Sunday’s Naples (Florida) Daily News features a column by noted science fiction author and space advocate Ben Bova. He uses the column to promote both NASA and space commercialization, suggesting the private sector, for the right money, might be motivated enough to either service or safely return to Earth the Hubble Space Telescope. Unfortunately, he uses some faulty statistics to back up his claims.
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As noted here earlier, one of the candidates in the Republican primary for the US Senate race in Illinois is Chirinjeev Kathuria, one of the early investors in MirCorp. With that primary coming up in just over two weeks, I was curious to see how he was doing in a crowded field of candidates for the open Senate seat. According to a Chicago Tribune article published Monday, Kathuria is lumped together with several other candidates under the catch-all “Other”, with only 2% of the vote combined together. It would appear that Dr. Kathuria’s bid to be a senator will be as successful as MirCorp’s effort was to save the Mir space station.
Leading the Republican primary in Illinois, with 30% in the Tribune/WGN poll, is Jack Ryan. Besides sharing a name with the protagonist of a number of Tom Clancy novels, Ryan is best known for once being married to actress Jeri Ryan, who played “Seven of Nine” on Star Trek: Voyager.
Jack Ryan, though, doesn’t appear to be much of a fan of space: in a campaign commercial he answers the doorbell to his home and is greeted by a stereotypically nerdy scientist. “Hi, I’m Dr. Jasper,” the man says, “I’m collecting to build a telescope on a volcanic peak in Mexico.” Ryan then slams the door in his face. After a couple of similar encounters with people trying to raise money for other odd projects, the commercial cuts to Ryan, sitting in his living room. “Every home in America pays $21,000 in taxes to fund ridiculous programs like these,” he says. “If you’re tired of the government wasting your money, vote for me.”
The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported Thursday that Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry has picked up the endorsement of former Ohio senator and astronaut John Glenn. Less newsworthy than the endorsement—which doesn’t carry that much weight—is some of the comments Kerry said in his speech about whether there should be human missions to the Moon and Mars:
But Kerry said the U.S. government should not be talking about returning to the moon or going to Mars missions proposed by President Bush.
Rather, he said, leaving his prepared speech, “we need to go to the moon right here on Earth” by creating high-paying jobs of the future and making sure that “young Americans in uniform are never held hostage” to Middle East oil.
The Toledo Blade offers the full quote at the end of its article about Kerry’s speech:
“What we need to do as we enter this dawn of the 21st century, is not talk about going to the Moon or even to Mars. We need to go to the Moon right here on Earth by creating the jobs, building the high value-added jobs of the future, making clear that no young American in uniform ever ought to be held hostage to America’s dependence on oil in the Middle East,” he said.
On the face of it, this appears to be a far stronger rejection of the Bush space initiative than what he told the AP.
The Associated Press, as part of an ongoing series of articles on various issues of the 2004 presidential campaign, asked the major candidates if they supported plans to send humans back to the Moon by 2020. The sound bites published in the AP article aren’t terribly informative: both Kerry and Edwards offer general support for the space program, but caution that the costs of sending humans to Mars must be balanced against other programs. Kucinich went into a little more detail, preferring to focus on the ISS rather than lunar exploration. (Neither Sharpton nor Bush responded to the AP’s question, but I think we know where the President stands on the issue…) Those who have been reading this weblog for a while, or read my article in The Space Review back in January, will not find any revelations in this piece. Alan Boyle of MSNBC also discusses this AP article in his Cosmic Log weblog.
On Wednesday the Aerospace Industries Association released a five-year research and development plan for the aerospace industry. The plan focuses primarily on the aeronautics sector, but the press release announcing the plan does make mention of NASA’s plans to develop a Crew Exploration Vehicle:
Although AIA supports the president’s plan, which increases funding for exploration capabilities by $12 billion over the next five years, the association believes the administration should be challenged to create a new human-rated space exploration vehicle by 2010, rather than 2014. The current NASA plan calls for retirement of the space shuttle by 2010 and a new manned vehicle by 2014, leaving a four year gap in which maintenance of the International Space Station would be accomplished by Russian or French space vehicles.
The plan would increase NASA’s budget by an average of $4 billion a year for the next five years to (in part) accelerate the CRV development, as part of an overall $34-billion increase to NASA’s budget during that period, according to an additional fact sheet. Some of the additional funding would also go to shore up NASA’s aeronautics program. Under such a plan NASA would get $28.8 billion in FY2008, about $11 billion more than under the current Administration’s plan. (The plan is a little confusing because it talks about increasing NASA’s 2004 budget, but we’re nearly five months into FY04 now and the budget, while delayed, was finally approved several weeks ago.)
The plan has some noble goals, but given the opposition the Bush plan has run into for a very slight increase in NASA’s budget, it seems highly unlikely that the Administration or Congress would endorse a much steeper increase.
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The President’s Commission on Moon, Mars, and Beyond, aka the Aldridge Commission, issued a press release Tuesday with more details about their next public hearing, scheduled for March 3-4 in Dayton, Ohio. The hearing will take place in the “soon-to-be-completed” Missile Gallery at the Air Force Museum from 1-5pm on Wednesday the 3rd and 9 am-4 pm on Thursday the 4th. The last half-hour of the session on the 4th will be devoted to audience comments. A press conference is scheduled for 4:15 pm on the 4th as well.
The commission’s web site has also updated its set of documents associated with the first public hearing held in Washington DC two weeks ago. In addition to the video of the hearing, the site now includes the meeting minutes, slide presentations from the witnesses, and photos of the commissioners and witnesses.
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President Bush signed into law on Tuesday the NASA Flexibility Act of 2004 (S.610). The bill gives NASA new power to attract and retain employees, including paying bonuses and establishing high salaries for a handful of positions deemed critical by the agency. The law also allows NASA to establish a scholarship program for college students; the students would, in turn, go to work at NASA for a period of time after graduation.
The bill, passed by Congress late last month, was relatively non-controversial, with bipartisan support in both houses. However, a few people have expressed some criticism of the legislation, saying it wasn’t really needed: this article by A.J. Mackenzie from The Space Review last June summarizes those arguments.
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Tuesday’s Washington Times has an op-ed piece by Jim Muncy on the Bush space policy. For those who weren’t able to attend the Georgetown Law School panel session on the policy that included Muncy, this commentary is very similar to his remarks there, although he spoke in much greater detail during the panel. Towards the end of the essay, Muncy quotes a George Will book that compared President Eisenhower to a quartermaster in his treatment of the nascent space program, while likening JFK to general who saw that the program “was primarily about politics, in a grand sense: it was about defining and shaping the nation’s spirit and confounding its enemies.” Muncy then concludes:
In that context, Mr. Bush has indeed found his “Kennedy moment.” By realigning our space program toward opening the space frontier to and for all humanity, Mr. Bush has thrown the space agency’s cap over the wall. NASA has no other option but to let go of its bureaucratic past and pursue this risky but rewarding future. Of course, Congress must join with the president and do its part as well.
An article in the Council Bluffs (Iowa) Sunday Nonpareil suggests that some educators may be opposed to the Bush space plan because of the perception that it’s taking money away from educational programs. The opening paragraph is blunt:
Is the exploration of Mars more important than the education of your child? “Clearly, their priorities are off,” said John Hieronymous, president of the Iowa State Education Association. “The president is suggesting sending someone to Mars is worthwhile, much more worthwhile than education.”
The article creates a false dichotomy that there exists a pot of money that can be spent either on space or on education, but nothing else: in other words, every dollar spent on NASA is one less for teachers and textbooks. Of course, that’s not the case. School districts are supported by local and state funds in additional to federal monies, while NASA is reliant solely on the federal government. Even at the federal level NASA and the Deptment of Education don’t directly compete with one another: NASA is grouped, along with other independent agencies, with HUD and Veterans Affairs, while Education shares an appropriations subcommittee with Labor and HHS.
I bring up this article for two reasons. One is that Council Bluffs probably isn’t the only place in the US where educators and/or students think NASA is somehow taking money away from educational programs: it’s a fairly typical Midwestern town. How I know that is the second reason I mention this article: I grew up in Council Bluffs, although I have long since moved away.
I alluded in a posting a couple days ago that NASA comptroller Steve Isakowitz had outlined four “great misconceptions” about the new space initiative. I hadn’t had the chance until now to discuss what those misconceptions were that Isakowitz outlined during a Space Transportation Association breakfast earlier this month. In short, the four misconceptions are:
1) The program is too Moon-centric
2) It is too expensive
3) It is not expensive enough
4) It slashes science
He spent much of his talk debunking those misconceptions, noting that, for example, going to the Moon is designed primarily to demonstrate new technologies, not to establish a permanent base. He also noted that over half of the funds planned for the program (through 2020) go to robotic, rather than human, missions, and that no existing programs were canceled to pay for it (although some, like Beyond Einstein and JIMO, will be delayed.)
Isakowitz also sounded a note of caution. If we “blow it” this time, he warned, it could be decades before we get another shot at such a program. He said that while the current economic situation may not be ideal, it will likely not get better in the next decade. This seemed perhaps a little too pessimistic, but does give the impression that this plan is perceived with the agency as the last, best chance for major change for fthe foreseeable future.