Congress

Coalition of the willing, space edition

The Commerce, Justice, and Science subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee will hold a hearing Thursday on the NASA FY06 budget, with administrator Griffin scheduled to testify. Sen. Barbara Mikulski, the ranking Democrat on that subcommittee, offered a hint of what she and her colleagues may be most interested in during a Maryland Space Business Roundtable luncheon Monday, Space News reported (subscription required). She said that she would seek an additional $250 million to cover the cost of shuttle servicing mission to Hubble, as well as increased support for aeronautics programs. Most interesting, though, is her claim that she is forming a bipartisan “coalition” of 16 senators who will seek a “robust allocation” for NASA. That coalition includes both senators from the key states of California, Ohio, and Virginia; no other members were announced in the report.

14 comments to Coalition of the willing, space edition

  • Given Griffin’s move back to the 60s and the political movement to reinstate everything done to remove distractions from NASA, I’m really starting to think that the implementation of the Vision stinks and has turned into NASA-as-usual.

    Is there anything to suggest otherwise? Admonitions to “Stay tuned.” being insufficiently convincing in my book.

  • I’m afraid that I agree. The Hubble decision may or may not have been technically or financially wise, but it has proven to be a needless political disaster that will end up costing NASA far more (in every sense) than just flying a Shuttle mission. This could have been handled far better. It still could be.

    Suggestions: make sure the Webb NGST is built as fast as possible and that it is controlled and utilized from Goddard. Be honest that Hubble is being killed for financial reasons and then point out that the Webb will soon be available and talk about the wonderful images it will produce. Start early work on a post-Web telescope, in a distant orbit and serviced by astronauts based on or near the moon.

    Or, stop the bleeding by promising to fly the damnned Shuttle mission. There were and are many options of less controversial projects to kill to save money. Unfortunately, because of the politically awful way Hubble was handled, the political will to do that to concentrate resources on VSE has been frittered away.

    — Donald

  • Bill White

    So long as space exploration is funded by a “single payor” (meaning the taxpayers) space exploration will necessarily be a political football.

    “Spinning in” new technologies is cool but what we really need to do is find a way “spin in” some private sector cash.

  • Donald,
    Why Goddard and not the NSF?

  • William Berger

    MM wrote:
    “Given Griffin’s move back to the 60s and the political movement to reinstate everything done to remove distractions from NASA…”

    I have read that sentence four times now and I still have no idea what it means.

    DFR wrote:
    “Suggestions: make sure the Webb NGST is built as fast as possible and that it is controlled and utilized from Goddard.”

    The James Webb Space Telescope is not in good shape. Watch the news. You’ll hear about this soon enough.

    As for Hubble, you do realize that Griffin has now told Goddard to begin planning for a shuttle servicing mission to Hubble, right? He has said that no decision will be made until after the shuttle returns to flight, but this clearly implies that he wants to do the mission.

  • I think NSF would have been great, had Hubble been better handled. Unfortunately, now we have to either fly the Shuttle mission or buy off Sen. Barbara Mikulski. The way to do that latter is to make sure that future space telescope work is done at Goddard.

    Or, where is the NSF headquartered? If it’s not in Ms. Mikulski’s district, how about NSF managing future space telescope work at Goddard?

    — Donald

  • William Berger

    MM wrote:
    “Why Goddard and not the NSF?”

    Does the NSF have a satellite operations facility? Goddard does.

  • William Berger

    DFR wrote:
    “Or, where is the NSF headquartered? If it’s not in Ms. Mikulski’s district, how about NSF managing future space telescope work at Goddard?”

    Arlington, Virginia. About 10 miles outside of Washington, DC.

    I would politely suggest that you guys do a little research on this subject. You’re really demonstrating your ignorance. For starters, NSF is a relatively small agency ($4.5 billion vs. $16.2 billion for NASA) that does not run laboratories or facilities. It hands out grants to privately run institutions. To repeat: it does not RUN anything.

    Goddard is a NASA field center. It has things like dishes and computers that it uses to control satellites in orbit. So when you toss out ill-thought ideas like “give it to NSF,” what that would really require is _turning Goddard (or part of Goddard) over to NSF_. And in case you have not noticed, NSF is also a government bureaucracy. So all you have done is shift the cost, not eliminated the cost. In fact, doing so might actually increase the cost for complicated bureaucratic accounting reasons.

  • William, thanks for the update. I was not aware that Mr. Griffin was contemplating the Shuttle mission. I think that is very good news, making the best of a bad situation.

    I also am pleased to read that he is accelerating the CSV. He does seem to be making the right decisions.

    I am aware of the differences between the NSF and Goddard; it was not I who suggested the transfer. Space Telescopes, being something of a “social good” probably are best handled by the government, though if someone really thinks they can make a profit at it, I’ll buy a picture or two. . . .

    — Donald

  • I’m glad that the VSE is losing some of its enthusiasts in less than two years. It could have been called a Delusion of Space Exploration from the beginning.

  • “So when you toss out ill-thought ideas like “give it to NSF,” what that would really require is _turning Goddard (or part of Goddard) over to NSF_.”

    That actually was exactly my suggestion. And yes, that does mean moving it from one government agency to another. The point being to put all of the science in one place and all of the manned space flight and engineering in another. Take transportation research in general. DARPA and NSF both do research into fuel technologies, logistics research, etc. But you don’t see either of those agencies running the stuff that the DOT runs.

    William,
    I re-read that too and it is hard to read.
    What I was trying to say was this: two recent events:

    1) Griffin returning to the project management style of the 1960s

    2) Political lobbying around issues such as the Hubble, aeronautics, earth observing, pure science, etc (e.g. what Jeff is reporting on) that are restoring to NASA goals that the Aldridge Commission suggested be moved out

    are both moving us back to business as usual: an agency that is unfocused and stuck in a by gone era…

  • Michael, please explain what you mean by Griffin “returning to a management style of the ’60s” and why this is a bad thing?

    I need more detail to fully comprehend your argument.

    Thanks!

    — Donald

  • William Berger

    MM wrote:
    “The point being to put all of the science in one place and all of the manned space flight and engineering in another.”

    Why? Other than satisfying some aesthetic need, what would this do? (One thing it would do is screw up a lot of space science. The NSF doesn’t know how to manage it and they currently don’t care about it. So stuffing it in an agency that doesn’t give a $#!+ about it is a surefire way to ensure that it gets done badly. Furthermore, by placing it in another agency, you have increased the transaction costs. People now need to pick up a phone and arrange a meeting rather than simply walk down the hallway to get an answer. Each agency has its own overhead, so now you have twice as much overhead because the functions such as satellite control and launch integration are split in different agencies.)

    And do you honestly think that human spaceflight would _benefit_ by having all of the space science completely stripped away and given to another agency? You do realize (obviously you don’t, but I’m being rhetorical) that many members of Congress fund NASA largely because they believe that it is science-based? If you take away that, then you remove a considerable amount of justification for doing this stuff. And you’ve then turned NASA into a total pork-barrel agency, where the _only_ reason stuff gets funded is to shovel dollars back home. Certainly that is a major factor already, but your proposal would enshrine it in stone.

  • If you gave NSF that budget, then they would start caring. And why would the transaction costs be higher when there shouldn’t be much of an interface anyway? Are the transaction costs high between the DOT and DARPAs autonomous vehicle projects? Sure they are. Its because there isn’t much of a need to “walk down the hall” in the first place.

    If launch integration is a commercial enterprise then the interface between it and satellite control are industry standard things, reducing those transaction costs. Reducing transaction costs in industry is never done by creating huge conglomerates. Its done by creating standard interfaces between the components of an industry through commoditization and modularization.

    I think your key misunderstanding of my comment is your assumption that I want NASA to be doing manned space flight at all. I don’t. My comment was trying to say that one of the main goals of the Aldridge Report and the VSE was that an industry be developed that could do all of that (yes, it did say that NASA was still the purvue of human space flight but only so long as the industry wasn’t there willing to do it for them).

    Long time horizon, deep space and planetary probes should be managed by NASA for the NSF. All centers should become FFRDCs. Anything remotely like biology, earth observation, materials science, etc should be sent to NSF, DARPA, or the other research processes we already have. Space infrastructure such as ISS and most of the VSE should be an industry lead, government empowered enterprise done by something more along the lines of the East India or Hudson Bay Company model.

    You also make the incorrect assumption that I think congressional funding of NASA to do this stuff is a good thing. Its not.