NASA seeks a new consensus to guide its course

The Obama administration and the US Congress must agree on a strategic direction for NASA before agency leadership can determine how to allocate its limited resources. That is the chief recommendation of a recent report by a committee of the National Research Council (NRC), which offered four options for resolving the mismatch between NASA’s portfolio of missions and its budget.

The NRC committee, chaired by retired UCLA chancellor Albert Carnesale, urged the Obama administration, in consultations with potential international partners, to lead the development of a new set of clearly defined strategic goals and objectives for NASA. The report said those goals and objectives should be long-term, ambitious, and achievable. Once a consensus on the plan is reached with Congress, NASA management should develop a strategic plan for accomplishing the goals.

To bring NASA programs into line with its current and anticipated budget, the NRC report said the agency could use any combination of the following four approaches: restructure NASA to reduce infrastructure and personnel costs to improve efficiency; commit to more cost-sharing partnerships with other US government agencies, industry, and international partners; increase the NASA budget; and reduce considerably the size and scope of NASA’s current program portfolio. The panel did not recommend a particular approach.

Ronald Sega, a former astronaut and vice chair of the NRC committee, told the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology on 12 December that NASA officials and Office of Science and Technology Policy director John Holdren have separately been briefed on the report. Neither NASA nor OSTP had offered a response to the report at the time of the hearing, he said.

Former House Science Committee chairman Robert Walker called for increasing public–private partnerships to leverage NASA’s limited resources and capabilities. “The reality is that no federal budget in the foreseeable future is going to provide NASA with the money it needs to do everything we want it to do,” said Walker. “NASA can extend its reach and find new financial resources by opening its doors wide to collaborative programs that allow any and all American space entrepreneurs, willing to pay for it, access to NASA expertise.” He added that “it makes no sense for NASA to spend billions for technologies that are already available” in industry.

Sega told lawmakers that NASA leadership desires greater flexibility in managing its facilities. Congress has prohibited the layoff of NASA employees through the end of 2013. But the NRC report said that that provision could be repealed, or that NASA could be granted greater flexibility to convert civil service positions to contractor jobs. In addition, regulations prohibiting federal agencies from selling facilities for less than fair market value have hampered NASA’s efforts to shed facilities it no longer needs.

Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said that President Obama’s decision to cancel the George W. Bush administration’s Constellation deep-space crew vehicle and launcher development program had left international partners without a way to work with NASA on human spaceflight beyond low Earth orbit. “Nobody thinks that we’re going to repeat the Apollo program and do it all alone,” Pace noted. Sega said that the NRC committee had seen little evidence of support for the current space-policy objective—enshrined in the 2010 NASA authorization act—of landing humans on a near-Earth asteroid in the mid 2020s.

Outgoing Science Committee chairman Ralph Hall (R-TX) said that since Constellation’s scrapping, which he and other Republicans opposed, the lack of consensus on NASA’s future “resulted in no effective way to prioritize the many competing demands” on the agency. Disagreements on goals and destination “has sown the seeds for disappointment,” Hall lamented, as three large development programs, a heavy-lift space launch system, the Orion crew vehicle, and the commercial crew program for servicing the International Space Station all compete for the same diminishing resources.

NASA’s $17.7 billion budget request for fiscal year 2013 is virtually the same as it was for 2009, the year when an advisory committee chaired by former Lockheed Martin chairman Norman Augustine called for a $3 billion annual increase to enable NASA to conduct a “meaningful” human exploration program beyond low Earth orbit.

Marion Blakey, president of the Aerospace Industries Association, warned that another Constellation-like interruption of NASA’s human exploration program would be “devastating” for the program and industry. Many parts and component suppliers to larger prime contractors simply cannot absorb major acquisition disruptions when the order volume of components is already so low in the space industry. Many suppliers design and fabricate unique, one-of-a-kind parts for the entire space industry. Further program disruptions will put those suppliers out of business, and will raise the fixed cost for other US government space programs, she said, noting how the space shuttle’s retirement has raised costs for solid rockets acquired by the Department of Defense. Prime contractors to NASA or other major companies with unique capabilities could decide to exit the business and seek more stable opportunities elsewhere.