Opinion: Is Congress About to Hand Russia the Keys to Space?

(July 22) -- With the coming retirement of the Space Shuttle, the most immediate issue in human spaceflight is how to get U.S. crews to the International Space Station.

When the decision was made in 2004 to retire the shuttle, the plan was to have a small "gap" starting this year, during which the Russians would provide this service, as they did for the two-and-a-half-year period after Columbia was lost.

But if lawmakers in the House have their way, we could be buying rides from Russia to the space station for the foreseeable future.

Here's the story so far.

The 2004 plan envisioned a new NASA flight system, which became known as Ares I/Orion, part of the larger Constellation program intended to return NASA astronauts to the moon by the end of the coming decade.

But Ares and Orion costs were climbing much higher and development was taking far longer than planned, with only a small chance of meeting even a 2017 goal, at a cost of tens of billions of dollars.

As a result, the Obama administration released new plans in February that would harness private enterprise to close the gap more quickly and at a far lower cost, while letting NASA focus its scarce resources on getting astronauts beyond low earth orbit.

But on Thursday, the House Science Committee is due to mark up a bill that would slash the $6 billion Barack Obama had planned for the commercial crew initiative (investing in companies to develop a space taxi service for taking astronauts into orbit) by about 96 percent, to $250 million. At the same time, the committee seems determined to resurrect the flawed Ares/Orion program. If this plan were to become law, it could leave the U.S. reliant on Russian rockets to get to the space station indefinitely.

These lawmakers say this new plan will assure U.S. access to space soon, demanding that NASA deliver a system by 2015. But their plan doesn't provide the funds to do so, and even if it did, the difference in cost between this approach and Obama's new commercial one is staggering.

The United Launch Alliance, the joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing that manufactures and operates the commercial Atlas and Delta launchers, estimates that it could have a crew module flying on its vehicles for a few billion dollars at most (well within the $6 billion proposed by Obama) no later than 2015, and probably earlier. Their vehicles have a highly reliable flight record (as opposed to the nonexistent Ares) and have been entrusted with military satellites valued at a billion dollars each.

Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), which had a successful first launch of its Falcon 9 rocket last month, expects to fly again in September with a test of its Dragon crew module, with a follow-on next year to demonstrate the ability to rendezvous and dock with the International Space Station. The company estimates that it can be ready to deliver crew on it within three years for a billion dollars at most.

So why does the House insist on returning to the hyper-expensive Constellation approach? The claim is that it is in the "national interest," as one of the bill's findings indicates: "It is in the national interest for the United States Government to develop a government system to serve as an independent means -- whether primary or backup -- of crewed access to low-Earth orbit and beyond so that it is not dependent on either non-United States or commercial systems for its crewed access to space."

But why? Why aren't redundant commercial systems adequate? We don't make this demand for moving troops to a war zone -- we rely on commercial systems. Why would Congress treat private American companies as though they are in the same category as foreign governments? And why is it determined to spend an order of magnitude more money for an "insurance policy" against the potential failure of multiple commercial providers? That's not how any insurance policy with which I'm familiar works -- usually it's a small amount of money to pay to insure a much larger amount.

I can only think of one reason. That is, it's not in the national interest of the U.S. government -- it's in the parochial interest of representatives with NASA contractor jobs in their district, who want to get re-elected.

The irony, of course, is that by choosing this approach, they aren't reducing our dependence on "non-United States" entities for access to the space station. They are increasing and extending it.

If this bill becomes law, the Russians will be getting hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars in the coming years for a service that could have been provided by private American companies.

As the Russians would say, Spasibo, Congress.

Rand Simberg is an aerospace engineer, space and business consultant and serial entrepreneur. He blogs at Transterrestrial Musings. His previous op-eds for AOL News include "SpaceX Launch Shows Promise of Private Space Travel," "A Space Program for the Rest of Us" and "NASA's Future Gets Murkier."