Constellation is dead — Long live Constellation

The good news is that, after multiple failures in previous CRs, language inserted into the appropriations bill last year by Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL) that was forcing NASA to continue to waste a million and a half dollars a day on the cancelled Constellation program was finally removed, freeing the agency to reallocate those funds to something productive, at least in theory.

What was Constellation?  In 2004, in the wake of the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia a year before, the Bush administration came out with a new policy called the Vision for Space Exploration, to end the Shuttle program and send humans out beyond low earth orbit once again, for the first time since the end of Apollo (now almost forty years ago).  He put together a presidential commission led by noted aerospace executive Edward Aldridge that recommended that the implementation of the vision incorporate commercial enterprise, involve our international partners and support national security.  But when Mike Griffin took over NASA a year later, he ignored those recommendations, and came up with a new NASA-only architecture to essentially repeat Apollo (except “on steroids”), without a matching budget.  That was Constellation.

It consisted of two new rockets (a small one for crew launches and a heavy lifter for everything else) derived from Space Shuttle components, a crew capsule called “Orion” that was a larger version of the Apollo capsule, a lunar lander called “Altair,” and an earth departure stage to get them to the moon.  Only the first rocket for crew (Ares I) and the Orion were under active development last year when, in response to a report from a new panel led by industry veteran Norman Augustine showing that the program was unaffordable and slipping more than a year per year in schedule (with a low probability of flight before 2018 or so), the administration canceled them.  They were replaced with a widely misunderstood plan to shift the burden of getting crews to space to fixed-price commercial contracts, while focusing on the technologies needed to drive down the costs of exploration beyond earth orbit, to make such expeditions sustainable and affordable (also unheeded recommendations of the Aldridge Commission), and happen much sooner than they would have under Constellation.  But Senator Shelby’s amendment had forced NASA to continue spending money on Ares and Orion, right up until this day, and the waste will end only if the CR passes.

So, what’s the bad news? 

Last fall, Congress passed a NASA authorization bill demanding that NASA build a different new Shuttle-derived rocket, called the Space Launch System (SLS, though wags, including yours truly, call it the Senate Launch System, after its designers on the north side of the Hill), and continue Orion under the name Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV), to be ready by 2016.  Think of it as Constellation by a different name, and the rose doesn’t smell any more sweet.  Particularly because they authorized less money for it than Constellation was slated to get over that time period, and there was universal agreement between NASA, the General Accountability Office and others that it could not be done for that amount.  Fortunately, the language in that bill provided NASA with some limited flexibility, by using words like “if practicable,” and in being somewhat ambiguous about the payload (ranging from between 70 tons to orbit and 130 tons, depending on how one interpreted the language).

Unfortunately, the current CR compounds that error with what seems to be the only earmark in the entire CR (which was supposed to be an “austerity” measure), rumored to be by the request of the minority leader.   The CR contains an “anomaly” — language specifically appropriating three billion of NASA’s exploration budget to these activities — $1.8B for the SLS and $1.2B for Orion, in the current fiscal year, an increase over the authorization (something that had been supposedly sacrosanct). 

NASA has told the Congress that it is still performing trade studies to determine the best means to satisfy the requirements, but those few senators who care about the NASA budget care primarily about jobs in their states, and maintaining the employment base in Utah, Alabama, Texas and Florida apparently trumps parsimony with the taxpayers’ money or progress in space.  They now demand a new 130-ton vehicle for which there is no mission defined, and for which no payloads are funded (or likely fundable, given how much money they’ll spend on the rocket).  The increase in funding over authorized funds for the SLS for the same fiscal year is an admission that the new program is already overrunning its budget.

That the Senate insists on earmarking funds in this bill, at this time, is an affront both to taxpayers and supporters of useful space activities.  It will inevitably end in wasting more years and billions on rockets that will never fly.  If they want to remove the taint of this, they will allow NASA to actually put out bids for the work, per NASA’s requirements (not arbitrary Senate payload numbers), rather than simply forcing them to issue sole-source no-bid contracts to ATK, and Boeing and Lockheed Martin.  Half a century after the dawn of human spaceflight, it’s past time for Congress to learn that the road to the solar system for humanity will not be paved with crony capitalism, from either side of the aisle.

[Update]

The Taxpayers’ Protection Alliance is on the case:

It looks like it’s a lot harder than Congressman Issa thought.