Virginia's Senators Tout Money Added In Cromnibus for Wallops Launch Pad Repairs

Virginia’s two Senators, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, issued a press release yesterday touting $20 million included in the  FY2015 “cromnibus” spending bill that just cleared the House.  The money is to help pay for damages to a launch pad at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility caused by the October 28 Antares rocket failure.  Wallops is on the coast of Virginia.

Warner and Kaine, both Democrats, thanked fellow Democrat and Maryland neighbor Barbara Mikulski for being a “supporter and advocate of NASA and the Wallops facility.”  Mikulski chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Orbital Sciences Corporation’s Antares is launched from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) at Wallops.  Orbital is headquartered in Dulles, Virginia, just outside Washington, DC.  MARS is owned by the State of Virginia and state officials reportedly were unhappy to discover what their financial responsibility is for repairing MARS under these circumstances.

The Senators’ press statement said the money would “support repairs following a launch failure on October 28 that caused significant damage to the [MARS] launch pad.”  It added that the Senators would release a complete list of “Virginia priorities” included in the spending package after the bill clears Congress.  (They also issued a press release listing what they achieved for Virginia in the FY2015 National Defense Authorization Act, also expected to clear Congress imminently.  None are space-related.)

The House passed the bill — the Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act, 2015, colloquially called the “cromnibius” because it is a combination of a Continuing Resolution (CR) and an omnibus appropriations bill — last night.  The Senate is expected to pass it today or tomorrow.  It includes $18.010 billion for NASA, an increase of $549 million above the President’s request.  It is not obvious where in the bill the $20 million is added, but presumably somewhere in that increase.

Antares exploded 15 seconds after launch on a mission to deliver cargo to the International Space Station under a Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract with NASA.   Orbital and SpaceX both developed cargo space transportation systems through a public-private partnership often called “commercial cargo.”   Skeptics of the “commercial” nature of the effort are watching how Orbital and the government recover from the failure to see who ends up paying for what.  Orbital has announced its own recovery plan, which includes buying at least one launch from United Launch Alliance, and insists that it does not expect “any material adverse financial impacts in 2015 or future years” because of the failure.