Mars exploration versus commercial crew?

On Wednesday Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) director John Holdren appeared at a hearing of the Commerce, Justice, and Science subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee. The hearing was held in a location without webcasting capabilities, so there was limited coverage of the event. Those reports, though, suggest that a battle may be brewing in Congress between preserving the administration’s requested funding for NASA’s commercial crew program and restoring funding for the agency’s Mars exploration program.

ScienceInsider reported that Holdren himself brought up that connection in his testimony regarding the decision to terminate NASA’s participation in the joint ExoMars program with the European Space Agency:

Holdren said the decision was one of many “tough choices” in the president’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2013, which begins on 1 October. He said that NASA realized it needed $450 million more than Congress gave it this year to maintain progress on building a commercial crew vehicle that would replace the space shuttle in ferrying U.S. astronauts to the international space station. That money, Holdren said, had to come from somewhere else within NASA’s $17.8 billion budget, which would remain flat under the president’s request.

Holdren, as expected, faced stiff questioning about the Mars program and overall planetary science cuts from two subcommittee members, Reps. John Culberson (R-TX) and Adam Schiff (D-CA), who have previously been very outspoken in their criticism of the cuts in the 2013 budget proposal. “I think that what this budget does to planetary science is deplorable,” Culberson said, as quoted by ScienceInsider.

The article also notes at the end that the subcommittee chairman, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), “asked repeatedly if NASA could find ways to reduce the cost of its commercial crew program.” A separate Space News account goes into more detail on this, with Wolf asking Holdren if the administration had considered consolidating the current effort, featuring four funded and three unfunded Space Act Agreements, “into a star team in order to eliminate the cost that would be incurred as they dropped out and to expedite this some”. The subcommittee’s ranking member, Rep. Chaka Fattah (D-PA), agreed with Wolf, saying “there may be more to be gained by collaboration amongst some of the commercial crew companies than by pure competition.”

The ScienceInsider account suggests that Holdren is blaming the commercial crew program for the decision to cut funding for Mars exploration. Yet, the request from the administration for the program in FY2013, approximately $830 million, is nearly the same as the $850 million the administration requested in FY2012 (with similar, if notional, values in the outyears of the budget projection.) And in the Space News account, he blamed Congress for funding the program at less than half the requested level in FY12. “Congress gave us too little money to keep commercial crew on a fast track,” he said.

With no apparently support for increasing NASA’s overall budget in order to fund planetary science, any effort to restore funding will have to come at the expense of some other agency program, Holdren warned. “If you’re going to fix planetary science, you’re going to have to figure out where it will come from,” Holdren told Schiff, as quoted by ScienceInsider. “And somebody’s ox is going to get gored.” Will it be the commercial crew program’s ox, or someone else’s?