Congress

Progress on INA

Aerospace Daily reported Thursday that the House is expected to approve an amendment to the Iran Nonproliferation Act (INA) that would permit NASA to continue purchasing ISS services from Russia. The change will be added to a bill yet to be identified that the House Judiciary Committee will mark up when it returns from summer recess after Labor Day. The House and Senate are also willing to add the provision to the NASA authorization legislation once they meet in conference to resolve differences between the two versions of their bills. There seems to be little opposition in Congress to the change, although the article cited an Aviation Week report that one lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, wants the change to expire in 2012.

31 comments to Progress on INA

  • William Berger

    AIPAC has other things to worry about:

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/04/AR2005080401129.html

    U.S. Indicts 2 in Case Of Divulged Secrets
    Both Worked for Pro-Israel Lobby
    By Dan Eggen and Jamie Stockwell
    Washington Post Staff Writers
    Friday, August 5, 2005; A01

    “Two former employees of an influential pro-Israel lobbying group were indicted yesterday on charges that they illegally received and passed on classified information to foreign officials and reporters over a period of five years, part of a case that has complicated relations between the United States and one of its closest allies.

    Although no foreign government is named in the indictment, U.S. government sources have identified Israel as the country at the center of the probe. The Israeli Embassy in Washington also confirmed yesterday that it has been “approached” by investigators in the case.

    The 26-page indictment, handed up in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, represents the first formal allegations of criminal wrongdoing against the former employees of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. AIPAC is widely recognized as one of the most powerful lobbying organizations in Washington and has carefully cultivated close ties to Congress and the Bush administration.”

  • Dfens

    So you believe Israel is our enemy and Russia and Iran are our friends? I was born at night, but not last night. If the space program is so important to you that a little thing like Iran having both nuclear weapons and the means to launch them toward civilized nations, you should rethink your values.

  • Cecil Trotter

    Ditto to what Dfens wrote.

  • Jim Muncy

    Guys,

    This is not about AIPAC or even Iran. It is about whether we are going to abandon ISS to Russia, Europe and Japan, and drive all of those countries towards cooperation with China.

    We can all scream and yell about Shuttle and ISS, but Shuttle is dying quickly and ISS is the first human community in space. If we want to trash all of that so we can go focus on repeating Apollo, then let’s just watch the rest of the world settle the solar system.

    – Jim

  • You have a lot of nerve. I believe that it is your former boss who put Soyuz launches in the INA in the first place.

    If we only repeat Apollo it will be a major step forward.

    Returning to the Moon is the ONLY way to start space settlement. Right now ISS is a major obstacle to space settlement.

    We are still the only country who has sent humans to the Moon. There was a good reason why Kennedy chose the Moon as the destination for the Space Race; getting to the Moon is hard, staying there will be even harder. It will be a huge prize for the first country that can, but China is no where near the Moon and the Russian couldn’t land there now, any more than they could in the 1960’s. We are still in the lead. The faster we dump ISS and the shuttle, the faster we can settle the Moon.

  • I agree with Karen’s wider point, but I also agree with Jim. The Space Station is built and partially deployed and having it as a market is critical to the nascent commercial launch industry. Karen is right about the Moon. We need both, and supporting the Space Station (as opposed to finishing it) need not cost a whole lot more Federal money. Even finishing it can probably be affordable if we give up on the Shuttle.

    Russia should be our friend. They have made great steps toward our style of government, and punishing them for that is stupid. That said, we should also encourage greater steps in the right direction by providing markets for industries they are good at — like rockets.

    Unlike ITAR — which, since it punishes everyone equally whether they are our friends or not, punishes no one but ourselves — I am torn by the INA. On the one hand, the world’s greatest arms exporter is hardly in a position to call a kettle black, and the INA clearly isn’t working; we’d need to ban something really important to the Russians like their oil to have an impact, and we aren’t about to do that because of our own oil addiction (which the current Administration actively encourages to what should be their great shame). On the other hand, Iran is a bigger threat than Iraq ever was and the idea of giving them weapons of mass destruction is terrifying. On the third hand, the Space Station and Russian support of it are really important to me. Humanity would not have a Space Station now without our friends the Russians.

    It’s a quandry.

    — Donald

  • Cecil Trotter

    Donald: “Even finishing it can probably be affordable if we give up on the Shuttle.”

    Given that ISS was designed to be built by the Shuttle and any change in that now would be very expensive, finishing ISS with the Shuttle is probably the cheapest method. So giving up on the Shuttle but finishing ISS affordably are mutually exclusive goals.

    Donald: “They have made great steps toward our style of government, and punishing them for that is stupid.”

    Who said Russia should be punished for making attempts at moving to a democratic style of government; that has nothing to do with this. What Russia should be punished for is helping a government like Iran’s build nuclear reactors, which could (and very likely will) be used to create nuclear weapons. There’s nothing stupid about that.

    Donald: “and we aren’t about to do that because of our own oil addiction (which the current Administration actively encourages to what should be their great shame).”

    And what administration has ever done enough to move away from our “oil addiction”? Carter? Clinton? What evidence is there to support your claim that the Bush administration wants to encourage that “addiction”? Maybe if we had drilled in the ANWR years ago….

    Donald: “the Space Station and Russian support of it are really important to me. Humanity would not have a Space Station now without our friends the Russians.”

    I don’t buy that. The US could have built a station on our own, and at less cost, or with involvement of others besides Russia. That we would have lost access to it when the Shuttles stopped flying is another thing all together however.

  • Regarding oil, I believe Carter actually did quite a lot, and was piloried for it.

    Regarding the current Administration, opposition to increased fuel standards, particularly for SUVs. A number of friends, including my partner, have recently tried to buy fuel efficient cars, and have found it impossible to buy a conventional car as fuel efficient as in the 1980s. (Eloise’ old Honda got some five miles to the gallon more than any conventional car she could find today.) Likewise, the Federal subsidies for both suburbanization and automobile use have increased substantially in recent years while those for public transit have declined. (You don’t think the former exist? At least one-third of the cost of highways and freeways is direct subsidy, not paid by the gas tax. As an inner city resident, I don’t own a car and the per capita share of road and other infrastructure in front of my house is a yard or two. A suburbanite’s share of infrastructure is a great deal higher, supplied at far greater cost and used at far lower efficiency, yet I and inner city businesses pay the same instrustructure taxes as a suburban individual or business of comparable income. In other words, we use taxation to remove all incentive for efficiency in our communities. The Economist, hardly a bastion of Liberal thought, pointed out that they way Americans fund infrustructure amounts to inner city poor paying for the rich to live in leafy suburbs.)

    Catering to, and actively encouraging, this kind of stupidity by American consumers may be politically correct these days, but it is a policy crime. The Administration should worry a bit less about what Americans do in the privacy of their own homes, and a little more about what they do out in public on the roads.

    Regarding the Space Station, yes, we could have done it without the Russians, but we didn’t. Had Gore not rescued the project (rightly or wrongly) it would almost certainly have been cancelled by Congress. Had he not done so by bringing in the Russians, the Space Station would have died with Collumbia, mostly because of policies followed by both Republican and Democratic Administrations and only seen to be mistakes in retrospect.

    — Donald

  • Putting the Soyuz provision in the INA was an extremely dumb idea, because it is like holding the gun to our head. It was bad when they put it in it is worse now because the shuttle is grounded.

    But repealing it is even worse. It is yelling to the world go ahead and sell the Iranians what ever you want. Bush may still get us in a war with Iran and if that happens repealing INA will be seen as treasonous.

  • “and if that happens repealing INA will be seen as treasonous.”

    Unfortunately, I doubt it. There are too many who will defend without noticeable thought any action Mr. Bush takes. I don’t understand it, but there it is.

    — Donald

  • Cecil Trotter

    Donald, I’d love to hear more detail on the “quite a lot” Carter did on curbing our “oil addiction” but it seems you’d rather tell me of what Bush has done wrong rather than what Carter did right. That is assuming all of your grievances are really a result of the current administration, which I’m not sure is a correct assumption.

    Anyway…

    First, I don’t think the federal government has a place in telling Detroit what type cars to build. Detroit builds what the consumer wants, if the consumer wants a gas-guzzler so be it. There’s other ways to change that situation other than the government ordering Detroit to build Yugos.

    As for you and other city dwellers not owning a car, but paying taxes too support road infrastructure etc., you do realize that you depend on the roads and highways regardless of your personal car ownership or lack thereof. You ever ride a bus, taxi that uses roadways? How does every product you need get to its market place? How will fire fighters get to you if need be, or the police, or an ambulance? Cities don’t exist in a vacuum, they depend on the highway infrastructure to survive more so than does the suburbs.

    As for ISS, the way it has turned out Mr. Gore did us little favor in “saving” it.

  • Cecil Trotter

    Donald: “There are too many who will defend without noticeable thought any action Mr. Bush takes.”

    And there are just as many if not more who blame Bush for everything to and including their VCR’s flashing “12:00″.

  • Cecil, regarding your second comment, I hope you will give me at least some credit. I despise the current Administration, but I am honest enough to give credit where it is due, e.g., the military actions in Afghanistan (which I believe were fully justified and relatively well handled, at least until Iraq), the VSE, and a few others. I have yet to hear you say _anything_ postive about _any_ Democratic administration, even the relatively conservative Clinton Administration. Almost no person’s actions are all evil, not even Mr. Clintons.

    I do recognize that cities are dependent on transportation, but why freeways (which benefit spread-out, inefficient communities) rather than rail (which benefits cities and is far more efficient to build and operate; freight rail is the only transportation industry in the US that operates more-or-less without subsidy and still carries the majority of freight by weight; per unit of investment rail is also far faster than freeway freight). Why do we give truckers subsidies and not rail?

    Yes, I use the same infrastructure a suburbanite does, but since inner cities operate at far greater efficiency (almost all of the things I need in life are a casual walk from each other and require no energy-using transportation at all, public or private) I use a lot less of it. As someone who has watched businesses leave my city for the suburbs because of “lower taxes” (which are really “higher subsidies”), I believe cities should benifit from their relative efficiency and suburban communities should pay something a little closer to their true costs of operation.

    However, I would suggest that we continue that discussion off-line as it is too far off-topic for here.

    — Donald

  • Cecil Trotter

    Donald:”Cecil, regarding your second comment, I hope you will give me at least some credit.”

    Oh I do, I wasn’t referring to you with that “VCR” remark. Kuperberg maybe, but not you ;-)

    As for the rest, yes it is way off topic. But we wouldn’t have gone there at all if you had just tried a bit harder in resisting a un-needed, un-related Bush jab (the whole Bush feeds the oil addiction thing) in the first place.

    Oh and for the record I think Clinton was right on Bosnia. And when he said Iraq had WMD ;-)

    Now, lets play nice for a while.

  • Cecil, don’t worry, whatever I may sound like I rarely take these personally. And you, I’ve come to genuinely like. I hope you don’t mind that from an unrepentant Liberal. [grin!]

    — Donald

  • Dfens

    Big cities need big infrastructure, including freeways to bring in the resources for them to exist, and to provide them a route to flee in the case where the “big one” hits, as we are seeing now. This “let’s all move to the big city” thing is a feature of our “service economy”. If you earn your money servicing people, you need lots of people to service. I preferred the days when the availability of natural resources dictated where we lived. I’d think a big exploration advocate like Donald would be more for the latter model.

    Yes, I’m trying to stir something up. I can’t stand all this peace between liberals and conservatives stuff.

  • Glad to oblige. Again, rail is far more efficient. Why do we subsidise the most inefficient transportation system possible?

    This Liberal says, stop subsidizing transportation at all for anyone except the genuinely poor (and make that mode-independent), make all users of all transportation pay at the fare gate the full cost of the distance they are traveling (that would be full cost recovery tolls for roads and full-cost airports for air transportation and truckers who pay for the extra damage their heavy loads do to the roads, and, yes, full cost recovery trains), and let the cards fall where they may. At this point in time there is no terrestrial transportation that is not mature enough to survive without subsidies.

    (I have a lovely cartoon on my refridgerator of an airplane on rails at a train station. The text is something to the effect of, What Amtrak needs to do to get multi-billion dollar operating subsidies. Note that Amtrak carries as many people as most individual airlines.)

    That is after all what we are asking of the space community. Equalize subsidies and let the most efficient method win. No?

    — Donald

  • Dfens

    Rail is less flexible than roads. People are willing to pay for the difference. The market prevails. That, however, was not where I was going with my comments. In a service economy, people clump together. In a manufacturing economy, they disperse in search of resources.

    Perhaps that explains why we’ve lost much of the will to explore. When you rely on others to manufacture the commodities you consume, why explore? In the mean time, we clump together in ever larger groups to have more people to service. The attitude becomes, let the manufacturers explore so they can provide us with more goods, which is largely what we’ve seen with the emergence of space programs in countries that provide our manufactured goods.

    I preferred the days when we created instead of simply consuming, when we explored instead of clumping. Don’t you agree?

  • Paul Dietz

    Even is a manufacturing economy, people clump together. In an extractive economy, people spread out. The extractive component is now a small part of the US economy.

  • Dfens

    Extractive? I’m not sure what that is. A gold rush, maybe? The quest for gold certainly caused a migration of people to California and the Yukon territories, but has not done anything for space exploration yet. Even at that, if I’m following you correctly, I’m not sure I’d call the economy of the US extractive at that point. It was primarily agrarian. When we had a more substantial space program, it was manufacturing based.

    Do you remember the story of the Tower of Babel? “So the LORD dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth. And from there the LORD dispersed them over the face of all the earth.” Again earth is written with a lower case ‘e’ signifing elemental earth, rather than the planet. It seems to me there’s a lot of earth we haven’t settled yet.

  • Paul Dietz

    Extractive? I’m not sure what that is. A gold rush, maybe?

    Agriculture, forestry, mining, and fishing.

    I suppose wind farms would also count.

  • Dfens: “Rail is less flexible than roads. People are willing to pay for the difference. The market prevails.”

    Fine, then they can do it without subsidies. Road may be more flexible, but rail is far, far cheaper. You can build an awful lot of rail for what one minor highway costs, and you can run a lot of metal-on-metal wheels for what it costs to run rubber wheels on tarmac. Again, this liberal says, let everyone pay what it costs and let the market decide.

    Regarding manufacturing in the United States, I _do_ agree with you. One of our problems, I think, is that with our rediculous infrastructure subsidies we’ve made our economy so physically inefficient that it simply costs too much to make anything here. I think there may be a bit too much attention paid to labor costs and not enough to what might be called the “friction” cost in the rest of the economy — the fact that we use absurdly high quantities of energy per unit of economic production. The amount of time that people spend in traffic jams is time that is not spent doing something creative, e.g., inventing new and better manufacturing methods.

    — Donald

  • Dfens

    Although I agree with you that we are wasting our country’s most valuable resource with our traffic problems, I recall the little manufacturing town I grew up in didn’t have such problems. I also do not blame labor costs for the current trends away from manufacturing, but primarily blame the hostile environment that exists due to our runaway legal system.

    I have a fellow engineer who left aerospace to manufacture a commodity associated with a long time hobby. He recently had to layoff his employees because a Chinese company decided to reverse engineer his product and make the same using inferior materials and processes for much less money. He can try to sue them, which will make some lawyer rich and he himself poor, and have no effect on the Chinese company, or he can allow them to manufacture his product and make money from the royalties, which will also make him liable for the inferior product. Then he can and probably will get sued for the cheap junk and end up with nothing. Either way his employees, whom he considers to be almost like family are out of a job. Welcome to America!

  • I tried to send this to you off-line and couldn’t, however, once I’d written it I wasn’t going to throw it away. But, I do suggest we move this conversation off-line going forward.

    Dfens: “I recall the little manufacturing town I grew up in didn’t have such [transportation] problems.”

    Gee, and I’ll bet it was a properly designed town where most people walked to work and / or took a tram or bus. I used to live in Silicon Valley and the transportation situation there is rediculous beyond belief. All of SV looks pretty much the same: low-rise office parks interspersed with two-story appartment blocks surrounded by little fake parks and parking. The few remaining islands of single-family homes are isolated from shopping and everything else by the freeway grid which makes walking any distance difficult to impossible. North, south, east, or west, it all looks like this for thousands of square kilometers. When I lived there I rented a flat near my job at a space industry newspaper. As far as I could tell I was literally SV’s only regular pedestrian. Everyone else figured they had to live on the opposite side of SV from where they worked (even though, unless you were rich or lucky enough to live in the hills, it looked exactly the same as where you worked), and cross over in enormous traffic crunches each morning and evening. The stupidity of it all, especially by mathemeticians and physicists who can geometrically _prove_ how stupid it is, stuns me to this date.

    Today, there is nothing I hate more than commuting. I refuse to work anywhere but within walking distance of my home in an inner city. Fortunately, I save so much money doing that, and my writing skills are in sufficient demand, I can usually make it work.

    Dfens: “I also do not blame labor costs for the current trends away from manufacturing, but primarily blame the hostile environment that exists due to our runaway legal system.”

    Here, I fully agree with you. The rule with labor is just like anything else: you get what you pay for. If you pay pennies, than labor will follow the ol’ Soviet dictum: “they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.”

    I have made a personal pact with myself that I will participate in no class action lawsuit that is asking for more than the actual damages, unless there is clear and unmistakable evidence for fraud on the part of the corporate officers. (Enron and their ilk deserve no mercy, certainly not from Californians who were their direct victims.)

    I try not to buy Chinese-made products, not so much to buy American (though I do that) but because I don’t want one country to dominate the world’s economy, and certainly not China. Since what amounts to one step above slave labor is, indeed, very cheap for everyone else, that is a very difficult thing to do in practice.

    — Donald

  • Dfens

    Since the ’60s mass transit in most manufacturing towns has disappeared. The population density has been such that the infrastructure was sufficient for the cars. Lately with the disappearance of manufacturing, the roads have become even less traveled. It is very much the same problem that has plagued aerospace. We provide a hostile business environment – especially hostile to manufacturing – and then complain about the loss of middle class manufacturing jobs. In aerospace, we provide incentives to escalate development costs, then complain when the costs go through the roof. Then we call ourselves capitalists. You don’t have to be an economist or behavioral scientist to understand the forces at work. Anyone who has had a pet knows you reward the behavior you want to encourage. Only an idiot rewards the behavior they want to discourage. When did we become a nation of idiots?

  • Paul Dietz

    Loss of manufacturing jobs can’t be laid entirely at the feet of hostile policies. Globally, there’s been a loss of manufacturing jobs. The culprit (if that’s the right word) is increased manufacturing productivity.

    The same thing is happening to manufacturing that happened to agriculture.

  • Dfens: “Since the ’60s mass transit in most manufacturing towns has disappeared.””

    True.

    “The population density has been such that the infrastructure was sufficient for the cars.”

    Only partially true. What is often missed is that this was a deliberate Enron-style effort on the part of automobile interests, who bought up rail lines and physically destroyed them, thus encouraging (or even forcing) auto use, which encouraged us down the destructive path we are now on. We build ever lower density cities that cannot be served by efficient transportation and end up in complete gridlock at an extremely high price (in terms of energy and the costs of extracting and defending it, and of wasted time and effort).

    There’s only one solution. I hate to sound like a broken record, but it’s to let the market work. Let the suburbs and their ridiculously inefficient infrastructure pay what it really costs, and businesses and individuals would quickly revert to a far more efficient transportation model.

    We won’t do it. Like psychopaths, we’ll pay any price to maintain our increasingly unmaintainable system (e.g., tapping the petrolium reserve every time there is a modest price spike in the strained energy infrastructure — and this heavily subsidised price really is modest: to quote again from The Economist, gas still costs far less than bottled water and we happily buy rediculous amounts of the latter without a second thought).

    As you and many others have pointed out, we talk capitalism but spaceflight is hardly the only arena where we refuse to practice it.

    — Donald

  • Paul: “Loss of manufacturing jobs can’t be laid entirely at the feet of hostile policies. Globally, there’s been a loss of manufacturing jobs. The culprit (if that’s the right word) is increased manufacturing productivity.”

    I don’t particularly disagree with this, but some this “increased productivity” has come at a very high price. Dfens and I obviously come at it from very different political perspectives, but I think he and I might agree on the reality of at least some of this price.

    We drive every commodity to the lowest possible purchase price by using foreign labor a step above slave labor, we keep very few “starter” jobs at home for the always large numbers of people who do not have the capacity, the wherewithall, and / or the sheer ruthlessness to become scientists or industrialists. All this benefits “consumers” in the short term, but taking away high-paying jobs also takes away the _new_ money that consumers have to spend.

    Too many of us are living off our the fat of our parents: we inherited our money; or we’re working off “education for all” that our grandparents paid for and we largely refuse to pay for the next generation; we’d rather consume than educate the future. We export both our jobs and our money while laying no seedcorn. The only thing that bales us out is immigration, where we’re living off education that other country’s have paid for and importing low-cost labor. Now we’re turning against that, partly because of the low cost labor but mostly because of our fear of alien people.

    What happens when we run out of money, which, since we as a nation have been living in the red as long as I’ve been economically aware, we will? I don’t know, but I suspect that it won’t be a pretty picture.

    — Donald

  • Dfens

    You’re right about running in the red. We have had a trade deficit for many years now, and no one seems the least bit concerned. If this “service economy” is so damn good, why are we running at a deficit? We should be servicing the world, right? Everyone should want to be serviced by us. The fact is, Donald is right, we are selling this country piece by piece. We won’t lose it in a war, the new owners will come in with a truck load of deeds and the courts will hand it to them.

  • Dfens: “and no one seems the least bit concerned.”

    Actually, the much-hated Mr. Clinton was a bit concerned and is the only president in my politically aware lifetime who actually did something about it. Admitedly, he had it relatively easy, but too many adminstrations have failed to use boom times to pay off debt. Whatever his other faults, he did.

    — Donald

  • Dfens

    National debt and trade deficit are two different things. The national debt is because Congress spends more than they get in taxes. Trade deficit is the debt our economy owes to foreign countries because we consume more from them than we produce to sell to them. Our debt is in the $3 trillion range now, around 5% of our gross national product. Aerospace used to be one of the bright spots, since we used to export much more than we bought.

    Here is the Bush administration’s solution to the national debt problem, from Aerospace Daily, Sept. 9:

    The Pentagon’s new undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics said the Defense Department is reviewing its supply chain operations, acquisition requirements, and planning in light of increasing globalization.

    Kenneth Krieg, who filled the No. 3 DOD position June 3, further said the department will “scour the world” to find the “best” industrial sources for its defense needs, and that the largest federal department must become “creative” in research, acquisition and delivery, especially to encourage competition.

    “We have to make substantial changes in the way we do business, and that includes more collaboration with friends and allies,” Krieg said Sept. 7 at the 2005 Common Defense Conference in Washington. “This is not easy
    — change never is.”

    Speaking to the meeting of foreign and U.S. defense officials and industry representatives, he said companies will continue to decide how to bid and provide their products and services. He indicated that cooperative, international consortia will continue to be considered, especially if they lead to industry sources bidding for Pentagon work.

    “We generally seek competition where competition is possible,” Krieg said at the National Press Club. He pointed to a Lockheed Martin Corp.-led international consortium that won the contract for the next fleet of presidential helicopters over incumbent Sikorsky Aircraft Corp.