To quote the SSES' new letter of recommendations to NASA: "[There are] major challenges facing the Space Operations Management Organization (SOMO). The Deep Space Network has no amortization budget and consumes its maintenance budget to preserve operations... These problems translate into a budget shortfall for SOMO of about $400 million over about five years." NASA has decided to transfer management of the DSN to the Office of Space Science -- but this means that that $400 million over the next five years will have to come out of the rest of the Space Science budget.

On top of this, the Senate has ordered that NASA immediately begin preparations to privatize the DSN by moving its management to a branch of the Lockheed Martin Corporation.

While the SSES tends to sympathize with the common desire to economize by privatizing operations, most of its members take a very dim view of radically shifting its management at precisely the time when the DSN must undergo an drastic expansion in functions in order to deal with its burdens over the next few years.

Indeed, some of them have privately said that such a move would be "catastrophic".

The SSES did not take an official stand on this in its letter of recommendations, since the Senate made the decision at the very time the meeting was going on.

But last week, the Division of Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society (which includes most of the nation's planetary astronomers) issued an official letter strongly opposing such a move:

"Removing the control of the Telecommunications and Mission Operations Directorate [which includes the DSN] from JPL carries the risk of dissipating a highly integrated group of research and control engineers [which has] provided critical support for space activities...around the country. Lack of continuity in such a critical support facility may put at risk our nation's ability to operate deep space missions successfully."

The second major new problem deals with the fact -- also announced at the SSES meeting -- that Boeing's production line for Delta 2 boosters, one of the mainstays of NASA's medium-sized space missions, will soon be closed down.

This is because the Air Force -- by a big margin the biggest consumer of Delta 2s, which it has used mostly for launching its network of GPS navigation satellites -- will soon be switching to use of Boeing's upcoming "Delta 4 Medium" booster. The remaining supply of Delta 2s will be exhausted around late 2008.

Delta 4 is designed to cost far less per kilogram of payload than Delta 2 -- but, even in its smallest version ("Delta 4 Medium"), it's a much more powerful rocket: capable of putting 4200 kg into a geosynchronous transfer orbit, as compared to only 900 to 1900 kg for the various versions of Delta 2.

This makes no difference for both military satellites and commercial comsats -- several of them can easily be carried on a single Delta 4 and put into similar initial orbits before being dispersed using their own motors.

But different scientific satellites require wildly different kinds of orbits, and of course planetary probes must be launched on totally different trajectories during launch windows separated from each other by months.

The result is that for scientific missions a Delta 4 has vast excess capacity compared to a Delta 2 -- and even though it's designed to cost only about a third as much per kg of payload as Delta 2, that still means that it costs about $65 million per booster as compared to $50 million for Delta 2 A similar excess-capacity problem applies to the Atlas 3 and Atlas 5-Medium boosters that Lockheed Martin will supply as rivals to Delta 4.

And so, if NASA is forced to launch its Delta-class science payloads on these bigger boosters, their mission costs will unnecessarily increase by $15 million per flight!

Right now, no one is planning to build any new booster with similar payload capability to the Delta 2 -- and federal law forbids launching any American payloads whatsoever on any foreign booster of similar size.

So NASA's Discovery and Mars Scout deep-space missions, and its MIDEX-class Explorer scientific satellites, will soon be costing more.