast television affiliates want to protect their advertising base by ensuring that their local signals – with local advertisements – are the ones being viewed by satellite TV subscribers in their broadcast area and not signals from affiliates in other parts of the country (“distant network signals”) unless it can be proved that the subscriber cannot get the local signal over-the-air; and
• copyright owners object to the compulsory copyright license that Congress grants to satellite television providers arguing that they should have to negotiate copyright licenses as do most other businesses (though Congress also gives cable television companies a compulsory copyright license).

For more on these issues and what this year’s legislation would do, see CRS Report R40624, Reauthorizing the Satellite Home Viewing Provisions in the Communications Act and the Copyright Act: Issues for Congress, by Charles B. Goldfarb, available through the OpenCRS project.