NASA Finds New Criticism and Skepticism Before Congress

From the New York Times: NASA Finds New Criticism and Skepticism Before Congress

The head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was buffeted with more criticism and skepticism before Congress on Wednesday as he sought to defend the Obama administration’s proposal to revamp the space agency.

Representative Bart Gordon of Tennessee, the Democrat who is chairman of the House Committee on Science and Technology, said Congress had still not been told enough to make informed decisions about the president’s plan to cancel the space agency’s Constellation program that would send astronauts back to the moon and turn, instead, to private companies for transportation into orbit.

“So far we have not seen any hard analysis from the administration that would give us confidence that it can be done for the amount budgeted,” he said.

In President Obama’s budget request for the 2011 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1, he called the Constellation program too expensive. The spending request added $6 billion over five years to NASA’s budget, but the increase was directed to other areas of NASA like aeronautics research, climate research and robotic science missions.

In a speech last month, Mr. Obama described ambitious goals for NASA: to send astronauts to an asteroid by 2025 and then to Mars a decade later.

But Mr. Gordon noted that the administration’s budget projections for what would be spent through 2025 on human spaceflight were far below what a blue-ribbon panel said last year was necessary for any program sending astronauts beyond low Earth orbit.

“It does no good to cancel a program that the administration characterizes as ‘unexecutable’ if that program is simply replaced with a new plan that can’t be executed either,” Mr. Gordon said.

Additional turmoil surrounded the Constellation program on Wednesday when its program manager, Jeffrey M. Hanley, was removed. In an e-mail message to his team, he said NASA headquarters had told him his services “are no longer required, effective immediately.”

The deputy program manager, Dale Thomas, was named acting program manager, and Mr. Hanley’s new position is as associate director for strategic capabilities at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

At the hearing, Representative Gabrielle Giffords, Democrat of Arizona, said the reassignment of Mr. Hanley made her “personally very dubious” of the pledge by NASA’s head, Maj. Gen. Charles F. Bolden Jr., that the agency would diligently continue work on Constellation until Congress approves any changes.

In his April speech, Mr. Obama tried to assuage criticism that he was not interested in human spaceflight by announcing the continued development of the Constellation program’s Orion crew capsule. It was to take astronauts to the moon, but is now envisioned as a lifeboat for the International Space Station.

General Bolden said at the hearing that the Orion lifeboat would cost $4.5 billion over five years to develop, not including the cost of launching it to the space station.

A NASA spokeswoman said later that none of the financing for the Orion lifeboat would come from the $6 billion allocated to the commercial crew program, and that the offsetting funds would come from elsewhere in the human spaceflight program.