House hearing revisits commercial crew concerns; Mars makes a cameo

A few hours after NASA administrator Charles Bolden defended the agency’s fiscal year 2013 budget request before the Senate Commerce Committee on Wednesday, he did the same on other side of Capitol Hill at a hearing of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee. The rhetoric at the House hearing wasn’t nearly as heated as the Senate hearing, where Bolden and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison engaged in an extended debate, but commercial crew and SLS/Orion funding was again a key theme, with a number of committee members expressing skepticism about the administration’s proposal of nearly $830M for commercial crew.

“I look at every program in your budget and it seems to take a hit, except for the commercial crew,” Rep. Donna Edwards (D-MD) said to Bolden at one point in the nearly two-hour hearing. “I wonder if you can tell me how we can expect support on this committee for an 104% increase when you have yet to provide to us, despite being asked numerous times, frankly, General, a credible cost and schedule estimate that justifies an annual funding stream.”

“We basically have to take it on faith that your budget requests are neither too small or too large,” Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), the ranking member of the committee, said in her opening statement in regards to commercial crew, “and that these vehicles will show up before it is too late for them to provide more than a year or two of support for the International Space Station.” She was also skeptical that these vehicles would be able to provide crew transportation services less expensively than Soyuz vehicles, or open up new markets beyond space tourism. “I can’t justify to my constituents the expenditure of their tax dollars so that the super-rich can have a joyride.”

Bolden made a number of the same comments about commercial crew as he did in the Senate in the morning, including that the requested funding was vital to keep the program on schedule for beginning transportation services in 2017 and that safety was not being compromised by using Space Act Agreements (SAAs) versus FAR-based contracts. In response to another question about the use of SAAs from Rep. Brad Miller (D-NC), Bolden said that if NASA had stuck to the agency’s original plan to use more conventional contracts for the third round of the program, NASA would have been able to select only one contractor given the limited funding available in FY2012, and “the subsequent costs on that contract would, I think, have been—I would not have been able to afford it.”

While commercial crew got considerable attention at the hearing, the proposed cuts to NASA’s planetary science programs cut only a modest amount of attention, but even that was more than what the Senate devoted to the topic earlier in the day. “NASA, seemingly in good faith, agreed in 2009 to join forces with the European Space Agency [on ExoMars], but with the unveiling of the 2013 budget, NASA has reneged on its commitment,” Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX), the committee’s chairman, said in his opening statement. “There’s no doubt in my mind that NASA’s decision to withdraw from ExoMars seriously imperils the ability of ESA to keep moving forward with this program and also imperils NASA’s ability to be viewed as a trustworthy partner on any future collaborations.”

Beyond statements by Hall and Johnson in their opening statements, the topic of NASA’s withdrawal in ExoMars came up only rarely in the hearing. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) mentioned it late in the hearing, expressing concerns about international cooperation. “What’s this going to do to our ability to be reliable partners?” he asked Bolden. The administrator responded that international cooperation remained important. “We have not stepped away from our European friends,” he said, discussing the ongoing restructuring of the agency’s Mars exploration program.

On one other topic, China, Bolden revealed in the hearing that he has already talked with Rep. Frank Wolf about his concerns regarding potential Chinese participation in the ISS that he expressed in a letter to the administrator earlier this week. “Congressman Wolf and I had a long conversation yesterday,” he said in response to a question from Rep. Sandy Adams (R-FL). “That meeting has been had and he considered that adequate response to his letter.”