House Moves Bureau of Space Commerce One Step Closer to Reality

The House adopted an amendment to the appropriations bill that funds NASA and NOAA last week that moves the Trump Administration’s goal of creating a Bureau of Space Commerce at the Department of Commerce (DOC) one step closer to reality.  The amendment transfers the money at NOAA for two existing offices that would form the nucleus of a new Bureau from NOAA to the Department of Commerce’s Management account, an action the House Appropriations Committee had rejected.  The amendment was adopted without debate.

The House is considering the FY2020 Commerce-Justice-Science (CJS) appropriations bill as part of a package of five appropriations bills, H.R. 3055.  The other four bills in “Minibus 2” are Agriculture, Interior-Environment, MilCon-VA, and Transportation-HUD (THUD).

The Trump Administration wants to merge NOAA’s Office of Space Commerce and Office of Commercial Remote Sensing Regulatory Affairs (CRSRA) and elevate them into the Office of the Secretary of Commerce reporting directly to the Secretary instead of via NOAA.  Each of those offices is currently funded at $1.8 million, a total of $3.6 million. The Administration proposal is to move that $3.6 million to the Secretary’s budget account and add another $6.4 million for a total of $10 million.

The House Appropriations Committee rejected that request when it marked up the bill in May.

Last week, however, Rep. Brian Babin (R-TX) offered an amendment to move the $3.6 million from NOAA to the Department’s Management account, which is a step in that direction.  It did not address the additional funding.  The Babin amendment was incorporated into Rep. José Serrano’s (D-NY) en bloc amendment 2 that combined a number of relatively non-controversial amendments.  Serrano chairs the House Appropriations CJS subcommittee.  The en bloc amendment was adopted without debate.

The Babin amendment said it would “facilitate the transfer of the Office of Space Commerce and the Office of Commercial Remote Sensing Regulatory Affairs back to where they are authorized by statute, thereby advancing U.S. leadership in space commerce and commercial remote sensing.”

The Office of Space Commerce was originally established by the Secretary of Commerce in 1988 and has had a complicated history since then.  In 1996, it became part of DOC’s Technology Administration and was codified there by Congress in the Technology Administration Act of 1998 as the Office of Space Commercialization.  In 2005, it moved to NOAA.  In 2015, Congress restored the name as Office of Space Commerce in the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, but it remains part of NOAA.  Kevin O’Connell was named director of the office last year.

NOAA also regulates the commercial remote sensing satellite industry through CRSRA.  It was assigned that task in the 1992 Land Remote Sensing Policy Act.

The Administration’s plan is to create a Bureau of Space Commerce and return it to the Office of the Secretary of Commerce where the original Office of Space Commerce was located.  It would merge the duties of the Office of Space Commerce and CRSRA and take on new responsibilities under President Trump’s Space Policy Directive-2 (SPD-2)and Space Policy Directive-3 (SPD-3). They include regulating non-traditional space activities like asteroid mining or satellite servicing and serving as the interface with the civil and commercial sectors for space situational awareness and space traffic management.

Congress has not acted on any of that yet.  Debate continues on whether the SPD-2 and SPD-3 authorities should be assigned to DOC or the Department of Transportation’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation.  The Space Frontier Act, which failed to pass the last Congress and is now pending again in the Senate, would create the Bureau, but is silent on the question of any new tasks it might assume.

Appropriations bills provide funding. Whether or not to create a new entity, like a Bureau of Space Commerce, and define its functions is the jurisdiction of authorization committees.  In this case, that is the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee and, historically, the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee.

The House completed action on the CJS portion of H.R. 3055 last week, but is still working on the rest of the bill.  Debate will resume tomorrow.