Space Politics
Because sometimes the most important orbit is the Beltway…
Archive for July, 2006
July 31, 2006 at 6:33 am · Filed under Other
Sunday’s edition of the Cumberland (Md.) Times-News promised a “faceoff” between two newspaper staffers on hoary question of whether space exploration should be done by humans or robots. If you’re looking for insightful commentary on the (space) age-old question, keep looking. The pro-robot argument reads as much like an attack on President Bush as a defense of the capabilities of robotic spacecraft: “Not satisfied with screwing up the nation and the world, George W. Bush has extended his foul reach to the very heavens with a backward-looking plan for space exploration that harms science and threatens the U.S.’s pre-eminent role on the final frontier.” The pro-human argument isn’t much better: the best it can do to defend sending humans in to space is that “by placing astronauts and scientists on manned space missions, we are able to more accurately conduct tests and experiments for the purpose of gaining more accurate results that provide us with information that is exponentially greater than if we simply collected samples and brought them back to earth for study.” The humans-versus-robots debate is a tired old argument, and neither Times-News writer does it much justice.
July 31, 2006 at 6:22 am · Filed under NASA
On the heels of the somewhat overblown story that NASA had changed its mission statement to delete a reference to Earth sciences come some editorials in major newspapers critical of NASA’s overall priorities. The New York Times published one such editorial Friday, claiming that “earth studies seem to be in trouble”. Evidence for this includes the cancellation of Triana (although the spacecraft isn’t mentioned by name), the delay of the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission, and cuts in research and analysis funding (something that affects other science programs, not just Earth science.)
A similar editorial appears in today’s Washington Post, although the claims it makes are a little sketchy. The Post claims that the Hydros mission to study soil moisture “got the ax”, although NASA intended that mission only to be a backup should one of two other missions run into problems (albeit with some confusion among the Hydros team about exactly what their status was). The editorial also claims that “NASA’s satellite network that monitors global weather patterns — including hurricane formation — is aging, and replacements may arrive late or not at all.” It’s not clear what satellites they’re referring to, since hurricane monitoring is done principally by NOAA, not NASA. It could be a reference to NPOESS, but that is a joint project among NASA, NOAA, and the DOD, whose problems have largely been beyond the control or blame of NASA. The Post also argues that “NASA is uniquely qualified to do things such as launch and maintain weather satellites.” That statement is debatable: while NASA oversees the development and launch of the GOES weather satellites, they are operated by NOAA, which also manages the overall program.
The two editorials also have slightly different recommendations about what NASA should do to rectify this problem. “Mr. Bush needs to get his head out of the stars,” the Post advises, arguing that “The White House has to either pay responsibly for its exploration programs or cancel them.” The Times, meanwhile, tacitly endorses the Senate’s billion-dollar supplemental funding proposal for NASA, saying that without it Earth sciences, and science programs in general, will be “a casualty of the administration’s insistence on completing the space station.”
July 28, 2006 at 7:12 am · Filed under NASA
NASA’s Crew Exploration Vehicle program, a cornerstone of the Vision for Space Exploration, is now facing criticism from two sides. On Tuesday the Space Frontier Foundation released a white paper calling the agency’s CEV development plans “unaffordable and unsustainable”. The Foundation is particularly critical of the “Block 1″ CEV, designed for low Earth orbit operations, noting that in its rush to get the vehicle ready to serve the ISS it is making design decisions on issues like docking adaptors and thruster systems that will not carry over to the Block 2 version intended for lunar missions. (The Foundation is also critical of the Ares 1, née CLV, development strategy.) The Foundation argues that NASA should go directly to the Block 2 CEV and use the “many billions” saved on additional COTS funding.
Just a day later, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report on NASA’s CEV program that is hardly any more complementary. The GAO concludes that “NASA’s current acquisition strategy for the CEV places the project at risk of significant cost overruns, schedule delays, and performance shortfalls because it commits the government to a long-term product development effort before establishing a sound business case.” The report also recommends that “Congress should consider restricting annual appropriations and limiting NASA’s obligations for the CEV project” to key support activities until the program is better defined.
After reading the Foundation paper, one concern I had is that they did not define, beyond “many billions”, how much money would be saved by going directly to the Block 2 CEV. The GAO report suggests that no one, not even NASA, would be able to answer that right now. This issue will get Congressional scrutiny; the House Science Committee issued a press release with committee chairman Sherwood Boehlert saying he plans to hold a hearing about the GAO report after the summer recess.
There is, however, a deeper issue not touched upon in either the Foundation or GAO reports. A big reason for the current CEV development schedule, and the whole Block 1 CEV design, is to minimize the “gap” in US government human space access after the shuttle is retired in 2010. NASA, under the watchful eye of at least some members of Congress, is trying to minimize that gap; even the Foundation report notes that, through additional COTS funding, NASA increases the odds of shortening the gap by funding more ventures, thus making it more likely one or more companies will develop a viable cargo and crew transportation solution.
Here’s the problem, though: while a gap in human space access is not desirable, in ideal circumstances, it’s not clear just how bad such a gap would be. Any missions in the post-2010 time frame would be limited to ISS missions, until the CEV and other ESAS vehicle systems are ready for lunar missions. And the US current plans call for ending support for the ISS in 2016, while the agency is already considering suspending all US research there for a year or more because of funding issues. NASA will still be able to purchase Soyuz flights to ISS at least until 2012 under current law, regardless of the status of other vehicles. “National security” is often trotted out as a reason for minimizing the gap, but if you’re in Congress and worried about national security in space, you’d be better off keeping watch on the problems with various Air Force space programs instead. Moreover, we seemed to have survived the nearly six-year gap caused by the Apollo-Shuttle interregnum between 1975 and 1981. Those who worry about a gap of a few years between shuttle and CEV need to be more explicit in the explanations why it’s so undesirable, or else we should re-think the overall CEV (and ESAS) procurement strategies.
July 27, 2006 at 7:22 am · Filed under NASA
I have been trying very hard the last several days to get worked up by the New York Times story Saturday that NASA has quietly changed the mission statement of the space agency, deleting a reference to studying the planet. I haven’t been successful, but a lot of other people, particularly in liberal neighborhoods of the blogosphere, have expressed varying levels of outrage, seeing this as another case where the White House has meddled with NASA so that it devotes less attention to global warming.
An example of these arguments can be a found in a post by Laurie David on The Huffington Post on Monday. David, one of the producers of the Al Gore documentary An Inconvenient Truth (as well as the husband of Larry David of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” fame), believes it’s “truly chilling” that NASA would quietly change the mission statement, and sees something more nefarious at work:
Since the quiet change to the mission statement was made in February, funding for research of our home planet has continued to disappear from NASA’s budget as Bush puts increased emphasis on returning to the Moon and putting men on Mars.
Getting past the argument about the perceived disappearance of Earth sciences funding (previously discussed here) is the question of just how significant that mission statement is for NASA. While David calls it “the mission statement of this 48-year-old agency”, the statement itself dates back only four years, when it and an accompanying vision statement were released a few months into the tenure of Sean O’Keefe. Go to the NASA web site and you’ll be hard-pressed to find this mission statement prominently displayed anywhere. Perhaps the most damning statement comes from the original Times article, which noted that “Though the ‘understand and protect’ phrase was deleted in February, when the Bush administration submitted budget and planning documents to Congress, its absence has only recently registered with NASA employees.” If the mission statement was more prominent with the agency, don’t you think its absence would have been noted earlier?
What would be cause for concern is if other references to space science disappeared from other NASA documents. Yet the agency’s 2006 strategic plan, released at the same time as other documentation with the revised mission statement, has listed as one of its goals to “study Earth from space to advance scientific understanding and meet societal needs.” Now if NASA (or the White House, or whomever is really pulling the strings) really wanted to stop global warming research, or whatever, do you think that section of the plan, whose first paragraph mentions the “understanding of Earth’s system and its response to natural or human-induced changes” would still be in there?
July 27, 2006 at 6:48 am · Filed under Other
Thanks to the grand publicity machine that is the Internet (and you thought it was just a series of tubes) you may have already read the op-ed I wrote for the latest issue of SEED magazine on the burdens facing NASA now and a way out. But there’s an interesting backstory about this essay worth discussion.
Earlier this year, the folks at SEED contacted me and asked if I would be interested in having this blog join ScienceBlogs, their collective of, well, science-themed blogs. I declined, since I liked doing my own thing and because I didn’t think this blog would be a good fit in their network (although there is a lot of policy and other non-science discussion there), but kept the door open for future collaboration.
Not long after, they asked if I would be interested in writing a commentary on a space policy topic for the magazine itself: the more controversial or counterintuitive, the better. Given that many scientists have blamed the Vision for Space Exploration on the cutbacks they’re suffering in missions and research funding, that led to a theme that was suitably counterintuitive: instead of killing the Vision to save science, the effort should be accelerated where possible to get legacy projects off of the agency’s plate and get sooner to the time where exploration (accompanied by science) dominates the agency’s budget. (There was an interesting back-and-forth with the editors, who wanted something even more controversial: that NASA should simply drop all space science programs. While that’s an approach endorsed by some, it doesn’t seem terribly realistic in the near or even long term.)
I don’t know if some of the measures mentioned in the article will help that much; I’m particularly skeptical of the ISS national laboratory designation, although the proponents of it vigorously argue that it will help spread the burden of operating the station. If was difficult to go into more detail because of the roughly 800-word limit on the entire essay. It is, though, another voice in the ongoing, and critical, conversation about NASA’s long-term direction.
(And yes, I did plan to post about this earlier, but my internet got clogged in the same series of tubes as Senator Stevens’, so I had to wait my turn.)
July 26, 2006 at 7:20 am · Filed under Congress
By a voice vote, the House passed Monday H.Res 892, a resolution that thanks those employees of the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans who “risked their lives in dedication to the space program and faced down one of the greatest natural disasters in this Nation’s history” by staying behind at the factory during Hurricane Katrina last August. The text of the resolution names all 38 members of the ride-out team who prevented more serious damage to the shuttle external tank facility. The resolution was introduced by Congressman Charlie Melancon of Louisiana and cosponsored by the chairs and ranking members of both the full House Science Committee and its space subcommittee; statements in support of the resolution from Reps. Sherwood Boehlert and Ken Calvert are included in a Science Committee press release, while comments by Melancon and Bart Gordon are in a separate Science Committee Democrats release.
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July 25, 2006 at 10:30 am · Filed under NASA
It’s common knowledge in the space community that a significant fraction of the general public overestimates—often wildly—the amount of money NASA gets. A particularly egregious example of this is a letter to the editor that appeared in Monday’s issue of the Courier-Post newspaper, which serves the New Jersey suburbs of Philadelphia:
I shudder when I think of how much money has been invested — wasted, in my opinion — over the years. And for what? There is so much to be done here on Earth, how about spending some of that money here?
I would like to see the government place a 10-year moratorium on NASA missions and anything space related. We could pay off the national debt, finally come up with a health program that could benefit all Americans, perhaps find cures for dreaded diseases, house the homeless, feed the hungry, educate the illiterate . . . who knows how much more. And we still would have spare change.
Reality check: the national debt right now is roughly $8.4 trillion. The NASA budget over the next ten years: no more than about $200 billion.
July 21, 2006 at 9:23 am · Filed under Congress
On Thursday the House of Representatives passed a resolution commending NASA for the successful completion of the STS-121 shuttle mission this month. The resolution, H.Con.Res.448, was approved by the House 415-0. The resolution is pretty standard stuff, praising the shuttle crew and the space agency for “its pioneering work in space exploration which is strengthening the Nation and benefitting all Americans.”
A couple of minor, but interesting, notes about this resolution. the member who introduced this measure was not one of the usual suspects, like a member of the House Science Committee or someone from the Cape or Houston areas, but instead Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX). Paul, nominally a Republican, is really more of a libertarian and often casts contrary no votes on bills that otherwise have broad support if he feels they overstep what the government should be doing. (The resolution’s cosponsors are some more familiar names, including Sherwood Boehlert, Ken Calvert, and Dana Rohrabacher.) The other interesting item: Paul introduced the resolution, which congratulates NASA for “the successful completion of the Space Shuttle Discovery’s STS-121 mission” on July 13, several days before the mission actually ended.
July 20, 2006 at 12:55 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Just a brief note that I’m in Las Vegas for the next several days for the NewSpace 2006 conference, which will be taking up all of my time throught the weekend. As a result, don’t expect much activity here (unless there are some good policy-related sessions or related developments during the conference) until early next week.
July 18, 2006 at 7:04 am · Filed under Other
A reader sent me a notice about a new web site, Spacedebate.org, which describes itself as “an effort to expand the debate on the weaponization of space through a collaborative wiki-like tool for structured debate on a topic.” The site is devoted to collecting arguments and evidence on both sides of the issue. Spacedebate.org is not associated with a particular organization but instead a single individual, Greg Schnippel, who was inspired by the massive filed of evidence competitive debaters in high school and college collect to prepare for their competitions.
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