Space Politics
Because sometimes the most important orbit is the Beltway…
Archive for February, 2004
February 14, 2004 at 6:16 pm · Filed under Other
On Friday the GAO issued a report studying requirements for shuttle upgrades. At first glance the report’s language looks a little odd: it notes in the preface that the shuttle “is planned for use well into the second decade of this century and possibly beyond.” Given that the President announced last month that the shuttle will be retired in 2010, is the GAO slow to hear the news? Not really. The study was performed from Aptil to October 2003, the report notes near the end, and was submitted to Sen. John Breaux (D-LA) on January 15: the day after the announcement, far too late to make any changes to the report. As the report notes, “NASA cannot fully define shuttle upgrade requirements until it resolves its uncertainty over the shuttle’s operational life,” and now that this uncertainty has been removed—at least for now—we’ll see how the agency moves ahead.
February 13, 2004 at 3:01 pm · Filed under Congress
Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) introduced legislation this week that would authorize funding for NASA to carry out searches of near Earth objects (NEOs). The “George R. Brown Near-Earth Object Survey Act” (HR 3813) is a short bill that can be summarized in this single sentence taken directly from the bill: “The [NASA] Administrator shall plan, develop, and implement a Near-Earth Object Survey program to detect, track, catalogue, and characterize the physical characteristics of near-Earth asteroids and comets equal to or greater than 100 meters in diameter in order to assess the threat of such near-Earth objects in striking the Earth.” The bill would authorize $20 million in FY2005 and 2006 for the survey, and also require NASA to submit an annual report on the search to Congress for five years. The bill was introduced Wednesday and referred to the House Science Committee; no futher action has yet been announced.
The naming of this bill is a little odd (at least to me.) The most famous George R. Brown was a Houston businessman (for whom that city’s convention center is named), but with only nebulous ties to NASA in general (his company, Brown and Root, helped build the Johnson Space Center) and nothing with NEOs. There was a Congressman George E. Brown, a Democrat from California, who led the House Science Committee back in the early 1990s and expressed an interest in NEO searches, however (read a quote from him at the end of this 1995 AIAA position paper on the NEO threat.) It’s not clear if the bill title is a typo or a reference to another George R. Brown out there somewhere…
(Thanks to Marc Schlather of ProSpace for pointing out the existence of this legislation.)
February 13, 2004 at 10:56 am · Filed under Uncategorized
This Wednesday’s issue of the Capitol Hill newspaper The Hill includes a full-page article about space tourism and the regulatory issues associated with it. What’s interesting about the article is that, in the print edition, it is included in the middle of a special section on transportation issues, alongside articles about Amtrak, a highway bill, and public transportation. The article isn’t too bad, although it does contain a minor error: it refers to the “Congressional Space Act of 2003″, introduced last October, as HR 3752. In fact, the “Commercial Space Act of 2003″ was HR 3245, but has been superceded by the “Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act of 2004″, which is HR 3752.
February 13, 2004 at 10:02 am · Filed under Other
For those of you who will be in the Washington DC area next week, there are a couple of space policy events of note to add to your calendars:
On the evening of Tuesday, February 17, the Georgetown Law Center’s Space Law Society will host a discussion titled “Mission to Mars or Mission Impossible?” The speakers will include former astronaut Rick Searfoss, PoliSpace president Jim Muncy, Ed Hudgins of the Objectivist Center, and Univ. of Maryland professor Robert Park, who the press release identifies as “Physicist and Space Critic”. The event starts at 6:30 pm on the 12th floor of 120 F St. NW.
At noon on Friday, February 20, the George C Marshall Institute will hold a discussion titled “Evaluating the New Space Policy: A Panel Discussion”. Speakers include Robert Butterworth, president of Aries Analytics; Richard Buenneke of the Aerospace Corporation; and Stu Nozette, a DARPA program manager. The event will be in room B-340 of the Rayburn House Office Building; the event is free but an RSVP is required.
February 11, 2004 at 6:19 am · Filed under Other
I’ve been wrapped up attending the FAA Commercial Space Transportation Forecast Conference in Washington yesterday and today (in a hotel sadly lacking WiFi access), so posting here has been light. It should pick up again later this week. There are several good tidbits from the conference I’ll mention here in the next few days. I’m also busy “guest blogging” this week for Technology Review magazine on space issues (mostly Mars, but I did mention the Aldridge commission this morning.)
February 11, 2004 at 6:13 am · Filed under White House
The White House went on the record Tuesday in its support for Pete Aldridge, chairman of the commission reviewing the implementation of the new space policy, Reuters reports. A White House spokesperson said that the President “is supportive of Mr. Aldridge and is grateful to him for accepting this position to serve.” A couple weeks ago Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) criticized the choice of Aldridge, noting a potential conflict of interest: Aldridge serves on the board of directors for Lockheed Martin, and had a “cozy relationship” with Boeing when with the Air Force.
Meanwhile, the Aldridge Commission, which now has a web site, is holding its first public hearing today in Washington. The event will be broadcast on NASA TV for those who can’t make it in person.
February 9, 2004 at 8:14 pm · Filed under Other
The President’s Commission on Implementation of United States Space Exploration Policy (hereafter the “Aldridge commission”) has scheduled its first public hearing for Wednesday, but the commission is already at work. SPACE.com reported Monday that the commission was scheduled to meet Monday somewhere in Virginia for a closed-door meeting. That tidbit came from an interview with Neil Tyson, one of the members of the commission.
In addition, one email correspondent noted an error in the Federal Register notice about Wednesday’s meeting. One of the topics on the agenda reads: “Review of accomplishments of previous commissions, such as Pioneering the Space Frontier (Augustine) and America’s Space Exploration Initiative (Stafford).” The Augustine Commission did not publish “Pioneering the Space Frontier“, which dates back to the mid-1980s: the Augustine Commission completed its report in 1990.
February 9, 2004 at 7:56 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe is scheduled to appear before the full House Science Committee on Thursday at 10 am to discuss “the President’s proposed space exploration initiative, including its goals and potential price tag, and the impact it may have on other NASA programs.” The reference to other NASA programs will almost certainly include a discussion of NASA’s decision to cancel the SM4 Hubble servicing mission. The New York Times reported Saturday that Congressional staffers said the topic would come up in the wake of new, anonymous documents that indicate that a shuttle mission to Hubble would be no less safe than one to ISS. (The article now includes links to the two documents mentioned in the piece, and SpaceRef.com also has HTML versions of the documents.) NASA is already fighting back, with agency officials telling SPACE.com that the report “over simplifies these complicated interrelated issues.”
February 9, 2004 at 1:29 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
There’s a wide-open race for the US Senate in Illinois this year as incumbent Republican Peter Fitzgerald is retiring after a single term. This has attracted over a dozen candidates but, as the Chicago Sun-Times reports Monday, many of them are in agreement in their opposition to the new Bush space policy. All seven Democrats and two of the half-dozen Republican candidates are opposed to the plan, but for different—yet predictable—reasons. The Democrats are opposed because they feel the funding devoted to such a plan would be better spent on social programs. The Republicans, on the other hand, think the money simply shouldn’t be spent at all.
The article misses an interesting angle. One of the Republican candidates quoted in the article in support of the plan is Dr. Chirinjeev Kathuria, who said that NASA needs “high-profile, high-concept goals”. It turns out this is the same Chirinjeev Kathuria who was one of the founders and investors in MirCorp, the company that tried to commercialize the Russian space station Mir several years ago and is now trying to establish a foothold in the space tourism business. (As of midday Monday the web site for MirCorp was returning an error message in Dutch.) It would have been interesting for the the Sun-Times reporter to dig into this a bit and see if Kathuria’s views are shaped in any way by his MirCorp experience, or what role he felt commercial interests could play in the new space initiative.
February 8, 2004 at 8:45 pm · Filed under Other
In many fields—the computing industry in particular—there is something known as FUD: fear, uncertainty, and doubt. It’s propaganda usually provided by one company, sometimes only loosely based on the facts, designed to raise doubts among a wider audience about a competing company’s product. For example, proponents of the Linux operating system often claim that they have to fight FUD generated by the likes of Microsoft and SCO.
The space arena has seen its share of FUD in recent weeks by people opposed, for one reason or another, to the Bush space plan. Last Sunday, Florida Today printed an essay by Alex Roland, a former NASA chief historian, who took issue with the Bush space plan with what seemed to be a convincing set of facts. On Sunday, Florida Today printed a sharp rebuttal to this essay by Dwayne Day, who takes issue with a number of facts presented in the Roland piece. Day essentially takes apart Roland’s commentary, piece by piece, exposing the flawed facts used to support those original arguments. In a time when trillion-dollar price tags are applied to the plan with no justification whatsoever, it’s refreshing to see a bit a FUD fighting going on.
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