Lawmakers Questioning NASA Manager’s Removal

From the New York Times: Lawmakers Questioning NASA Manager’s Removal

Members of Congress have asked the inspector general for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to look into whether the NASA leadership is undermining the agency’s moon program.

The request, from Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia and chairman of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, the committee’s ranking Republican, was sent Thursday, one day after NASA removed the head of the program, Jeffrey M. Hanley.

The program has spent $10 billion over the last five years in an effort to send astronauts back to the moon. However, the Obama administration has concluded that it is too expensive and has proposed canceling it in the budget for the 2011 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1.

Mr. Rockefeller and Ms. Hutchison asked Paul K. Martin, the NASA inspector general, to “examine whether this or other recent actions by NASA were intended or could reasonably have been expected to foreclose the ability of Congress to consider meaningful alternatives” to the president’s proposed policy, which invests heavily in new space technologies and turns the launching of astronauts over to private companies.

Congress has not yet agreed to the changes and inserted into this year’s budget legislation a clause that prohibits NASA from canceling the program, called Constellation, or starting alternatives without Congressional approval.

Mr. Hanley had been publicly supported by Maj. Gen. Charles F. Bolden Jr., the NASA administrator, and other NASA officials, but he may have incurred displeasure by publicly talking about how Constellation could be made to fit into the slimmed-down budgets that President Obama has proposed for NASA’s human spaceflight endeavors.

The senators’ letter cites an e-mail message from Douglas R. Cooke, NASA’s associate administrator for exploration systems, to Mr. Hanley on May 21 that told him to focus on items that could be used in the president’s proposed space policy and put less priority on other work.

“It’s enough for us to be extraordinarily concerned,” said a Congressional staff member, who was authorized to speak only anonymously. “It’s not the smoking gun, but it’s smoking. We just want the inspector general to follow the path and report back to us what he’s finding.”

In response to an earlier request from members of the House of Representatives, the General Accountability Office concluded last week that NASA study groups looking into how the proposed policy could be carried out did not violate the Congressional ban on starting new programs.

The office is still investigating a second complaint, that NASA is handicapping Constellation contractors by telling them they need to hold back money to cover costs in case the program is canceled.