Space Politics
Because sometimes the most important orbit is the Beltway…
Archive for May, 2004
May 31, 2004 at 10:34 am · Filed under Congress
MSNBC published late Friday a detailed article about the obstacles facing HR 3752 in the Senate, notably the definition issues previously noted here. This is the first article (that I have seen) in the mainstream media to talk about the status of this legislation in any detail. There are a number of interesting tidbits in the article, such as identifying the senator who raised concerns about the bill as Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma.
There may be some good news for the legislation, though. I spent the weekend at the International Space Development Conference, the annual National Space Society conference, in Oklahoma City (hence the lack of postings the last few days). According to a couple of sources I talked with there, on different sides of the issue, there appears to be a way to tweak the definitions in a way that will satisfy all involved. There were no details about what that change would be, but it apparently will assuage Rocketplane’s concerns while not creating significant new burdens for passage. The revised bill would have to go back to the House for its approval, but those sources said this should not be a serious issue. According to one source, the hope is to get the bill passed and sent to the President by the end of June—perhaps so that he can sign it into law around the same time that he delivers his next address on space policy, which is rumored to be in the works for some time this summer.
May 29, 2004 at 7:39 pm · Filed under Congress
The Houston Chronicle reported Friday that Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) has sent a letter to President Bush asking him to reverse NASA’s decision to cancel the SM4 Hubble servicing mission. The letter was accompanied by a petition signed by 26 former astronauts, including Scott Carpenter, Gene Cernan, and Dick Gordon, asking for the SM4 reinstatement. Both make the arguments that the benefits of a Hubble servicing mission outweigh the risks, and that robotic servicing of Hubble would not be as effective as a shuttle mission. (SpaceRef.com has a copy of the letter and petition.) Interestingly, Hutchison has apparently elected not to cosponsor S.Res 324, the resolution introduced by Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) two months ago that called for an independent study of the SM4 cancellation decision, and to continue preparations for that mission while the study was in progress. To date the only cosponsors for the resolution are Sam Brownback (R-KS) and Paul Sarbanes (D-MD), who signed on earlier this month.
May 26, 2004 at 12:35 pm · Filed under Congress
In a UPI article yesterday, Frank Sietzen describes the upcoming political challenges the Vision for Space Exploration faces in Congress. The article has a couple of interesting tidbits, including the possibility that the NASA authorization bill soon to be introduced in Congress will include a provision giving the NASA administrator the “political authority” to close a field center, although not mandate it. While some critics have suggested that NASA needs to realign and possibly close some centers, Sietzen suggests that this provision is primarily designed to give Sean O’Keefe a “budgetary ace-in-the-hole” to get recalcitrant legislators in affected states to support NASA budget increases.
It might be a moot point, though: Sietzen writes that “most” Congressional staffers familiar with the authorization bill plans believe that the bill will get lost in the rush to pass other legislation before Congress adjourns for the fall campaign. That’s in strong contrast to Pete Worden, working in Sen. Brownback’s office, who said at the COMSTAC meeting last week that he believed that that there was a “pretty good shot”, or better than a 50-50 chance, of getting the authorization bill passed. That legislation should be introduced in the Senate in the next couple of weeks, Brownback said at the JPL town hall meeting yesterday.
May 25, 2004 at 7:52 pm · Filed under Other
This week’s issue of Space News has an article (not available online) about the AFL-CIO’s “America’s Priorities” web site that was previously discussed here. A spokesman from the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM)—a union that is a member of the AFL-CIO—said in the article that his union supported space exploration. Indeed, the IAM spokesman said the union didn’t think the Vision for Space Exploration went far enough, and that more funding is required. Bruce Mahone of the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA), a member of the Space Exploration Alliance, said that he understood that the AFL-CIO would back away from their opposition because of the opinions of the IAM. However, as of this evening the America’s Priorities web site is still up, although with a few cosmetic tweaks that don’t alter the overall message.
May 25, 2004 at 9:26 am · Filed under Congress
Senator Sam Brownback and Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, the chairmen of the Senate and House subcommittees that oversee NASA, will jointly hold a town hall meeting Tuesday at 3 pm PDT (6 pm EDT) at JPL. The topic, as you might imagine, is the Vision for Space Exploration. For those not at the lab, the event will be webcast.
May 24, 2004 at 1:08 pm · Filed under Congress
A lot has been said of late of the very slow pace of activity in Congress, particularly in the Senate, where very little legislation, from space issues to budgets to judicial nominations, have been getting through. There are, though, exceptions to the rule, one of which is tangentially space-related. S.2315, with the descriptive title of “A bill to amend the Communications Satellite Act of 1962 to extend the deadline for the INTELSAT initial public offering”, was introduced by Sen. Conrad Burns of Montana on April 8. On April 27th the Senate approved the bill by unanimous consent, and referred to the House, which also passed the bill by unanimous consent on May 5. President Bush signed the bill into law on May 18, only 40 days after its introduction.
The bill amends an earlier law, the ORBIT Act, that set a deadline for satellite operator Intelsat, which was privatized several years ago, to conduct an initial public offering (IPO) of stock. The deadlines in the original act had been extended several times, and prior to the passage of S.2315 stood at June 30, 2004. The bill extends the deadline one year, with the option of another six-month extension to the end of 2005. Intelsat wasted little time taking advantage of the measure: three days after it was signed into law the company announced it was withdrawing a planned IPO it announced earlier in the year. That’s good news to Lockheed Martin, Intelsat’s largest shareholder, which backed the legislation, hoping that an extension would allow Intelsat to wait until the IPO markets were better, or could find a buyout offer that was a better deal.
May 24, 2004 at 12:54 pm · Filed under Other
Later this week at the 2004 International Space Development Conference, the annual conference of the National Space Society in Oklahoma City, there will be one track devoted to space policy issues. That track, scheduled for Friday, features a number of well-known speakers including Courtney Stadd, Dana Johnson, and Jeff Bingham. Randall Clague, government liaison for XCOR Aerospace, is also scheduled to talk about the status of “suborbital space flight legislation”, presumably HR 3752 and its status in the Senate. See the program tracks page for more details, although the conference web site only has speaker names and titles; no abstracts or more detailed descriptions.
May 22, 2004 at 8:23 am · Filed under Congress
A couple of notes to follow-up on this earlier posting about concerns regarding HR 3752. At the full COMSTAC meeting at FAA Headquarters on Thursday, Pete Worden, the retired Air Force general who is serving as a Congressional fellow in the office of Sen. Sam Brownback, discussed the status of the bill in the Senate. He said there is a lot of interest in it in the Senate, but those most willing to push the bill through are busy working now on NASA authorization legislation, which should be introduced in the next few weeks. He hinted at the concerns regarding what kinds of vehicles the bill covers, adding that one unnamed Senator has raised the issue, but seemed optimistic that those concerns could eventually be worked through.
On Friday I talked with an industry expert familiar with the status of HR 3752. While I had previously noted that the specific concern—that vehicles that “self ferry” under jet power might not be considered a suborbital rocket under the FAA definition—was not new, this source said that the specific concern had actually emerged relatively recently. Even though the definition in the legislation was publicly unveiled at the Space Access ‘03 conference in April 2003, and published in the Federal Register six months later, Rocketplane Ltd. didn’t voice their concerns about the definition until February, after the bill had been reported out of the House Science Committee. It has also been difficult for those working to advance the bill to figure out exactly what Rocketplane thinks it needs to resolve the issue. Congressional staff working on the legislation are said to be willing to accommodate Rocketplane on the issue, at least to some degree. The longer it takes to resolve this, this source warned, the less likely the bill will pass this year.
May 21, 2004 at 3:49 pm · Filed under Other
In the May issue of SpaceWatch, the newsletter of the Space Foundation, there’s an article by foundation president Elliot Pulham about public support for the new exploration plan. An excerpt:
…in survey upon survey over the past two decades we [the American public] have expressed overwhelming support for the nation’s civil space program. Nonetheless, our politicians remain narrowly focused on “mail box issues” — ignoring the silent majority of support for space exploration in favor of pandering to the much smaller audience of squeaky wheels — the letter writing vested interests who, although small in number, set the mailboxes of elected officials on fire if their benefit or entitlement is threatened.
This “squeaky wheel gets the grease” mindset has led to the all-too-familiar refrain on Capitol Hill, “I’m not getting any mail on that.” Well, duh. Americans are not likely to be whipped into a letter-writing frenzy over an issue that they regard as such an apple-pie no-brainer. The challenge is for elected officials to act as leaders of public opinion rather than followers of their mailbox.
This is an interesting argument, but I don’t know how valid it really it is. While public support of space exploration, in the broadest, most general terms, might be significant, that support tends to drop off as more details, particularly the cost of such plans, emerge. Polls ranging from a CBS/New York Times poll in January to one that focused on people living in only one part of upstate New York showed, at best, lukewarm support for the new plan based on the details available at the time. Proponents of the Vision for Space Exploration should be careful about assuming that a vast “silent majority” exists in support of the plan, and continue to sell the plan to the public as well as Congress.
May 20, 2004 at 10:32 pm · Filed under Congress
At Wednesday afternoon’s meeting of the RLV Working Group of the Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC) at FAA Headquarters, there was a spirited discussion among participants about the status and fate of HR 3752. At least one person present had concerns about the bill because of the language used in the bill to define suborbital rockets:
’suborbital rocket’ means a rocket-propelled vehicle intended for flight on a suborbital trajectory whose thrust is greater than its lift for the majority of the powered portion of its flight.
While this covers a wide range of vehicles, from vertically-launched rockets to air-launched rocket-powered vehicles (like SpaceShipOne), there is a concern that it might exclude vehicles that take off under jet power, “self-ferry” some distance from the launch site using its jets, then fire its rocket engines for a suborbital flight. (An example is the XP from Rocketplane Ltd., formerly Pioneer Rocketplane.) Those vehicles might not strictly meet the definition because of their use of jet engines, and thus would either not be able to get a suborbital RLV license, or else would have to get both a launch license and an aviation certificate. Moreover, while suborbital RLVs can enter revenue service with a launch license, aircraft on experimental certificates cannot, thus requiring a potentially more expensive and time-consuming certification process.
This concern is not new, but has taken on added urgency for those most affected by it now that the bill has passed the House and is now sitting in the Senate. While others in the suborbital industry—as well as some FAA/AST officials—believe that this is not a big issue, and vehicles like the XP can get launch licenses, companies like Rocketplane Ltd. don’t want to be the test case for an ambiguous issue.
The obvious solution would be to change the definition of suborbital rockets in the Senate version of the legislation to make sure such borderline vehicles are clearly included. This, though, would make the Senate version different from the House version, requiring a conference committee to hash out the differences (assuming that the Senate does decide to accede to and accept HR 3752). However, in a year like this, with much bigger issues to contend with and the slow rate of legislative progress in the Senate, that could be fatal. As one attendee put it, “If this bill goes to conference, it will not happen this year.” That would mean starting all over again in the next Congress…
Next entries »
