The following space policy events may be of interest in the week ahead.  The House and Senate are in session.

During the Week

President Obama will deliver his State of the Union address on Tuesday night.  There are no rumors that the space program will figure in his speech, but anything is possible.  Tuesday is, after all, the 28th anniversary of the space shuttle Challenger tragedy.

In fact, this is the week that commemorates the loss of the Apollo 1 crew on January 27, 1967; the Challenger crew on January 28, 1986; and the space shuttle Columbia crew on February 1, 2003.  NASA and the Air Force will hold a ceremony tomorrow (Monday) at Launch Complex 34 to remember the Apollo 1 crew and NASA will hold its annual Day of Remembrance for all three crews on Friday according to Florida Today (we could find no mention of these events on NASA HQ or Kennedy Space Center websites, so don’t have any other details).

Apart from that, perhaps the most notable event coming up this week is Tuesday’s hearing before two subcommittees of the  House Armed Services Committee on China’s counterspace program.  Bob Butterworth from Aries Analytics, Michael Krepon from the Stimson Center, and Ashley Tellis from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace are the witnesses — 3:30 pm ET, 2118 Rayburn (and via webcast at the committee’s website).

Here’s the list of everything we know about as of Sunday afternoon.

Monday, January 27

• Space Transportation Association luncheon with Bill Wrobel, Dale Nash and Carl Walz, 2325 Rayburn, 11:30 am – 1:30 pm ET (RSVPs were required by Friday)
• NASA media teleconference on Lunar CATALYST initiative, virtual, 12:30 pm ET
• NASA-JAXA pre-launch press conference on Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Core Observatory mission, Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, 1:00 pm ET

Tuesday, January 28

• HASC hearing on China’s Counterspace Program, 2118 Rayburn, 3:30 pm ET
• State of the Union Address, U.S. Capitol, 9:00 pm ET

Tuesday-Wednesday, January 28-29

• 6th Conference on European Union Space Policy, Brussels, Belgium

Thursday, January 29

• Senate HELP Committee Nominations Markup, including France Cordova to be Director of the National Science Foundation, 430 Dirksen, 10:00 am ET

President Obama will submit his FY2015 budget request to Congress on March 4 — a month late — according to news reports.  

By law, the President is supposed to submit each year’s budget request on the first Monday of February.  Delays in reaching agreement on budget bills in recent years have meant consequent delays in submitting requests for the next year and FY2015 will be no exception.

The Hill and Politico are citing White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) spokesman Steve Posner as saying today that March 4 is the date for the FY2015 budget submission to Congress.  Last year, the budget was not sent to Capitol Hill until April 10, so, comparatively speaking, this is an improvement.

The Bipartisan Budget Act agreed to in December set spending caps for both FY2014 and FY2015, which may make the FY2015 appropriations process easier than it has been in recent years.   The cap for FY2015 is $1.014 trillion for discretionary (defense and non-defense) spending, compared to $1.012 trillion for FY2014. 

The following space policy events may be of interest in the week ahead.  The House and Senate are in recess this week.

During the Week

This week is a welcome break from the hustle and bustle that greeted the New Year. 

After an exceptionally busy start to the second session of the 113th Congress, the House and Senate are in recess (Monday is a federal holiday — Martin Luther King day), having passed the appropriations bill that funds the government for rest of the fiscal year.  The frenetic pace in Congress was matched by major American Astronomical Society (AAS) and American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) conferences just outside Washington at National Harbor, MD during the past two weeks, plus the State Department-led International Space Exploration Forum and the International Academy of Astronautics’ (IAA’s) Space Exploration Conference and Heads of Agencies meetings.   Not to mention several significant launches.   It’s been quite a busy couple of weeks!

This week signals a return to a more normal pace.  Here are the meetings we know about as of Sunday afternoon.

Wednesday, January 22

• NASA Advisory Council (NAC) Planetary Science Subcommittee, NASA HQ, Washington, DC, 8:30 am – 5:30 pm ET
• NASA Media Teleconference on “Big Year Ahead for NASA Earth Science,” telecom (listen at www.nasa.gov/newsaudio), 12:30 pm ET

Wednesday-Thursday, January 22-23

•  NASA Applied Sciences Advisory Committee,NASA HQ, Washington, DC

Thursday, January 23

• Media Briefing on Celebration of 10 Years of Rovers on Mars, Jet Propulsion Lab, Pasadena, CA, 11:00 am PT (2:00 pm ET) (watch on NASA TV or Ustream)
• NASA Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, Johnson Space Center, Houston, TX, 1:00-2:00 pm CT (2:00-3:00 pm ET)

Exceeding expectations, the Senate joined the House in passing the FY2014 Omnibus Appropriations bill today.  The next stop is the White House and the President is expected to sign it.  In addition to funding the government for the rest of FY2014, it extends launch liability indemnification for three more years.

The House and Senate earlier passed a three-day extension to the Continuing Resolution (CR) to keep the government operating through Saturday with the expectation that it would take that long for the Senate to pass the Omnibus.  The House passed the Omnibus yesterday (359-67) and sent it to the Senate where action proceeded more quickly than expected.  It passed with a vote of 72-26.

The bill (H.R. 3547 as amended) also extends the FAA’s authority to indemnify commercial launch services companies from certain amounts of liability from third party claims in the event of a launch accident.  In fact, H.R. 3547 originally was the bill that passed the House to extend indemnification for one year.   The Senate amended that bill to extend indemnification for three years instead and sent it back to the House.  There, it was used as the legislative vehicle (a term used to describe a bill originally intended for one purpose, but amended to address different and/or additional issues) for the Omnibus.   In this case, extending indemnification was incorporated into the bill, adopting the Senate position of a 3-year extension — through December 31, 2016.

The bill is commonly called “the Omnibus,” but officially its title is the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2014.  It provides a total of $1.012 trillion for discretionary (defense and non-defense) spending in FY2014.

NASA fared pretty well all things considered, receiving $17.65 billion compared to its $17.72 billion request, although the devil is in the details and some programs did better than others.  Congress did not approve the Obama Administration’s proposed reorganization of government STEM education programs, which would have had a significant impact on NASA’s education and public outreach activities, and said NASA had more work to do before Congress would agree to the Asteroid Redirect Mission.

Most satellite programs at NOAA also fared well, except for Jason-3 and Polar Free Flyer.

The second session of the 113th Congress began in earnest this past week, with budget issues still at the top of the agenda.  Even so, the Senate had time to pass the bill renaming NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center (DFRC) after Neil Armstrong, an effort in the works since soon after he died in 2012.

That bill, H.R. 667, passed the House almost a year ago.  That actually was the second time the House approved the measure, which is sponsored by Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) who represents the district that includes DFRC and is the House Majority Whip.  The bill originally passed the House on December 31, 2012 in the final days of the 112th Congress, but the clock ran out without Senate action.  Bills that are not passed by the end of a Congress die, so it had to be reintroduced in the current Congress.   The House passed it again on February 25, 2013.   Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) introduced a companion bill in the Senate (S. 1636) in October, but on Wednesday (January 8, 2014), the Senate simply agreed to the House bill.  It now goes to the White House for signature.    It renames DFRC as the Neil A. Armstrong Flight Research Center.   While he is best known as the first man to walk on the Moon, Armstrong spent the early part of his career as a test pilot there.   The bill renames the Western Aeronautical Test Range after Dryden.   Hugh L. Dryden was director of NASA’s predecessor agency, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), and NASA’s first deputy administrator.

On matters of national interest, Congress is working hard to finalize FY2014 appropriations.   The Bipartisan Budget Act signed into law on December 26 sets limits on how much the government may spend in FY2014 and FY2015, but does not actually give money to anyone.   That is the province of the House and Senate  appropriations committees.  They are now finalizing the 12 regular appropriations bills for FY2014.   Numerous news sources report that negotiations on at least half of those are completed, including Defense and the Commerce-Justice-Science bill that funds NASA and NOAA.   Details are not being released while negotiations continue on the rest.   All 12 bills are expected to packaged together into a single “Omnibus Appropriations” bill for consideration by the House and Senate.

The existing Continuing Resolution (CR) that funds the government expires on Wednesday, January 15, and although appropriators reportedly are very close to agreement on everything, they are not there yet and a very short-term CR is likely to be passed as a bridge early in the coming week.  The expectation is that it will be a three-day CR, keeping the government operating through Saturday, January 18, by which time the House and Senate presumably will pass the Omnibus. 

There is little talk this time of a government shutdown.   The 16-day shutdown at the beginning of the fiscal year (October 1-16) seems to have convinced many Republicans that it is not in their best interest to do that again this time, particularly in an election year.  Still, there are many controversial issues and it may be that some are pushed off into the FY2015 budget cycle for resolution.   Strictly speaking the White House should send its FY2015 budget request to Congress on the first Monday in February, but rumors are that it will be delayed until late February or early March because the budget agreement, which affects FY2015 as well as FY2014, was not reached until late in December.

Many pundits label last year as the “do nothing Congress.”   At the very end, the House and Senate did at least reach agreement on a two-year budget resolution and the FY2014 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), but a lot did not get done.  Here is a quick synopsis of the civil, commercial and national security space issues facing Congress in the second session of the 113th Congress as it returns to work this week.  The Senate meets tomorrow (Monday), and the House on Tuesday.

Third Party Liability for Commercial Launch Services.  Perhaps the first space-related issue they will tackle is extending third party liability indemnification for commercial launch services providers.  The House and Senate committees with jurisdiction — the House Science, Space and Technology (SS&T) Committee and the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee — agree that the FAA’s authority to indemnify commercial launch services companies for certain amounts of liability for third party claims in case of a launch failure should be extended again.  They disagree on the length of time for the extension.  Democrats on the House SS&T Committee want to limit the extension to one year so additional hearings can be held on the need for indemnification.   The Senate committee and House SS&T Republicans want three years.  Industry would prefer a longer extension, preferably making the authority permanent.

The House passed a one year extension (H.R. 3547) on December 2.  The Senate passed the House bill on December 12, but with an amendment extending it for three years.  That meant the bill had to go back to the House.  By then, however, the House had completed its legislative business for the year and the clock ran out.  The indemnification authority expired on December 31.  This is an important matter for U.S. launch services providers, however, and it would not be surprising to see an extension passed early this year as a stand-alone bill or as part of the anticipated Omnibus Appropriations Act.

FY2014 Appropriations.  Speaking of an Omnibus Appropriations Act, the mood in Washington is relatively upbeat that a bill to fund the government for the rest of FY2014 can pass before the existing Continuing Resolution (CR) expires on January 15.   The Bipartisan Budget Act (H. J. Res. 59) that cleared Congress in December set the limits of how much money Congress can appropriate for FY2014, but the actual task of appropriating those funds is the province of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees.  They have been working diligently over the holidays crafting the 12 regular appropriations bills within the limits set by the budget act. 

Three of those 12 bills are of particular interest from a space policy standpoint: Defense (H.R.. 2387/S. 1429); Commerce-Justice-Science, which includes NASA and NOAA (H.R. 2787/S. 1329); and Transportation-HUD, which includes the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation (H.R. 2610/S. 1243).  The expectation is that all 12 bills will be bundled together into a single Omnibus Appropriations bill for consideration by the House and Senate.

The total amount for defense and non-defense discretionary spending in FY2014 was set at $1.012 trillion, a figure half way between what the House and Senate each had earlier approved. That does not necessarily mean that the amount for any particular agency like DOD, NASA or NOAA will be half way between what the House and Senate Appropriations Committee separately approved, however.  (For NASA, the House Appropriations Committee approved $16.6 billion; the Senate Appropriations Committee approved $18.0 billion.) Also, the budget act did not replace the sequester, but did provide $63 billion in relief from the effects of the sequester split equally between defense and non-defense spending over two years.  All in all, the most dire predictions may be avoided and the budget outlook is brighter for federal departments and agencies than it was just a few weeks ago, but that hardly means a return to business-as-usual.  Budgets will continue to be constrained across the board and Tea Party Republicans appear determined to continue fighting for deeper cuts.

NASA Authorization.  DOD may have gotten its authorization bill (H.R. 3304) at the eleventh hour, but not NASA.   NASA’s most recent authorization act became law in 2010 and covered the years FY2011-2013.   The policy provisions remain law indefinitely, but the funding authorizations have expired.  The House SS&T committee and the Senate Commerce committee each worked on separate versions of a new NASA authorization bill last year, but they are quite different from each other and neither was actually reported from committee.  Each committee marked up its bill and they were “ordered reported,” but they still have not actually been reported.  (Typically, though not always, a bill is reported from committee before going to the floor of the House or Senate for consideration.)

The two major differences are funding levels and the status of the Obama Administration’s Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM).   The House bill (H.R. 2687) authorizes $16.9 billion, while the Senate bill (S. 1317) authorizes $18.1 billion.   The House bill prohibits spending any funds on ARM; the Senate bill is silent on ARM.  Both bills cleared their committees on party line votes, which is unusual for NASA, traditionally a bipartisan topic.

Intelligence Authorization.   Like NASA, the FY2014 authorization bill for the Intelligence Community did not clear Congress.   It was reported from the House and Senate Intelligence Committees (H.R. 3381/S. 1681) in November, but no further action was taken.  The Senate bill “encourages” the relevant government decision-makers to allow commercial satellite imagery providers to sell imagery with better resolution than what is allowed today (0.25 meter instead of 0.5 meter).  A statement in the unclassified report accompanying the House version of the bill (H. Rept. 113-277) says that it “continues to remove barriers to competition in space” and “advances technologies to enhance U.S. satellite capabilities,” but no further details are provided.

Termination Liability for Certain NASA Programs.   Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) introduced one part of the House committee’s NASA authorization bill as a separate bill in the hope of moving at least that part to the floor for a vote.   Referred to as the “termination liability” bill (H.R. 3625), one portion would change how NASA manages funding for termination liability for contracts for the Space Launch System (SLS), Orion spacecraft, International Space Station (ISS), and James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).  Perhaps more significantly, however, it would require congressional approval before any of those programs could be terminated, which some view as an encroachment on presidential prerogatives.  Congress has the power of the purse under the Constitution and strictly speaking can always countermand a presidential decision to either initiate or terminate a program that requires funding, but this bill explicitly requires congressional approval to terminater these particular programs.  The bill passed the House SS&T committee on a bipartisan vote in December after the top Democrat on the Space Subcommittee, Rep. Donna Edwards (D-MD), convinced committee Republicans to add JWST to the list of protected programs.  Like the NASA authorization bill, H.R. 3625 was ordered reported, but not formally reported.  There is no Senate counterpart at this time.

Weather Forecasting Improvement Act.   The House SS&T Committee approved the Weather Forecasting Improvement Act (H.R. 2413) in December, but, like the others, has not been formally reported.   The bill does not focus on weather satellites, but does clarify that existing law does not prevent the government from buying commercial weather data or placing weather satellite sensors on co-hosted government or private sector satellites.   There is no Senate counterpart to this bill yet, either.

Other Legislation.   A number of other space-related bills were introduced last year, but whether they will see any action this year is somewhere between unlikely and possible.   They include a bill to study an alternative to RD-180 rocket engines (S. 1679), the Suborbital and Orbital Advancement and Regulatory Streamlining (SOARS) Act (H.R 3038), and a bill to rename NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center after Neil Armstrong (H.R. 667 passed the House, but there has been no action on its Senate counterpart, S. 1636). 

Nominations.  The Senate had a major show-down over nominations this year.   Democrats weary of Republicans preventing nominations from coming to the floor under existing Senate rules changed the rules so that only 51 votes instead of 60 votes are needed to bring a nomination to a vote.   Republicans are furious and responded by slowing action on the Senate floor during the chamber’s last days in 2013.   How it will affect Senate business in 2014 remains to be seen.

In the meantime, although Deborah Lee James was finally confirmed as Secretary of the Air Force on December 13, other important space-related nominations did not reach the floor during the first session.  Consequently they must be resubmitted by the President under Senate Rule XXXI paragraph 6.   They include:

• Kathy Sullivan to be Administrator of NOAA (she is currently acting in that role)
• Beth Robinson, currently NASA’s Chief Financial Officer, to be Under Secretary of Energy
• Dave Radzanowski to replace Robinson
• France Cordova to be Director of the National Science Foundation
• Jo Emily Handelsman to be Associate Director for Science at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)
• Robert Simon to be Associate Director for Environment and Energy at OSTP

All of these nominations were returned to the President on January 3, 2014 (the end of the first session).