White House Decides to Outsource NASA Work

[Heloise]

JANUARY 24, 2010, 10:50 P.M. ET
White House Decides to Outsource NASA Work Article
By ANDY PASZTOR

The White House has decided to begin funding private companies to carry NASA astronauts into space, but the proposal faces major political and budget hurdles, according to people familiar with the matter.

The controversial proposal, expected to be included in the Obama administration's next budget, would open a new chapter in the U.S. space program. The goal is to set up a multiyear, multi-billion-dollar initiative allowing private firms, including some start-ups, to compete to build and operate spacecraft capable of ferrying U.S. astronauts into orbit—and eventually deeper into the solar system.

Congress is likely to challenge the concept's safety and may balk at shifting dollars from existing National Aeronautics and Space Administration programs already hurting for funding to the new initiative. The White House's ultimate commitment to the initiative is murky, according to these people, because the budget isn't expected to outline a clear, long-term funding plan.

The White House's NASA budget also envisions stepped-up support for climate-monitoring and environmental projects, along with enhanced international cooperation across both manned and unmanned programs.

Press officials for NASA and the White House have declined to comment. Industry and government officials have talked about the direction of the next NASA budget, but declined to be identified.

The idea of outsourcing a portion of NASA's manned space program to the private sector gained momentum after recommendations from a presidential panel appointed last year. The panel, chaired by former Lockheed Martin Corp. Chairman Norman Augustine, argued that allowing companies to build and launch their own rockets and spacecraft to carry American astronauts into orbit would save money and also free up NASA to focus on more ambitious, longer-term goals.

However, many in NASA's old guard oppose the plan. Charles Precourt, a former chief of NASA's astronaut corps who is now a senior executive at aerospace and defense firm Alliant Techsystems Inc., said that farming out large portions of the manned space program to private firms would be a "really radical" and an "extremely high risk" path. Unless the overall budget goes up, he said, whatever new direction NASA pursues "isn't going to be viable."

Such arguments already are raging around NASA's Ares I rocket, which could be replaced or scaled back if the commercial option gains traction. Some Ares I contract work could be shifted toward providing the basic elements of a future larger, more-powerful NASA family of rockets. Alliant and other Ares proponents have argued the program is several years behind schedule primarily because Congress and previous administrations failed to provide promised funding. According to some of these analyses, Congress in the past five years earmarked a total of about $4 billion less than initially projected for NASA's manned exploration programs. The design of the Ares I also changed and became more complex since its inception.

Ares critics, on the other hand, counter that instead of costing about $4.3 billion as originally planned, the Ares booster is likely to cost more than three times that much. The program already has spent roughly $4 billion, and these critics say that exceeds original funding profiles for the Ares I by hundreds of millions of dollars. Moreover, they say that year-by-year expenditures actually exceeded the original timetable. NASA's last budget projected spending another $9.5 billion through 2015.

Space Exploration Technologies Corp., founded by Internet entrepreneur Elon Musk, is one of the start-up commercial ventures likely to gain from the proposed policy shift. But other large incumbent NASA contractors such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing Co. also are likely to compete for some of the anticipated government seed money earmarked for new commercial ventures.

The White House's budget is bound to spark a battle with Congress because NASA would have to kill off big chunks of its existing manned exploration program in order to finance some of these new initiatives in the coming years. The budget package, slated to be released in early February, is expected to stop short of proposing major cancellations. But it also isn't likely to specify how all the different programs can be adequately funded in the future.

Under the White House proposal, the agency's top-line budget is expected to stay close to the $18.7 billion in the current fiscal year. Only a small portion—roughly $200 million—is likely to be slated for the initial phase of opening up NASA's manned space exploration program to private firms. However, that initiative is expected to cost a least $3.5 billion—and potentially much more—over the next five years.

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, an Arizona Democrat who heads a key subcommittee, has blasted the notion of shifting money to outsource transporting astronauts to the international space station. Unless Congress makes the NASA budget a higher priority, Rep. Giffords said during a hearing last month, there won't be enough money for robust manned exploration efforts of any kind and U.S. human space flight could be "on hold for the foreseeable future."

Write to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704375604575023530543103488.html?mod=rss_Today's_Most_Popular

[MaryJo]

Just great..out sourcing NASA now..now everyone in the world will know what we have.

[ImAnOldLady]

It won't be long when we won't even have a space program at all.

[Heloise]

It won't be long when we won't even have a space program at all.

So true
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February 04, 2010
The War on America's Greatness
Lee DeCovnick
Forty years ago Americans walked on the moon. Forty years from today, when Americans can objectively look back at the failures of the Obama Administration that crippled this country, perhaps the most glaring loss will be the missed opportunities inflicted on NASA and the manned exploration program.  The Orlando Sentinel pulls no punches in its exclusive coverage:

    NASA's plans to return astronauts to the moon are dead. So are the rockets being designed to take them there -- that is, if President Barack Obama  gets his way.

    When the White House releases his budget proposal Monday, there will be no money for the Constellation program that was supposed to return humans to the moon by 2020. The troubled and expensive Ares I rocket that was to replace the space shuttle to ferry humans to space will be gone, along with money for its bigger brother, the Ares V cargo rocket that was to launch the fuel and supplies needed to take humans back to the moon.

    There will be no lunar landers, no moon bases, and no Constellation program at all.

    "We certainly don't need to go back to the moon," said one administration official.

    In the meantime, the White House will direct NASA to concentrate on Earth-science projects - principally, researching and monitoring climate change.

    The end of the shuttle program this year is already going to slash 7,000 jobs at Kennedy Space Center.


The closing of the Ares and Constellation programs will make it impossible for NASA and its contractors to ever reconstitute the engineering teams that design and build these launch vehicles. With development lead times in space science and heavy lift vehicles often exceeding ten to fifteen years, America could easily be decades behind Russia, China, Brazil and Japan in the manned colonization of the moon and Mars and in the harvesting of metal ores from the asteroid belt.

Manned colonization opens vast new extraterrestrial resources, provides national challenges in technological innovations, and militarily assumes control of  "the high ground" for next two centuries.

So why is manned exploration being shelved?

To my mind, the answer is simply this: Obama and his closest advisors loathe America's successes.  NASA has had a disproportionate share of American successes. There were the technological successes of the space program and the moon landings, plus the on-going successes of Hubble and Cassini. Obama and his advisors understand that manned missions create a patriotic unity that comes from a shared national experience. These are positive emotions that link the country together, a huge political negative for a political Administration that happily feeds on racial discord and economic class warfare.

NASA manned and robotic programs create the spark for American industry and science. These missions proclaim the American character, illustrating what free men can dream and achieve. Reasons enough for this President to remove life support from American space colonization.

Lee DeCovnick continues to be inspired by NASA's successes.

Kathy Garriott adds:

One summer in college I landed what for local Houston kids was a dream job--driving with an on-site taxi service at the Johnson Space Center in Nassau Bay, Texas.  This was the summer of 1975 and NASA was jumping and bustling with  Soyuz-Apollo mission.  My dad was a contract engineer, so were many of the dads of the kids at Clear Lake/Clear Creek high schools, where the teen children of technicians, NASA executives and astronauts were steeped in a local can-do culture inspired by the competitive challenge of  the USSR's advances in space.

Engineers and technicians from the Lockheed building needed rides to the Westinghouse building, and back again.  I was twenty, and saying "10-4" into the radio with the dispatchers felt very important and clued-in to the rhythms of the bustling Space Center.  I even got to drive a few Soviets around, Soviets who asked me  probing questions about Edwards AFB.  I smiled at their ham-handed spying, told them what they wanted to know, and offered to drive them out to the base.  Americans  had nothing to lose by being generous.  It was a disappointment that summer that I wasn't allowed to take these Russians shopping at the local Houston malls. Only the older male drivers got to do that.   

The whole idea of a shopping mall was new, too, and Texas had the first, the best and most ostentacious.  I was proud of American production of the most beautiful consumer goods,  freedom's awesome plenty that even those of modest means in America could afford.  The Soviets always wanted to buy Levi jeans for their daughters back in the USSR.  Remember when Levi jeans meant America?

NASA was a triumphalist field of dreams in that moment, despite the WIN buttons some Republicans were sporting.  (Whip Inflation Now)  American children were growing up with the belief that they would be flying to Mars when they grew up, because the moon-landings were already old news.   

The term "Welfare for PhDs" is used in reference to NASA and the Space Program is not entirely unfair.  Like the public school system is an employment warehouse for liberal arts majors, NASA was fast becoming a warehouse of PhDs.  The International Space Station has been a disappointing merry-go-round.  Nothing is more mundane than a clogged toilet in low earth orbit. After the moon landings, the sense of purpose and mission for manned spaceflight seeped out of NASA like the slow leak of a balloon. 

During the Bush years, an effort at NASA to inspire a  bold and very expensive undertaking to Mars attracted some hope for those diehards who dream of space travel, but they never should have said,  "back to the moon" when they were pitching it.  Last week, Obama's new head of NASA came out brimming with enthusiasm over the brave new cancellation of the mission.    His statement was a laughable spin, trying to make the Obama administration's abandonment of manned space exploration a kind of an aspirational step forward for mankind.  7000 are looking at layoffs in Florida.

Seeing the stars and stripes on a rocket bursting from its launch pad can bring a catch to your throat and a gleam to your eye, a uniquely American-Levi  pride.  Those were moments to treasure.  Where do they make Levis these days?

Obama is singlular among presidents, in that he doesn't seem to mind projecting disdain for the idea of American exceptionalism. Perhaps he'll be about the world stage bowing and  apologizing to China  for our "arrogance," as he calls it.  China might like to pick up a little used space technology, cheap.  Being proud of the manned space program is a little too much like being proud of the  US armed forces, our Founding Fathers, pioneers, or entrepreneurs, or our posterity--our children.

It's not cool. 

In the same Houston of the Johnson Space Center is a construction of a facility that is the first and biggest of its kind.  Houston was always brash in wanting the first and the biggest, but they won't be sending our children to Mars.  Obama's close political ally and supporter, Planned Parenthood, aspires to represent a different vision of what America is and what it can achieve.

    "The abortion business is set to open its largest abortion facility in the nation -- a 78,000 square foot behemoth that will house its regional headquarters and do second-trimester abortions." (LifeNews.com)


It's a six-story building, even closer to the heavens than the abortion palace Planned Parenthood built in Austin.  Dubbed the "abortion super-center," the towering new facility will be located in a  mostly minority, black and hispanic area of Houston on the Gulf Freeway. 

The time since Obama's campaign has passed by in the bewildering months of Nancy Pelosi's grinning-head threats and the terrifying, 2000-page stacks of tyranny.  It's easy to forget the chilling positions that the candidate Obama embraced on abortion, more radical and extreme than any other liberal in Congress.  Famously voting in Chicago, more than once, to deny protection to the newly born and living; making the scoffing reference "not wanting his daughter punished with a baby," and his promises to Planned Parenthood that "the very first thing he'd do" would be to implement policies to promote as many abortions in America as possible, provide greatly increased taxpayer funding, and shut down all the legislative limitations that the individual states have passed--embodied in the Freedom of Choice Act.  This new abortion facility is the fulfillment of what he promised in his speeches.  He boldly goes where no pro-choicer has gone before. 

Perhaps it should be "The Barack Obama Choice Clinic"-- but does any politician really want an abortion clinic named after them?  And, why not? 

NASA gets kicked to the curb like last year's shabby blue jeans (manufactured in Viet Nam), but Planned Parenthood gets a ride to the skies in Houston, Texas.