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NASA’s Budget

37 Comments

The omnibus bill provides a boost, and full funding of Commercial Crew, for the first time ever. It also allows NASA to apply Soyuz payments for 2018 flights to the program, to get it flying in 2017 (I still think they could fly next year if they were serious about it). Loren Grush has more. Unfortunately, it also increases the SLS budget.

On the milspace side, it also lifts the restriction on the RD-180, which McCain is going nuts about on the floor right now, according to Twitter. He’s lambasting Shelby and Durbin by name.

[Update a while later]

The worst part of the NASA budget is that it overfunds SLS at the expense of (as usual) technology.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here‘s the McCain story. Nutty.

37 thoughts on “NASA’s Budget”

  1. It looks like Christmas just came early for lots of people in the Space Community! A lot remains to play out, but I think this spending bill makes for the most interesting path.

    ULA gets to survive with more RD-180’s. Does that mean Vulcan dies a slow death, or does ULA close the business case with Vulcan to keep Atlas operational until it is ready? A ULA that sees a future for itself is going to be very interesting to watch. Development of an upper stage with IVF with either RL-10 or XCOR piston pump technology would be great to see happen.

    SpaceX & Boeing will get to complete their commercial crew programs, giving the USA redundant capability to LEO. For SpaceX, this keeps the bottom line filled with another government contract while they struggle to get F9 flight rate up to a commercially viable point. It likely also gives Musk more room to stay the course on Raptor and BFR development.

    As much as I think it is unneeded, and likely to fail, SLS is going to fly. If they can get that thing a proper upper stage, which the funding was aimed at, it becomes much better rocket & more differentiated from an F9 Heavy. I see that earmark for the upper stage as the potential pivot in the heavy launch market. As great as F9 Heavy payload to LEO looks on paper, it does not seemed positioned to capture enough business for high launch rates. I hope I’m wrong, but the schedule for first launch keeps slipping without loss to SpaceX because it just isn’t that important to the bottom line of the company right now.

    Other than some loose scraps that may fall into the COTS-2 bucket, it looks like coal in the stocking for Lockheed & ATK.

    Thanks Santa.

    2. For a limited definition of the Space Community. In this Christmas spirit, perhaps we should take a moment to think about those less fortunate — the companies who got downselected out of CCDev. Dream Chaser, Kistler, Rocketplane, Blue Origin, Excalibur Almaz, etc. There’s no shortage of books, articles, videos, etc. about how the Krampus gave Boeing and SpaceX slightly less than full funding, but not so much as a NewSpace sympathy card for the companies who got thrown off the bus.

        1. When did that happen? The last news I saw for CRS-2 said the selection was postponed again.

          Although, I do find it interesting that reports say Boeing and Lockheed have been eliminated by the selection board. If NASA chooses Dream Chaser over Boeing’s CST-100 for CRS, it will bring up the question of why NASA chose CST-100 over Dream Chaser for CCrew.

          According to Gerst, a winged spacecraft is more complex design and entails more technical and schedule risk than a capsule. I don’t see how NASA could argue that suddenly changed in the last year. Picking Dream Chaser over CST-100 now could be taken as an indication that NASA made a mistake before.

          And here’s a heretical thought — if it’s possible for government selection boards to make mistakes, maybe it isn’t a great idea for the government to be picking winners and losers in commercial space?

          1. “could be taken as an indication that NASA made a mistake before.”

            Its pretty obvious that they aren’t making their decisions purely on merit or progress in product development. For crew, Boeing certainly has some gravitas on being able to produce a quality product. But SpaceX has shown that going through the cargo program is like a training ground that proves competence.

            From an outsider’s perspective, it looks like NASA is trying to throw everyone a bone to keep them in the game. Viewing this as a mistake is perhaps a misjudgement of what their intentions are.

            And you are right, I should have been more precise, Dream Chaser was selected to compete rather than given a contract. Who knows if they will be able to compete on price but price isn’t the only thing being considered.

  2. What happened to the normal budgeting process? Why is everything in omnibus spending bills? This is a very recent phenomenon, and very troubling.

  3. Unfortunately, it also increases the SLS budget.

    Which Gwynne Shotwell has supported publicly (and it’s a safe bet that Elon agrees, or she wouldn’t have said it).

    It’s also a safe bet that Boeing supports continued funding of SLS (and likely that Orbital does as well).

    This is one of the ironic paradoxes of the New Space agenda. Activists calling for Congress to cancel SLS and transfer the money to CCDev ignore the fact that none of the CCDev contractors want that outcome. (A fact which lobbyists have surely made Congress well aware of.)

    1. Which Gwynne Shotwell has supported publicly (and it’s a safe bet that Elon agrees, or she wouldn’t have said it).

      Of course she has. Why piss off Shelby any more than they have to for something that’s not a threat to them?

      1. Why piss off Shelby any more than they have to for something that’s not a threat to them?

        Why are you asking me? I’m not waging the Never Ending Battle against SLS.

        There are plenty of people who are quite eager to piss off Shelby and get nothing in return.

          1. My point is that a great many NewSpace activists — the majority, in fact — spend a great deal of time doing just that, in the belief that it will help SpaceX, Boeing, and OSC who don’t even believe that.

            Your question would be be aimed at them than at me.

          3. My point is that it’s irrational for NewSpace activists to obsess over trying to get Congress to cancel SLS in order to help CCDev, a program which aids only Boeing and SpaceX, when neither Boeing nor SpaceX want that (as evidenced by Gwynne Shotwell, who happens to be a spokesman for SpaceX).

            And no, I don’t expect you’ll ever understand that. 🙂

          4. My point is that it’s irrational for NewSpace activists to obsess over trying to get Congress to cancel SLS in order to help CCDev, a program which aids only Boeing and SpaceX, when neither Boeing nor SpaceX want that (as evidenced by Gwynne Shotwell, who happens to be a spokesman for SpaceX).

            I have no idea which “Newspace activists” are doing that. Are they also members of Mark Whittington’s imaginary Internet Rocketeers club?

          5. I have no idea which “Newspace activists” are doing that.

            You seem to know very little about the NewSpace movement.

            Of course, you don’t even acknowledge your own flood of anti-SLS posts. I believe the term for this is “cognitive dissonance.”

  4. How does this recent COMSTAC business work into NASA’s budget or NASA’s direction? I know they are separate government agencies but there is some interaction here.

    1. COMSTAC is not an agency. It’s an appointed committee of commercial space people to advise the FAA. But FAA-AST gets a budget boost, too, which it has been asking for.

      1. Something just smells fishy to me with the FAA, NASA, congress relationship. The FAA wants to work with ESA on a lunar village and NASA wants to go to Mars. Or perhaps want is the wrong word to use but someone sure wants to do something that didn’t go through congress. But then again, I am obviously not a policy wonk so might have missed something.

  5. I can’t stand McCain, but I’m reluctantly sort of on his side on the RD-180 issue.

    I may be wrong (If so, I’d appreciate being corrected), but my understanding is that ULA guaranteed domestic production ability for the RD-180, which turned out to be a lie. If so, that’s fraud, and there should be consequences. Relying on a foreign sole source for a major irreplaceable component for a nat-sec launcher is, and always was, insane.

    Also, if they really did sneak this in in the dead of night like McCain claims, that’s always wrong, no matter the issue.

    Good news on commercial crew IMHO.

    1. It wasn’t ULA, it was P&W (now part of AJR). Components were demonstrated, and then the AF let them off the hook years ago.

      That whole mess is somewhat complicated. IIRC the final nail in the domestic production coffin was when Energomash refused to provide all the technical details for the engine. This would include the metallurgy and particularly the ‘special sauce’ coating used on the engines’ innards.

      It also turned out to be vastly more expensive to build them here.

      1. GClark, thanks for the correction and the information.

        I’ll also fault the AF for letting them off the hook.

    2. This isn’t a done deal yet as the House still has to weigh in and the correlation of forces there may differ from that in the Senate in important particulars, but – if the Senate version holds – it’s a good outcome for the following reasons:

      (1) It provides a needed bitch slap to Sen. John McCain. McCain’s entire political career has been punctuated by instances of ill-considered hysteria and reflexive anti-business animus immediately following the end of his oblivious ignorance about some long-simmering issue he should have been aware of long since. During his 2008 campaign he got royally snowed by the Global Warmists, for example. He also got stampeded into an incoherent and crazed response to the long-building financial crisis of 2008. His ill-considered ban on the RD-180 engine is just the latest example of his tendency to hip-shoot when startled and to do solely collateral damage, neatly missing all the real villains.

      (2) In a rare instance of agreement with WhitMark, I think this really is an example of smart politics. ULA really does need access to more RD-180’s if it’s ever going to complete its Vulcan project. Without them, ULA will implode in the next year or two and Mr. Shelby simply won’t countenance massive layoffs or even corporate collapse in Decatur on his watch.

      But the Commercial Crew people are, with the notable exception of SpaceX, also a Shelby constituency. Boeing needs Atlas V to launch Starliner and wouldn’t have it if ULA implodes in the meantime due to Sen. McCain’s engine ban. Ditto for Sierra-Nevada if Dream Chaser is ever to carry either cargo or crew. Boeing would already have Shelby’s ear as it is the main private sector beneficiary of SLS spending.

      Doubtless, some Boeing worthy pointed out that the earlier Commercial Crew goes operational, the sooner we can quit paying the Russians their current Danegeld rates for crew transport to ISS. Every Atlas V RD-180 costs $23 million, but it can lift a Starliner that replaces a Soyuz for which Russia charges over three times as much for a single seat. Even on its own terms of beggaring the Russians, the RD-180 engine ban is ineffective. This argument may well have swayed senators with little or no direct interest in either Commercial Crew or SLS to favor the deal. It would even be a talking point that could have been put to quite a few senators and representatives by USAF and the contractors for the payloads that would directly benefit from assured access to Atlas V were the engine ban overturned. The extra money for CC was probably in there to insure that SpaceX, Sierra-Nevada and others with CRS and/or Commercial Crew interests wouldn’t oppose an even richer boost for SLS/Orion.

      As to the grubby parliamentary mechanics of the deal, I’m sure it was sneaky and underhanded. That seems to be SOP in both houses of Congress these days. Still, it’s a good deal and I, for one, will take it.

      1. Boeing needs Atlas V to launch Starliner

        Do they? Boeing originally stated that CST-100 could fly on Delta IV, Atlas V, Falcon 9, or Ariane.

        Wasn’t “the ability to fly on any expendable launcher” touted as one of the big advantages of capsules?

        If that’s changed, NASA has lost a lot of the redundancy they were supposedly purchasing in the CCDev program.

  6. I guess this development buries the idea that we have to cancel SLS to fully fund commercial crew. Funny how smart politics works.

  7. Hm. In the past, NASA said it would have to delay its decision to impose the full FARs on CCDev contractors because it didn’t get full funding.

    Now that it has full funding, I guess NASA can go ahead with its plans? I wonder what percentage of the money will be eaten up by FAR compliance?

    1. Presumably, NASA’s budget request already takes into account whatever contracting mechanism they plan to use. Congress simply (for the first time) gave them the budget requested.

      1. You presume that NASA’s accountants understand the cost of compliance with their own regulations? Seriously?

        1. All I know is that NASA has a plan, and a budget for it, and that they received the budget they requested. There is nothing in the bill that would compel them to change whatever their plan is, other than that they can now use money planned for 2018 Soyuz launches to perhaps accelerate the program.

  8. McCain is lambasting Shelby and Durbin by name.

    When did Senarors start doing this, rather than always referring to “my distinguished colleague from Alabama”, etc.? Am I just showing my age?

    1. McCain is making the point that he’s seriously angry over how Shelby bypassed him in his capacity as Chair of SASC.

      But then, McCain should have been bypassed on this one. Last time he really went off on one of these crusades, he delayed replacment of a USAF aerial tanker fleet almost as old as he was for a decade or more, while seriously running up costs. This time he was going to cost the country a rocket (and possibly also a rocket company) it very much needs over much of the next decade.

      McCain is not prone to listening after his mind is made up. (Doesn’t listen much before either, come to think of it.)

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