NASA’S Gateway faces questions in Congress

A GATEWAY AROUND THE MOON…BUT FOR WHAT? NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine faces a tough task selling Capitol Hill on the agency’s ambitious lunar Gateway program, House space subcommittee Chairman Brian Babin tells us.

— The program envisions an orbiting platform around the moon by 2023 and is a main plank of the space agency’s plans for deep-space exploration — but first, the Texas Republican says, the Trump administration “has to make the case.” He wrote an Oct. 10 letter asking Bridenstine to lay out how the Gateway will support trips to both the lunar surface and Mars and how it can make deep space exploration more sustainable.

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— NASA anticipates it will spend nearly $3 billion between fiscal 2018 and fiscal 2024 on the program. Last fall, it awarded initial contracts to Lockheed Martin, Sierra Nevada Corp., Boeing, Space Systems Loral and Orbital ATK (now Northrop Grumman) to study how to build the Gateway’s first segment, the power and propulsion element, which is expected to launch in 2022.

— Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle want more information. “I’ve been on the science committee for four years and really we haven’t talked about the Gateway a lot,” says Rep. Ed Perlmutter, a Colorado Democrat on the space subcommittee. “I don’t think it has really developed a constituency in favor of it or a group against it.”

In the meantime, the project took another step forward this week when NASA began soliciting ideas from the space industry for “logistics modules” that could be part of the Gateway. The agency says it is “seeking information from interested parties to determine industry capabilities and to assist the government in refining the acquisition strategy and requirements for providing Gateway Logistics Services via a Logistics Module.”

The first two logistics missions to the Gateway, NASA anticipates, “will launch the Logistics Module using commercial launch vehicles, but after Gateway assembly, the Space Launch System (SLS) may be available for co-manifested logistics delivery.”

** A message from Lockheed Martin: Connect the world. Explore the solar system. Protect what matters most. Space is a place to do big, important, epic things that make a difference for millions of people on Earth. At Lockheed Martin, we’re helping the world do more than ever in orbit and beyond. www.lockheedmartin.com/space **

SPACE FORCE READIED FOR BOOST PHASE: President Donald Trump will act “very shortly” on six recommendations from the National Space Council this week on standing up a military Space Force, Vice President Mike Pence said this week.

— Most of the recommendations match a Defense Department report released this year but two of them — creating a U.S. Space Command and a Space Development Agency — are expected to become a reality in the next four or five months, Deputy Defense Secretary Pat Shanahan told reporters after the council meeting on Tuesday. Yet the Space Force itself will need Congress’ approval, and Shanahan says he’s begun briefing lawmakers including House Armed Services Chairman Mac Thornberry.

— The feedback from the Hill so far: Members have expressed “universal” support for doing more to treat space as a “contested environment,” Shanahan reports, but they’re worried about how big a budget a whole new bureaucracy will demand. The Project on Government Oversight, a leading watchdog group, raised similar questions this week in a report titled “Space Force: A Historical Perspective: Adding Bureaucracy Without Adding Capability.”

— Thornberry is doing his own research, as Space News reported. He’s asked the Pentagon to provide more details on what the consequences would be under four scenarios: creating a Space Corps within the Air Force; standing up an enhanced Space Corps that adds Army and Navy space capabilities; setting up an independent service; or creating an organization modeled after Special Operations Command that could organize, train and equip forces for space missions.

NUKES IN SPACE? Nuclear weapons are banned in space by the United Nations Outer Space Treaty of 1967, but Pence declined this week to say that should remain the case. “What we need to do is make sure that we provide for the common defense of the people of the United States of America and that’s the president’s determination here,” Pence said when asked about nukes in orbit during an interview with The Washington Post. The Union of Concerned Scientists, an arms control group, called the comments “troubling and potentially dangerous.”

But maybe, just maybe the Rams and Packers can team up to save the universe.

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EARTH SCIENCE FOCUS IN 2019? Expect the House space panel to focus on climate change and Earth science if Democrats take control of the chamber in next month’s midterms, says Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), a member of the Science, Space and Technology Committee.

The panel — now led by noted climate change skeptic Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) — will place “a really strong emphasis on Earth science,” one of the few partisan topics over which the panel has oversight, he tells us. “We don’t want to lose focus on Earth. … That’s been a little controversial,” Beyer maintains. “NASA is the only one that can do that job.”

Other highlights from the interview:

— Pushing deeper into the solar system is a way to sustain life on Earth — with a focus on humans reaching Mars. “Exploring other planets beginning with Mars … is going to help us take care of this planet better and perhaps one day give us some alternatives to Earth,” Beyer says.

— He defended the troubled James Webb Space Telescope, which is dogged with mounting cost overruns and schedule delays. Engineers only get one chance to make it right, he said, pointing out that it’s better to catch errors on earth than in orbit. “You’d hate to spend [billions of] dollars and have a couple bolts shake lose an hour into the flight and have wasted all of that.”

— His personal focus for the next Congress? Making sure the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope — a follow-on to the James Webb project — gets full funding in the fiscal 2020 budget. The Trump administration’s fiscal 2019 request diverted all of WFIRST’s planned money to higher priority projects at NASA, and a House appropriations bill restored only some funding. The project “was a high priority of the astrophysics community that didn’t get enough attention, so I will push back on that,” Beyer says.

— Beyer also spoke about how he got onto the space subcommittee, his views on how Congress will fund NASA’s exploration goals, and the space relationship between the U.S. and Russia. Read the full interview here.

‘SPACE MONTH’ AT THE FCC. The Federal Communications Commission is launching “Space Month” in November to focus the agency’s attention on the role of satellite communications, its chairman, Ajit Pai, writes in a new blog post previewing the upcoming agenda for its monthly meeting.

“The FCC will take up nine items to ensure that America leads in the New Space Age, with an emphasis on cutting through the red tape,” he writes, including “voting on a package of orders that would give the green light to companies seeking to roll out new and expanded services using new non-geostationary satellite constellations.”

Also on the agenda: “a new unified license for space stations and earth stations operating in a geostationary, fixed-satellite service satellite network,” Pai says, while “another proposal would update our rules governing direct broadcast satellite service so that it too could benefit from the streamlining of our rules for launching satellite service in other bands.”

LOST FROM SPACE. NASA’s internal watchdog slammed the agency this week for sloppy stewardship of artifacts from the space program — including losing lunar dust collected by Apollo astronauts and failing to recover a moon rover before it ended up as scrap metal. “A significant amount of historic personal property has been lost, misplaced, or taken by former employees and contractors due to the agency’s lack of adequate procedures,” the agency’s inspector general found. NASA’s leadership generally agree with the IG’s findings and recommendations.

MILESTONE: NASA notched another first, though, when one of its cubesats snapped the first images from a miniaturized satellite of Mars. A wide-angle lens fitted on MarCO-B — known affectionately as Wall-E — took the picture from 8 million miles away. It is traveling along with its twin, MarCO-A — nicknamed Eve — as part of the Insight Lander mission that is expected to reach the planet next month.

It marks “the first image of the Red Planet ever produced by this class of tiny, low-cost spacecraft,” NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said. Added Cody Colley, the mission manager: “The cruise phase of the mission is always difficult, so you take all the small wins when they come. Finally seeing the planet is definitely a big win for the team.”

INDUSTRY INTEL: Space coffers climb: Leading aerospace contractors reported solid earnings in their space segments during the third quarter:

—Northrop Grumman’s Innovation Systems business segment saw $1.4 billion in sales during the first full quarter since its acquisition of Orbital ATK was finished this summer. A boost to its space portfolio was driven mainly by government satellite purchases, the company said.

—Lockheed Martin also reported a 10.8 percent increase in sales in its space business from government satellites and NASA’s Orion spacecraft program.

TOP DOC: The Luxembourg model for commercial space growth: The small European nation’s space sector, which is focused on commercial rather than government activities, can serve as a model for the U.S. space industry to support and build relationships with international partners developing their space programs, the government-funded Aerospace Corp. said in a paper this week.

The approach also includes accepting a higher level of risk and failure, engaging with other countries and increasing the visibility of space activities. The report says the U.S. can use this same framework to help emerging space nations grow their programs, which will in turn help the U.S. “promote responsible behaviors in space, increase its influence abroad, mitigate the risk of countries seeking support from U.S. adversaries, open new markets for U.S. companies, and secure future partners in space.”

TOP DOC II: Congress needs to pass a budget next year that fully funds national security space missions, a top aerospace trade group urged this week as part of a series of space-related recommendations. “The $8 billion funding increase over five years in the President’s recommended budget for national security space is a good start,” maintains the Aerospace Industries Association. “But in Fiscal Year 2020, the current budget deal will expire, imposing real consequences unless Congress can agree to set aside the draconian budget caps.”

AIA also recommends improving space situational awareness capabilities, requiring future space capabilities to be able to better withstand a range of attacks from cyber tactics like jamming or spoofing to kinetic attacks that blow up a satellite, increasing cooperation with industry and other government space agencies and developing a set of behavioral norms for space to help identify good and bad acros in orbit.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “Some might say that nine space-related items on the agenda for a monthly meeting is overdoing it. During Space Month, I would instead say that we have dared to boldly go where no FCC has gone before.” — FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, on the agency’s November meeting agenda.

— Alabama’s commercial space growth.

— And NASA boss was in town to talk national security space.

— Space Force: boon or boondoggle?

— Get your Space Force shwag — and support the GOP.

— Pentagon urged to pursue space cooperation with India.

— How America’s space launch juggernaut left Europe in the dust.

— European spacecraft takes first selfie on the way to Mercury.

— Canadian Defense Ministry warns about cyber threat in space.

— The U.K. is tracking pollution from space.

— Russia launches first Soyuz rocket since failure.

— White House to waive sanctions for Russian space chief’s visit.

— A Chinese space elevator?

— How NASA repaired the Hubble telescope.

— NASA, Northrop Grumman postpone satellite launch — again.

— SpaceX nabs new customer for Falcon Heavy.

— The space industry is growing, but there’s one group they can’t hire.

— Maiden launch of ULA’s Vulcan rocket slips to 2021.

— The remarkable woman who lost the race to get to space.

— The battle of the space suits.

— How space travel can change your brain.

— What could the private space stations of the future look like?

— Get your own NASA ringtone.

SUNDAY: The Air Traffic Control Association and the Federal Aviation Administration kick off the Commercial Space NAS Integration 2018 conference in Washington.

MONDAY: Former NASA astronaut Jeanette Epps speaks at a Center for Strategic and International Studies event on international collaboration in human spaceflight.

TUESDAY: The American Society of Gravitational and Space Research holds its 34th annual meeting in Bethesda, Md.

TUESDAY: The FAA’s Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee meets at the Department of Transportation.

THURSDAY: The Economist hosts a full-day space event in New York, featuring remarks from Simonetta Di Pippo, director of the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, and several industry leaders.

FRIDAY: Brig. Gen. DeAnne M. Burt, director of operations and communications at Air Force Space Command, speaks at a Mitchell Space Breakfast Series in Washington.

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Lockheed Martin builds satellites and spacecraft that do amazing things in space for government and commercial customers. Connecting people. Advancing discovery. And protecting what matters most. Lockheed Martin-built satellites give earlier warning of severe weather, connect troops on the battlefield and deliver GPS directions to a billion people worldwide.

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