Space Politics
Because sometimes the most important orbit is the Beltway…
Archive for February, 2006
February 22, 2006 at 6:51 am · Filed under Uncategorized
I normally don’t pay much heed to letters to the editor, but this one from a Mr. Weaver E. Gore, Jr., which appeared in Tuesday’s edition of the Jackson (Miss.) Clarion-Ledger, caught my eye:
I notice that the government is sending a probe to Pluto at a cost of $700 million (”Unmanned NASA craft blasts off on mission to Pluto,” Jan. 20). Divide that amount by $150,000 and one would be able to build 4,666 houses on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
The only reason that I can see why NASA keeps squandering money is to support Boeing, Pratt and Whitney, General Electric and other people who contract with the government at inflated prices.
We have wasted two probes to Mars when the robots would not work. Is that proof there is no intelligent life on Earth?
President Bush is now asking for $150 billion to further put innocent people in danger and getting killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Hmmmm… three paragraphs complaining about a $700-million Pluto mission (take that, advocates of robotic missions), and just one sentence tacked on to the end to complain about something that costs more than 200 times as much. But everyone’s got their own priorities.
February 21, 2006 at 6:33 am · Filed under Other
As an experiment, I’m making available here recordings from some recent space policy-related events. I’ve started with a couple of breakfast events: a speech by OSTP associate director Richard Russell on commercial space transportation policy on February 9, and a speech by Rep. Tom Feeney on China’s space program on February 16:
These are necessarily the most scintillating of speeches (and the sound quality is so-so, a limitation of my recorder), but this offers an unfiltered take on their presentations and may trigger some additional discussion. I may do this in the future depending on reader (listener?) interest, as well as bandwidth and disk space availability.
February 17, 2006 at 7:15 am · Filed under Congress
Prior to yesterday’s House Science Committee hearing, Rep. Tom Feeney (R-FL) spoke at a Space Transportation Association breakfast about his recent trip to China, including a rare visit to the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, the Chinese manned spaceflight center that is typically off limits to Western visitors. (He noted in his talk that while he and two fellow Congressmen were allowed to visit the center, a US Embassy staffer who planned to accompany them was forced to stay at a hotel.) A few notes from his talk:
- He said that, as previously reported, there is some interest among Chinese officials about developing a common docking adapter that would allow Shenzhou spacecraft to dock with ISS or US spacecraft to dock with a future Chinese space station. However, he added that his Chinese hosts said this was a “decision for a higher pay grade”, and noted there would be concerns here about technology transfer.
- There is “enormous” pride in China for their manned space program, which is played up by the Chinese government in order to keep the Chinese public happy. The number one worry of the Chinese government, Feeney claimed, is that “there’s going to be some sort of massive uprising or rebellion within China itself.”
- That pride, though, dissipates whenever the Chinese space program is compared with US efforts. “At that point they get very humble, I think partly because they do not want to be a threat and partly because they do not want to overly excite expectations that they cannot live up to.”
- In a similar vein, he did not see a race developing between the US and China. “I think it’s a mistake to look at China as an extension of the Cold War. This is not the Soviet Union… They have not been an aggressive country since Genghis Khan was running things.” Still, he thinks there would be a competitive reaction in the US if China ramped up its lunar exploration program, for example. “I think some members would be motivated by that, let’s put it that way, but I think more likely the motivation would come from the people of the United States.”
- Listening to the talk, I noticed that the congressman was sometimes a little off with his facts. Comparing the Chinese facilities with what’s at the Kennedy Space Center, he called KSC’s Vehicle Assembly Building “a 60-year-old huge warehouse”, about 20 years older than its actual age. Elsewhere he described the US and Russian manned space programs as having histories of “30 and 40 years, respectively”. His pronunciation of Chinese names was also different from what I have commonly heard elsewhere, but then, he’s been to China and I haven’t.
February 17, 2006 at 6:29 am · Filed under Congress
After reading the opening statements from yesterday’s hearing mentioned in a previous post, you’d think that science committee members were very upset about the planned cutbacks in NASA science programs. And indeed, some members expressed their concern about cuts, either in general or in specific programs of interest (aeronautics, SOFIA, etc.) Yet, later in the hearing, after Griffin said that “we’re not slashing science to the bone”, chairman Sherwood Boehlert said:
We’re conditioned as people to accept the argument that we’re slashing away at some program when in fact we’re slowing the rate of growth… Washington is the only town in the world where if you ask for a $73 raise and you get a $70 raise, you say, “You’ve slashed away at my potential income.”
However, one thing to keep in mind is that the overall increase in science programs, about one percent, is not enough to keep up with inflation, so that one can argue that NASA is “slashing” (or, yes, “eviscerating”) science, even if in aggregate it’s just a scratch.
Also, some of the news accounts, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, focused more on the still-brewing public affairs controversy than the specifics of the budget. On the other hand, Florida Today, the Houston Chronicle, and SPACE.com did put more of an emphasis on the budget, the primary purpose of the hearing.
February 16, 2006 at 7:18 pm · Filed under Other
In the final hours of its regular 2006 session, the New Mexico state legislature approved a spending bill that includes $100 million over three years for a new commercial spaceport in the southern part of the state. The legislature also approved a separate measure that allows cities and counties to impose gross receipts taxes on businesses to raise additional money for the spaceport.
February 16, 2006 at 7:01 pm · Filed under Congress
I haven’t had time yet to digest today’s hearing of the House Science Committee featuring NASA administrator Mike Griffin; that will have to wait until later tonight. In the meantime here are a few resources:
Discuss.
February 16, 2006 at 5:58 am · Filed under Congress
I stumbled across yesterday an interview with Clint Curtis, a Republican-turned-Democrat who is considering running against Rep. Tom Feeney (R-FL), whose district includes KSC. It’s a wide-ranging, and somewhat odd, interview, although when asked what his top issues would be, Curtis mentioned several, including “Stop the gutting of NASA.” (Oh dear, there’s that evisceration theme again.)
Mr. Curtis does have a campaign web site, and devotes several paragraphs on his issues page to NASA. That’s where things get a little odder. Curtis’ primary concern is that the US is losing ground to China in space, and that Rep. Feeney is only making matters worse: “Mr. Feeney takes trips to China, who knows who actually paid for this trip, and touts how advanced they are. He promotes that we should share our technology with them in the spirit of cooperation. Sounds very much like a prelude to outsourcing more American jobs.” Curtis proposes restarting a space race with China: “What Russia lacked in manpower and economic might, the Chinese already possess. While Mr. Feeney is bragging on how impressive the facilities are in China and suggests that we should cooperate in the development of their space program, our own space program has been under-funded for the entire duration of his time as this districts [sic] representative.”
Incidentally, Rep. Feeney is scheduled to speak about China’s space program, and the results of a recent trip to China he took that featured a visit to Chinese space facilities, at a Space Transportation Association breakfast in Washington this morning.
February 16, 2006 at 5:39 am · Filed under Other
One of the most popular punching bags in the space industry, both among established and emerging companies, is export control. Everyone, it seems, has a story of woe to tell about the difficulty and delays involved in complying with export control regulations for space products, and how such obstacles threaten the American space industry. There have been some efforts to get Congress to change those policies, although nothing of consequence has emerged to date.
To get a different perspective on export control, The Space Show interviewed Ann Ganzer, director of the State Department’s Office of Defense Trade Controls Policy, which handles export licensing. The interview took place Sunday, although you can listen to a recording of the show, which runs about 90 minutes. You won’t necessarily come away with a different opinion about export control, but perhaps gain a little better appreciation of the process. However, it is still up to Congress to provide any substantive reforms to streamline the process, particularly when dealing with friendly nations.
February 15, 2006 at 7:12 pm · Filed under Congress
This week’s print issue of Space News includes a short article about a speech last Thursday by Rep. Mark Udall (D-CO) at the U.S. Commercial Remote Sensing Industry Conference in Washington (one floor up and around the corner from the FAA Commercial Space Transportation Conference, taking place at the same time.) Udall has long advocated increased use of remote sensing for various applications, including sponsoring legislation that was later incorporated into the NASA authorization bill last year that sets up a pilot program of grants for state and local use of such data. The article includes this interesting passage:
Udall said there needs to be as much of an emphasis on funding Earth science projects as there is on funding the rest of NASA’s research.
“There are a lot more humans living on this Earth right now than there are on Mars,” he said.
I checked to see if the text of his speech was available on his web site, but no luck: he posted a speech he made Monday night, but the one before that dates back to February 2003.
February 15, 2006 at 7:01 am · Filed under Congress
CQPolitics.com notes that Rep. Tom DeLay is facing some competition in the Republican primary for the 22nd Congressional District, scheduled for March 7. Three candidates are running against him, one of whom, Tom Campbell, is running TV ads that indirectly attack DeLay. No one expects Campbell to upset DeLay, but it could pose another challenge for the staunch NASA supporter. Some comments at the end of the article point out that a former Republican Congressman, Steve Stockman, is contemplating filing to run as an independent for the general election in that district against DeLay and Democrat Nick Lampson. Would Stockman’s entry end up splitting the Republican vote or the DeLay protest vote?
« Previous entries ·
Next entries »
