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Quick Fix
— Q&A: Alaska spaceport is preparing for commercial space boom.
— House and Senate NASA authorization bill not that far apart staffer insist.
— Commercial Crew delays could leave the U.S. reliant on Russians for spacewalk help, GAO says.
WELCOME TO POLITICO SPACE, our must-read briefing on the policies and personalities shaping the new space age in Washington and beyond. Email us at jklimas@politico.com, bbender@politico.com or dbrown@politico.com with tips, pitches and feedback, and find us on Twitter at @jacqklimas, @bryandbender and @dave_brown24. And don’t forget to check out POLITICO's astropolitics page for articles, Q&As, opinion and more.
Space Q&A
COUNTING ON THE FAA. The FAA's Office of Spaceports will make a big impact speeding up the sluggish process for getting federal approval to establish and run a private space launch facilities, Mark Lester, the president of Alaska Aerospace, which owns and operates the Pacific Spaceport Complex - Alaska on Kodiak Island, tells us.
“It's a tremendous asset for the industry and the ability to look at a network of spaceports across the country,” Lester, a former Air Force space officer, said on the sidelines of the Commercial Space Transportation Conference this week. The office, which Congress established in a 2018 authorization bill, can play an important role in ensuring there’s adequate access to orbit, he said.
That means licensing rockets to launch at any location, instead of tethering licenses to a particular launch site. It’s just one of the lessons the spaceport industry can learn from commercial aviation, he said in our weekly Q&A.
COMPETING NASA AUTHORIZATION BILLS. The House’s version of the 2020 NASA authorization bill moved forward this week, despite criticism from the space industry and even NASA itself. It cleared the House space subcommittee and is now headed to the full House Science, Space and Technology Committee. the legislation differs from the Senate’s version, which was introduced last year, in a few important ways. One big departure is the House bill delays a moon landing to 2028, rather than the Trump administration's new 2024 goal.
House committee staff defended the bill, saying that it fits the stated goal of NASA to use the moon as a stepping stone for a crewed mission to Mars -- and there's nothing to stop NASA from going to the moon faster. "It focuses on using the moon as risk reduction in order to build the capabilities necessary to send humans to Mars," Pam Whitney, the Democratic staff director on the House Space, Science, and Technology Committee, said at the Commercial Space Transportation Conference. Tom Hammond, a senior space adviser for the House committee, also stressed that the House bill puts the goal of landing a human on the moon no later than 2028 into U.S. code, while the Senate bill does not set a solid timeline.
Another big sticking point between the bills: The House bill requires NASA’s lunar lander to be “fully government-owned and directed,” a significant departure from NASA’s current strategy to work closely with commercial partners. The bill drew a strongly-worded rebuke from Commercial Spaceflight Federation President Eric Stallmer, who wrote in a letter to lawmakers that “it was profoundly disappointing that this committee has, without consultation with NASA or industry, selected a path that will systematically degrade America’s space capability.” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine disagreed more politely, saying he was “concerned that the bill imposes some significant constraints on our approach to lunar exploration.”
So what are the bill’s chances now? Staffers struck an optimistic tone that the two chambers would find common ground. "Broadly speaking, we're saying the same thing, we're just saying it a little different way," Joel Graham, a staffer on the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, said at the conference. Those outside Congress are less convinced. "Time is not on their side," said Casey Dreier, the chief advocate at the Planetary Society. "The coming elections will soon come to dominate the political landscape, slowing down the pace of legislation and potentially change the political calculus after November."
TOP DOC: More Webb woes. The much delayed and over budget James Webb Space Telescope is likely to miss yet another deadline for launch, says a Government Accountability Office report released this week. The follow on to the Hubble Space Telescope was rescheduled for launch in March 2021 but there’s only a 12 percent chance NASA can stick to this timeline due to additional technical challenges, the report found. NASA will reevaluate the launch date this spring.
GAO estimates the telescope will now launch in July 2021, based on the data NASA uses to establish baselines for other projects. “Now estimated to cost $9.7 billion," GAO says, "the project’s costs have increased by 95 percent and its launch date has been delayed by over 6.5 years since its cost and schedule baselines were established in 2009.”
TOP DOC II: Commercial Crew delays threaten ISS mission. The American presence on the International Space Station will shrink to one astronaut in April if neither SpaceX nor Boeing can fly an operational mission with its commercial crew capsule by March, another Government Accountability Office report warns. If there are further delays, the American presence on the orbiting habitat would shrink to zero in October, 00 that is unless NASA buys additional seats on Russian rockets as it has since 2011.
More reliance on Russia? Having only one American astronaut on board the station would mean the U.S. could not conduct spacewalks -- which are needed to replace or repair equipment and require two people -- without help from Russia. “If there is only one U.S. astronaut on the ISS, NASA officials said they would not plan to conduct any spacewalks. However, in the event of an emergency, officials told us that NASA is training Russian cosmonauts to perform critical contingency spacewalk activities,” the report said.
ICYMI: Boeing takes loss over Commercial Crew. Boeing’s Defense, Space and Security business segment took a hit last quarter after the contractor budgeted $410 million for another uncrewed test flight of the Starliner capsule if NASA deems it necessary before crew flies. The test flight in December has to be cut short after the capsule failed to reach the International Space Station.
QUESTION OF THE WEEK: Congratulations to Clay Scott, an OSP fiber planner, for being the first to correctly answer that the space shuttles were named after explorer ships.
This week’s question: NASA launched the Ranger 6 mission to take photos of the moon 56 years ago this week. Why was the mission a failure? First person to email the answer to jklimas@politico.com gets bragging rights and a shoutout in next week’s newsletter!
What We're Reading
— SpaceX wants to build its rockets in the port of Los Angeles.
— Meet the company building giant centrifuges to launch rockets into space.
— Where do small launch companies like Rocket Lab fit into the new ridesharing model?
— Satellites avoid massive collision in orbit over Pittsburgh.
— Concern grows about crashes in orbit as space traffic grows.
— NASA tries to fix Voyager 2 probe after glitch from 11.5 billion miles away.
— NASA is adding a hotel capsule to the International Space Station.
— Will an obsession with Mars ground NASA’s other exploration goals?
— Parker Solar Probe breaks its own record and gets even closer to the sun.
— Telescope captures stunning, up-close images of sun’s surface.
— How to get to space without carbon emissions damaging Earth.
— The origin of Star Trek’s Starfleet insignia.
— Watch for astronaut Nicole Stott in a Super Bowl ad about getting more women involved in space and science.
Event Horizon
TODAY: The European Astrofest conference begins in London.
TODAY: A Northrop Grumman resupply mission departs from the International Space Station.
MONDAY: NASA hosts a pre-launch press conference about the Solar Orbiter, a joint project with the European Space Agency that is expected to launch Feb. 7
MONDAY: The SmallSat Symposium begins in Silicon Valley, Calif.
THURSDAY: Astronauts, including Christina Koch who broke the women’s record for longest spaceflight, return home from the International Space Station.
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