Space Politics
Because sometimes the most important orbit is the Beltway…
Archive for May, 2006
May 31, 2006 at 7:03 am · Filed under Congress
Earlier this month a group of fiscal conservatives in the House put forward a budget resolution proposal that, according to an article in today’s issue of The Hill, “was as nearly identical as possible to the 1995 budget resolution” during the heyday of the “Contract with America”, with sharp cuts on federal spending. However, unlike in 1995, a majority of Republicans in the House—134—voted against the resolution, including retiring Congressman Tom DeLay. Why did he vote against the resolution?
DeLay said he voted against the conservatives’ budget because it would have hurt the space program based in his district. He agreed with the conservative principles but couldn’t vote for a budget “that would have crippled NASA while giving China’s military-run space program the go-ahead to make the next giant leaps,” said DeLay spokeswoman Shannon Flaherty.
“This budget would have devastated our space program, and no conservative should feel comfortable voluntarily locking our nation out of space and making us dependent on foreign countries to access the international space station.”
Readers may recall that the perceived threat posed by China to the US in space was a key issue in a subcommittee hearing of the House Appropriations Committee on the NASA budget two months ago. At that time the sub, whose membership includes DeLay, committee asked NASA to compile a report within 30 days on the Chinese space program and goals, and planned to hold another hearing on the topic timed to coincide with its release. It’s now been 60 days, with no sign of the report, nor another hearing on the topic by the subcommittee. And DeLay is scheduled to leave Congress in early June.
May 30, 2006 at 6:27 am · Filed under Congress
In her speech last week at CSIS, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison endorsed (although not by its specific name) NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program to support the development of commercial vehicles to transport cargo and personnel to and from the ISS. She sees this approach as one way of dealing with the potential four-year gap between the retirement of the shuttle and the introduction of the CEV. “I think if we, in the next five years, put some money into the private sector as seed money, and we see that there can be progress there, of course that would be a wonderful option,” she said. “Certainly, I think, if we can get the private sector up to speed, that would be a great option.”
In an editorial in today’s issue, the Houston Chronicle supports Hutchison’s statements, but wonders if NASA is doing enough:
NASA has taken a few halting steps to encourage non-government development of space technology, including sponsoring a $2 million contest modeled on the $10 million Ansari X Prize won by Rutan for the historic suborbital flight of SpaceShipOne. The NASA contest, to be conducted by the X Prize Foundation, challenges designers to come up with a means to shuttle astronauts and cargo between the lunar surface and orbit. It also has asked the aerospace industry to come up with new technologies to provide needed transportation to and from the International Space Station.
These are good first steps, but alone they will not stimulate the massive involvement by private industry needed to boost the space program. NASA should develop a long-range strategy to harness the engine of free enterprise for the exploration of space, with government providing regulatory oversight, while allowing private partners in the pilot’s seat. After all, a formula that made the United States the most powerful nation on Earth should work just as well on the moon and beyond.
This sort of glosses over the $500 million that NASA has committed to COTS through 2009, which is designed to “stimulate the massive involvement by private industry” seen, in part, by the strong interest in the COTS program by the industry. A bigger near-term challenge for NASA—and Congress—may not be drafting a long-term strategy for private sector involvement in the Vision for Space Exploration, but simply ensuring that planned COTS funding for FY2007 and beyond remains intact.
May 30, 2006 at 6:09 am · Filed under Other
Most people in the US have not heard about the “Clearstream” scandal that’s currently rocking French politics; I admit I had not until last week, although the controversy has been brewing for weeks. In an article in this week’s issue of The Space Review, Taylor Dinerman provides a capsule summary of the scandal and its ties to the French aerospace industry: one of the key figures was, until recently, a vice president of EADS. Dinerman believes that EADS will get caught up in the controversy, which could have repercussions for launch services provider Arianespace and satellite manufacturer Astrium, as companies and governments outside France may be prompted to review their dealings with EADS “if only to insure that they are not being manipulated for interior French political purposes.” This comes at a time when the European aerospace industry had been performing well, yet “the Clearstream scandal looks to be yet another obstacle to France’s ambitions to make the EU into a first-rate space power.”
A couple other policy-related articles of note in this week’s issue:
- Christopher Stone makes the case for space-based weapons—not for use against satellites but against terrestrial targets. Given the squeamishness many have towards putting weapons of any kind in space, this proposal is not likely to go anywhere in the foreseeable future, but it’s an interesting argument.
- Eric Hedman examines why NASA appears unwilling to take major risks, noting the lack of new technology in the current implementation of the Vision for Space Exploration. (Some, of course, have argued that the lack of new technology is a positive, not negative, attribute of the VSE.) He hopes that the COTS program is a sign NASA is willing to take some risks to try and gain “a revolutionary approach to orbital access”.
May 26, 2006 at 6:18 am · Filed under Congress
This week’s print edition of Space News reported that Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), speaking at a Maryland Space Business Roundtable luncheon last week, suggested that the solution to NASA’s budget woes might be for Congress to approve $2 billion in “emergency” supplemental funding . Such a move, which Mikulski said she planned to discuss with the President at a White House meeting this week, would get around existing spending limits. The increase would also fund NASA above the level authorized in last year’s authorization bill, but because of the “emergency” nature of the funding, those limits also would not apply.
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, speaking at CSIS earlier this week, said she favored some kind of addition to the NASA budget. “I think that increasing even one-tenth of one percent would add to the research capabilities” of NASA, she said. (It was later explained that this 0.1% increase was not relative to NASA’s overall budget, which would be a pittance, but rather 0.1% of the entire federal budget, or over $2 billion.) She added that “there might come a time when we are not in a war on terror, in the next few years” which might free up money for NASA and other efforts—although in that case many might want to reduce spending to close the budget deficit.
Advocates of such a measure notes that NASA has absorbed the cost of recovering from the Columbia accident largely within its existing budget, while NASA received additional money after the Challenger accident. “So we’ve had to forage [out of] NASA’s regular programs to do what Challenger got as an emergency chunk of bucks,” Mikulski said last week. The difference then is that much of that “emergency chunk of bucks” was used to pay for a replacement orbiter, Endeavour, while no new orbiter is being built to replace Columbia. However, back then NASA wasn’t trying to develop new launch vehicles and manned spacecraft in preparation for a return to the Moon.
May 25, 2006 at 6:13 am · Filed under Other
The Planetary Society is taking out ads today in several publications, including the Washington Post, calling for the reversal of planned cutbacks in NASA space science programs. The Post ad, a quarter-page black-and-white ad in the bottom-right part of page A26, notes that “NASA is poised to sharply curtail its exploration of the solar system and the cosmos” with its planned cuts in both missions and research funding. “This is not a question of exploration for its own sake,” the ad continues. “This is about our vision for humanity’s future. It may even be about our survival on this swiftly changing—and vulnerable—globe. Out nation’s space exploration program is a demonstration of our confidence in humanity’s potential and what awaits us on other worlds.”
The society is also running an ad in today’s issue of the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call as well as banners on SPACE.com (which did not appear to be up yet when I checked the site early this morning.) The ads are times to coincide with the 45th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s speech to Congress where he called for a manned mission to the Moon by the end of the 1960s. The society is also holding an event on the Hill to mark the anniversary and make their case for increased space science funding.
May 24, 2006 at 6:04 am · Filed under Congress
Elsewhere in her speech at CSIS, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison discussed legislation the Senate Commerce Committee recently passed regarding the American Competitive Initiative and similar Congressional efforts:
We are now going to focus on having more math and science majors in college, produce more scientists and more research in America, and NASA needs to be part of that. The National Science Foundation will be a major focus, but so will NASA. When we passed our bill out of committee last week that will be part of this competitiveness initiative, that responds to the report [”Rising Above the Gathering Storm” by the National Academies], NASA is going to be hand-in-hand with the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense, in being on the leading edge of basic science research in our country.
The legislation she is referring to is the American Innovation and Competitiveness Act (S. 2802), which the Commerce Committee approved unanimously on May 18. One of the hallmarks of the President’s initiative is a doubling of research budgets at organizations like NSF (but not NASA), and S.2802 increases the authorized funding for NSF from $6.4 billion in FY07 to $11.4 billion in FY11. The original version of the legislation had only a few provisions for NASA, including the creation of an “Aeronautics Institute for Research” within NASA to manage its aeronautics programs and a “Basic Research Executive Council” to oversee basic science programs within the agency. The committee, though, added several additional provisions to the version of the bill reported out of committee, most notably this section:
SEC. 406. DIRECT NASA PARTICIPATION IN AMERICAN COMPETITIVENESS INITIATIVE.
Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration shall increase funding for basic science and research, including for the Explorer Program, for fiscal year 2007 by $160,000,000 by transferring such amount for such purpose from accounts of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for fiscal year 2007. The transfer shall be contingent upon the availability of unobligated balances to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
It’s interesting that the committee singled out the Explorer program in particular. While it is one of the planned cutbacks in NASA’s science programs that has met with strong opposition from scientists, that opposition stems only in part on the science, basic or otherwise, they perform: such missions, advocates argue, serve as “training grounds” for scientists and engineers, preparing them for work on larger missions down the road.
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May 24, 2006 at 5:39 am · Filed under Congress
Yesterday Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison spoke at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington on “Exploration and the Future of U.S. Leadership in Space.” What seems to have attracted the most attention, and perhaps some confusion, are some comments she made in her speech about the role the ISS could play regarding energy production. Here is what she said on the topic:
We had a great hearing in our committee where Dr. Sam Ting, who is a Nobel laureate at MIT, he talked about the importance of the basic science that can be done on the space station and especially in light of our energy crisis in this country. He said that what they’re trying to do is go to the dark side, the dark energy that is in the universe, the energy that scientists believe is propelling the galaxies and the expanding universe. We believe, and Dr. Ting believes, that if we could improve the understanding of that dark energy, that matter, that that would help us find a new source of power, perhaps, if we could harness that energy, maybe a new source of energy that we could use on Earth. That is one of the things that he wants to do if we could get the space station finished with the equipment that he needs. Well, at a time when we’re desperate for new sources of energy, while China and India are exploding as industrialized nations and we see the price of energy going up all over the world, this is something that we should explore. That is something that the 16 nations who are part of the space station could do together, because all of us have a common goal of needing more efficient energy in all of our countries.
Now, that does sound an awful lot like trying to harness dark energy for power production, something that I imagine that most (if not virtually all) scientists would find a bit ludicrious, if for nothing else that no consensus regarding just what dark energy is.
If her statements sound vaguely familiar, there’s a good reason: at an STA breakfast in early March, Sen. Hutchison said, “We had a great Commerce Committee hearing with Dr. Samuel Ting, the Nobel laureate at MIT, who talked about cosmic rays being the most important energy source in space that we can start probing to see how we can harness that to provide energy, energy in space, but maybe we can bring it back here too.” That’s very similar to yesterday’s comments; only that cosmic rays have since been replaced by dark energy, it seems.
So what exactly is she talking about? Several weeks back a staffer sent me a document describing the potential benefits of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), the instrument being developed by an international team led by Dr. Ting that is intended to fly on the ISS. And, indeed, one of the first benefits listed by Dr. Ting is “enhanced energy production”. However, he’s referring to enhanced terrestrial energy production, by spinning off the superconducting magnet technology being developed for the instrument:
Both the U.S. and the former Soviet Union have recognized the importance of using superconducting magnets to enhance energy production by harnessing nuclear energy directly. Both countries have invested substantially in the development of many such devices to convert nuclear power directly to electricity without the necessity of traditional heavy turbines using a system called Magnetohydrodynamics (MHD). Since an MHD generator can directly convert nuclear energy to electricity without degrading its high quality, as is common in conventional turbine-generators, the power conversion efficiency is significantly higher than conventional nuclear reactor power plants.
Nowhere does the document mention using the AMS, or technologies derived from it, to try and harness cosmic rays or dark energy for energy production. So the AMS may be used to stucy cosmic rays or dark energy (or, more likely, dark matter, which is something completely different from dark energy), and AMS-derived spinoff technologies may enhance energy production on Earth. Unfortunately, Sen. Hutchison has appeared to short-circuit the two ideas by combining them into an unlikely amalgam.
May 23, 2006 at 5:48 am · Filed under NASA
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued Monday a report highly critical of NASA’s maintenance of the Deep Space Network (DSN), the system of ground stations used to transmit to and receive data from a variety of NASA spacecraft. In a study requested by Rep. Mark Udall (D-CO), the GAO found that the DSN’s three ground stations, in California, Australia, and Spain, are suffering from aging and poorly-maintained equipment that, while accommodating most mission requirements now, “may not be able to meet near-term and future demand.” NASA has exacerbated the problem by deferring $30 million in DSN maintenance for the last several years. (The full report includes photos of corroded antennas, road damage, and other problems with the Goldstone, California facility, the only one of the three visited by the GAO.) NASA concurred with the report’s assessment and said it is already working on implementing them through a “roadmap” exercise to chart the future of the DSN.
May 22, 2006 at 6:40 am · Filed under White House
That’s the question I consider in an article in this week’s issue of The Space Review. It’s based on a forum earlier this month on the topic organized by the Marshall Institute. Many space advocates have looked to the presidency to provide leadership to make bold new projects happen, citing the success of President Kennedy’s declaration that the US would land men on the Moon by the end of the 1960s. That, though, appears to be a historical anomaly, and today presidential space policy is limited more to tweaking existing policies, with a few exceptions (like the Vision for Space Exploration.) In fact, the current administration has, unlike its predecessors all the way back to Jimmy Carter, has yet to release a comprehensive national space policy document, relying instead on topic-specific policies like the VSE. That lack of a policy, though, doesn’t seem to be hindering NASA, as one speaker noted: “I don’t think Mike Griffin has to look to the White House for what he needs from a policy standpoint.”
May 22, 2006 at 6:33 am · Filed under Other
While I normally don’t scan the so-called blogosphere for commentary about space policy, one post on Blogcritics.org caught my eye: “Bush Guts Critical Science Projects And Outsources NASA Projects To India To Further His Ambitions”. The author, who identifies himself as only “Jet in Columbus”, decries both the cutbacks in NASA science programs and the space agency’s decision to cooperate with India on lunar exploration. However, he claims in his lede that “‘ol GW apparently is slashing NASA’s research funds by $59.8 billion in order to make budgetary room to salvage his pompous and extravagant scheme to get a moon base in his name set up by 2020.” $59.8 billion? That’s nearly four years’ worth of NASA’s entire budget; the cuts to NASA’s science programs over the next several years are more than an order of magnitude smaller. “Jet in Columbus” never provides a source for that figure, perhaps because he can’t.
Later, he claims that NASA’s decision to fly two instruments on ISRO’s Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter mission is evidence that NASA is somehow outsourcing its science program to India. Nowhere in his analysis, though, does he mention that NASA recently confirmed its plans to launch its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter—a much larger and arguably more capable spacecraft than Chandrayaan-1—in 2008. “Jet in Columbus” also argues that “Everyone seems to be overlooking the fact that India’s four-stage Chandrayann-1 [sic] rocket that’s going to be used for this mission is also potentially the same device being developed for carrying possible nuclear warheads.” In fact, that hasn’t been ignored (even if he confuses the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft wth its PSLV launch vehicle), although as previously noted here most consider that a very weak argument.
There does appear to be one truthful item in his post: “Jet in Columbus” has his own blog, titled “The Absent Mind”, with the subtitle “The insane ramblings of a conservative trapped in a Liberal’s body.” Tough to argue with that.
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