Space Politics
Because sometimes the most important orbit is the Beltway…
Archive for September, 2005
September 30, 2005 at 7:06 am · Filed under Congress
The AP reports that the Government Accountability Office will release a report today finding that NASA often flew its personnel on its own aircraft instead of utilizing commercial flights, spending an extra $20 million in the process in fiscal years 2003 and 2004. Current NASA administrator Mike Griffin has promised to reform NASA’s travel policies to limit the use of its own aircraft. While $20 million is not much in the larger scheme of things, like a $16-billion annual budget, it is a bit embarrassing at a time when NASA is tying to convince Congress and the public that it can be fiscally prudent as it plans a human return to the Moon. (As you may recall, this issue was supposed to be the topic of a Congressional hearing that has been delayed twice, once because of the August recess and once because of hurricane-related hearings; it has not been rescheduled.)
September 29, 2005 at 6:29 am · Filed under Congress
The Senate approved, by unanimous consent, its version of a NASA authorization bill on Wednesday. As you may recall, one of the provisions of S.1281 is that “the Administrator may not retire the Space Shuttle orbiter until a replacement human-rated spacecraft system has demonstrated that it can take humans into Earth orbit and return them safely”. The bill also designates the US segment of the ISS as a national laboratory to “expand the variety of areas to which space research can be applied,” the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Hutchison, said in a press release. The legislation must be reconciled with the House version, HR 3070, which passed by a wide margin in July.
September 28, 2005 at 1:03 pm · Filed under Congress
The AP is reporting that a Texas grand jury has indicted House Majority Leader Tom DeLay on a criminal conspiracy charge. While it’s a long way from an indictment to a conviction, this will at the very least prove to be a major distraction for DeLay, arguably the biggest supporter of NASA in Congress; he will have to step down at least temporarily from his leadership post just as a new battle for NASA’s exploration plan and budget gears up.
September 28, 2005 at 12:38 pm · Filed under Congress
It’s not very surprising, but a Senate subcommittee voted earlier this week to cut money from several high-profile, troubled military space programs. The cuts, made by the defense subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, include $250 million from the T-Sat program, $125 million from Space Radar, and $100 million from SBIRS. The House had already made similar cuts in its version of the budget. The cuts come at a time when there’s a strong debate over whether military space acquisition programs in general are “broken”, since nearly every major program is suffering from delays and cost overruns. Sen. Wayne Allard (R-CO) said yesterday that these problems “threaten our space dominance”, while Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), who co-chairs the Congressional Space Power Caucus with Sen. Allard, warned last week that budget cuts like those working their way through Congress “seriously risk damaging our industrial base, and in turn, our capabilities.” This is a key issue arguably as important to the nation as NASA’s exploration plan, but with only a small fraction of the public visibility.
September 27, 2005 at 7:34 am · Filed under Congress
Congressman Ken Calvert (R-CA), chair of the space subcommittee of the House Science Committee, is unsatisfied with one component of the new NASA lunar exploration plan: he thinks a manned landing on 2018 will be too late. Too late for what? He tells Aerospace Daily that he believes that China will land humans on the Moon before then: “I’ve been talking to a number of people that are much more knowledgeable about that than I am, [about] some things that maybe are still classified, but they believe that the Chinese are probably on the mark to get there sooner,” he told the publication.
Obviously, we’re not privy to the possibly-classified information that Calvert has apparently seen, but what is known suggests that while China may be interested in manned lunar missions, their schedule is not that aggressive. After all, next month’s Shenzhou 6 mission—a five-day, two-man flight—comes two years, almost to the day, after Shenzhou 5: hardly the sign of a program racing to the Moon. At last week’s International Lunar Conference in Toronto, Chinese representatives said their unmanned Chang’e lunar exploration program remained on its relatively slow schedule: a lunar orbiter to launch in 2007, a lander around 2012, and a sample return mission by around the end of the next decade. Calvert’s comments sound something like what former Congressman Robert Walker said a couple years ago, when a Japanese parliamentarian—a European in another version of the story—claimed that China would land men on the Moon in “three to four years”. Ooops. Moreover, as I have argued in the past, a space race between the US and China (or anyone else, for that matter), is hardly a recipe for an affordable, sustainable space exploration effort.
There are a couple of other interesting notes in the Aerospace Daily article. Both Calvert and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) support the NASA lunar exploration plan in general, although Rohrabacher said that “some tough ‘prioritizing’ will have to take place” in the overall NASA budget to pay for the plan. Rohrabacher, who previously led the space subcommittee, said he interested in becoming chairman of the full House Science Committee once the current chairman, Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY), wraps up his final term as committee chair.
September 26, 2005 at 7:08 am · Filed under Other
The New York Daily News noted today that New York magazine asked 60 Minutes anchor Morley Safer what he thought of NASA’s new lunar exploration plans. His response? “It’s the only way, short of murder, of getting rid of Donald Trump. And it’s worth every penny.” Hadn’t thought of that rationale, but, hey, whatever it takes…
September 26, 2005 at 7:00 am · Filed under Congress
There have been reports in recent days that the Office of Management and Budget has been studying the possibility of retiring the shuttle before 2010, in an apparent bid to save money for other agency programs, or to quiet fiscal conservatives. Florida Today reports that such a plan is—surprise!—unlikely to win support from some key members of Congress. “I wouldn’t let ‘em,” Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL), a staunch supporter of the shuttle, told the paper. “There would be plenty of other senators up here who wouldn’t let them.” (Presumably Nelson’s colleague on the Senate Commerce Committee’s space subcommittee, Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), would be among them.) Of course, Nelson goes on to say that, come 2010, “I don’t think there is any choice but to increase the budget to continue launching the shuttle.”
September 23, 2005 at 7:50 am · Filed under Other
SPACE.com reported yesterday that some members of Congress may seek to find ways to convert ballistic missiles earmarked for destruction under arms reduction treaties into small launch vehicles. Rep. Dennis Rehberg (R-MT), speaking at a space policy conference in Montana last weekend, said he felt it made more sense to use retired Peacekeeper missiles as launch vehicles, particularly if it costs no more to covert them than it would to destroy them. Rehberg said that he and two colleagues, Chet Edwards (D-TX) and Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-NJ), plan to “delve into the Peacekeeper use within the arena of non-proliferation.”
Unfortunately, there’s not much more information about what exactly Rep. Rehberg wants to do. ICBM assets are already being converted into launch vehicles through the Air Force’s Orbital Suborbital Program (OSP): a Minotaur 1 rocket, whose lower stages are from Minuteman 2 missiles, launched the STP-R1 satellite for DARPA just last night. The Minotaur costs about $20 million a launch, which may not exactly be “low-cost”, particularly in the eyes of university smallsat developers; it’s also limited to government-sponsored payloads. You can also imagine that companies developing small low-cost launches would also not be pleased to see increased competition from converted missiles.
September 23, 2005 at 6:55 am · Filed under NASA
One aspect of Monday’s ESAS announcement that hasn’t gotten a lot of attention is NASA’s continued push to seek commercial cargo and crew services options for the ISS. That’s not new, of course—Mike Griffin made comments along those lines this summer, as did Chris Shank at the Return to the Moon Conference in Las Vegas in July—but Monday’s announcement reiterated that intent even as NASA designs the CEV to be able to support the station as an alternative. As Griffin said at Monday’s press conference, according to the official transcript:
NASA has not had at its upper levels a manager or an administrator more supportive of commercial enterprise than I. We are base lining in the out years past the retirement of the shuttle, we are base lining commercial service to the station. That is the only known and knowable, at this point, market for those entrepreneurs that I have to give. We are base lining the use of that market for them and are providing, will be providing this fall a new procurement to try to stimulate that market.
That said, at the end of the day, what commercial means is, that it is not government directed. So, I can provide the incentive and I can provide the market that I have and commercial providers will either emerge or not. It is not acceptable for a publicly funded program not to have a way of meeting its mission requirements in the event that commercial operators do or don’t materialize. So, the architecture that we have advanced allows NASA to meet its mission requirements, but also allows NASA to concentrate its resources on other more advanced activities if commercial providers can emerge in the next five to seven years. That is exactly our intent.
Our fondest desire would be to keep NASA on the very frontier of space activity, letting commercial provider fill in for those activities which are not frontier activities. We will be putting some money where our mouth is.
The Space Frontier Foundation did notice that, and, not surprisingly, heartily endorses it and calls in supporters to defend the plan: “Money must be allocated and the agency’s tendency to make creeping changes which ultimately kill innovation must be blocked.”
September 22, 2005 at 6:10 am · Filed under Congress
The Republican Study Committee (RSC) formally introduced yesterday “Operation Offset”, its proposed collection of budget cuts and related measures designed to pay for hurricane relief without increasing taxes or running up the budget deficit. As previously reported, the proposal calls for cutting “NASA’s New Moon/Mars Initiative”. The program is just one of dozens that the RSC offers up on the chopping block, but unlike most of the others, the report provides little justification for the cut:
In 2004, the President announced a new initiative to explore the Moon and Mars with the goal of returning humans to the Moon by 2020. NASA currently intends to use the savings from phasing out the space shuttle in 2012 to fund this program. Savings: $44 billion over ten years ($11.5 billion over five years)
For nearly all the other programs in the report, the RSC offers some explanation why the program is question is duplicative or otherwise unnecessary, but not so here. Moreover, they’re retiring the shuttle a couple years later than what has been planned all along under the VSE.
The RSC counts about 100 members of Congress in its membership, but that doesn’t mean that all 100 members are in complete agreement on the proposed cuts. Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX), a Houston-area Congressman and RSC member, spoke out in particular against the NASA cuts at a press conference, the Houston Chronicle reported. “NASA is one of those programs the American people receive benefits from,” he said.
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