Space Politics
Because sometimes the most important orbit is the Beltway…
Archive for March, 2008
March 29, 2008 at 12:02 pm · Filed under Other, NASA
At the Space Access ’08 conference in Phoenix on Friday, Charles Miller, a member of the board of directors of the Space Frontier Foundation, gave a presentation with a provocative title: “The Vision for Space Exploration (VSE) and the Retirement of the Baby Boomers: Is this the Beginning of the End? or The End of the Beginning?” Miller took aim at one of the core assumptions behind the planning for the VSE and its implementation, dating back to the budget projection “sand chart” from January 2004: that NASA’s budget would grow at roughly the rate of inflation for the foreseeable, if not indefinite, future. Current administrator Mike Griffin, for example, has said on a number of occasions that budget growth that keeps pace with inflation would be sufficient to allow humans to land on Mars by the mid-2030s, among other things.
The problem with that assumption, Miller said, is that the budget is facing a major crunch in the relatively near future, as the Baby Boomer generation retires and starts putting increasing fiscal strain on programs like Social Security and Medicare. “Mandatory” programs, like those, now account for 53% of the overall federal budget, compared to 26% in 1962, according to OMB data released last month with the President’s FY09 budget proposal. Discretionary spending, which includes NASA as well as the military and many other agencies, has seen its share of the budget pie shrink from 68% in 1962 to 38% now. Those discretionary programs will continue to be squeezed, Miller believes, particularly once Boomers start retiring en masse around 2010.
“There’s going to be blood on the floor for a wide variety of programs, and it’s going to include NASA,” Miller predicts. “A conservative projection for NASA’s real budget in the long term, for 50 years, needs to take this into account, and should consider significant reductions in the top-line NASA budget.”
In such a scenario, it seems unlikely that the Vision would continue in anything like its current ESAS implementation. That is likely to be true regardless of who becomes the next president, as he or she will have to grapple with the same fiscal realities. “I think it [ESAS] is going to probably die in the next administration,” Miller said. Which begs the question: what should replace it?
Miller said that the goal of going to the Moon, Mars, and beyond can be preserved if one of three conditions can be met: cheap, reliable access to space (CRATS) is achieved; we find an “economically-driven strategic reason” for investing in space; or we address high-priority national security objectives. All those things can be achieved, he said, if the US develops a “reusable space access industry” that includes not just launch vehicles but other infrastructure elements like propellant depots, orbital transfer vehicles, and the like. Such an industry could make civil, military, and commercial space affordable and sustainable even in a severely constrained budget environment.
Miller proposed at the end of the talk to start preparing for “the end of the beginning” with a “National Reusable Space Access Summit”. This event would bring together the major players to develop a “National Reusable Space Access Strategy”, and come out with a short consensus statement that would be the basis for future discussions with government leaders. “I’m throwing this out here to start a discussion,” he concluded.
March 28, 2008 at 12:42 pm · Filed under Other
As a counterpoint to the recent Houston Chronicle op-ed about the need to “stay the course” on the exploration program or else lose out to the Chinese, among other recent statements that have suggested that the US is in danger of falling behind to the Chinese in human spaceflight, a reader passed along this China Daily article from earlier this month. In it, Hu Hao, the director of China’s “moon exploration center” said that China had no plans for a human lunar mission by 2020, as the country was only now making its initial steps in robotic lunar exploration. As Hu colorfully put it: “You can’t declare yourself the boss of a chicken farm when you’ve only got one egg now, can you?” That’s a message that hasn’t reached—or is being ignored by—some in the US, though.
March 28, 2008 at 12:15 pm · Filed under Congress
As Congress returns from recess next week, the House Science and Technology Committee has a couple of relevant hearings scheduled. On Wednesday morning, April 2, the research and education subcommittee is holding a hearing on “International Science and Technology Cooperation” with the following witnesses scheduled:
- Dr. John Marburger, Director, Office of Science and Technology Policy
- Dr. Arden Bement, Director, National Science Foundation (NSF)
- Dr. Nina Fedoroff, Science and Technology Advisor to the Secretary, U.S. Department of State
- Mr. Jeff Miotke, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Science, Space and Health, Bureau of Oceans and International and Environmental and Scientific Affairs, U.S. Department of State
- Mr. Michael O’Brien, Assistant Administrator for External Relations, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
On Thursday morning, April 3, the space subcommittee is holding a hearing titled “NASA’s Exploration Initiative: Status and Issues”, with the following witnesses:
- Dr. Richard Gilbrech, Associate Administrator, Exploration Systems Mission Directorate, NASA
- Ms. Cristina T. Chaplain, Director, Acquisition and Sourcing Management,
Government Accountability Office
- Dr. Noel Hinners, Independent Consultant
- Dr. Kathryn Thornton, Professor of Department of Science, Technology and Society & Associate Dean of the School of Engineering & Applied Science, University of Virginia
March 27, 2008 at 6:02 pm · Filed under NASA
While it’s been mentioned in the comments in the earlier post on the subject, it’s worth a post itself. Space News scored the first interview with Ed Weiler, the director of the Goddard Space Flight Center and the interim replacement for Alan Stern as head of the Science Mission Directorate. The interview makes it clear that Weiler, who previously served in a similar position at NASA headquarters, is still getting up to speed on the issues. He also declined to comment on the circumstances of Stern’s resignation.
The interview does raise the question of the future of some of the programs that Stern promoted while on the job, including planning for a Mars sample return mission near the end of the next decade and a reinvigorated suborbital program. On the last point, Weiler was asked about the request for information that NASA issued recently for suborbital flight services; Weiler responded, “I know nothing about this,” although he was supportive in general of the efforts Stern made on suborbital programs. (That last comment, though, may be causing some concern among companies in the entrepreneurial suborbital industry, based on some conversations I had with people at the Space Access ’08 conference going on now in Phoenix.)
Scientific American, meanwhile, has an article with comments from the space science community about Stern’s resignation, as they speculate why he resigned, and what impact it will have on the agency’s science programs. “It means potentially a black day for science at NASA,” said Mark Sykes of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson. “It’s clear that [Stern] was pushing very hard on the system,” James Bell, a Mars scientist at Cornell, said. “He may have thought he had more latitude with Mike Griffin than he did.”
March 26, 2008 at 1:06 pm · Filed under NASA
NASA officially announced this morning that Alan Stern, the associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, was resigning. He will be replaced on an intermin basis, at least, by Ed Weiler, the director of NASA Goddard. Stern will leave in “a few weeks”, Stern announced in an email memo cited by Space News/SPACE.com.
“While I deeply regret his decision to leave NASA, I understand his reasons for doing so,” administrator Mike Griffin said in the official statement. However, the statement doesn’t explain what those reasons are. There has been speculation (based on some emails and phone calls I received this morning) that this is linked to the recent kerfuffle over a plan, since overruled, to cut the Mars Exploration Rovers program budget. The timing, at the very least, is suspect, but it could also be a coincidence.
March 26, 2008 at 6:25 am · Filed under Other
The Planetary Society announced this week that it is holding the first in a series of “town hall” meetings on space policy this Saturday in Brookline, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. The society is billing this event as the “public follow-up” to the Stanford University exploration workshop last month, which endorsed human exploration with the goal of “Mars and beyond”. “We need to examine the current Vision for Space Exploration to see what it will take to gather greater political support and public interest to carry out the Vision,” Lou Friedman said in the statement. The society hasn’t released a schedule of future such events.
March 24, 2008 at 8:56 pm · Filed under NASA
In last week’s issue of The Space Review, I reported on some Mars scientists were concerned about the long-term future of the exploration of the Red Planet, given shifting NASA priorities and funding. While the near-term picture looks promising, with the arrival of the Phoenix lander in two months and the planned 2009 launch of the Mars Science Laboratory, the picture beyond 2009 looks rather fuzzy. NASA officials, including Mike Griffin, have defended the cuts in the five-year budget plans for NASA by saying that Mars exploration is being rebalanced to help support other science programs, like outer solar system exploration, that have not fared as well as recent years.
Now it appears NASA’s Mars programs are facing some short-term pain as well. SPACE.com and the AP report that NASA has asked the Mars Exploration Rover program to cut $4 million from its budget for the remainder of FY2008. That likely means that the Spirit rover will remain in an extended hibernation period after the winter ends, instead of resuming scientific work. That cut could be extended into FY2009. SPACE.com added that the Mars Odyssey orbiter, launched in 2001, is “on the cost-cutting table” as well.
Some will argue that the rovers, on the surface for over four years each, have long exceeded the planned 90-day missions, and that Spirit in particular is not in the best of shape, suffering from a stuck wheel that impairs the rover’s mobility, so these cuts are not catastrophic. However, don’t be surprised if there’s some vocal opposition—among scientists, advocates, and supporters on Capitol Hill—to these proposed cuts in the days and weeks to come. Whether that will make any difference, though, remains to be seen.
Update 3/25 7:30 am: After those initial reports, NASA spokesmen told CNN and the Pasadena Star-News that “shutting down of one of the rovers is not an option,” although they confirmed that the order to cut the program’s budget had been issued. “The rovers program will continue and not one rover will be impacted by this budget challenge, period,” spokesman Dwayne Brown told the Star-News. One wonders, if these statements are accurate, if the rover program is playing a version of the “Washington Monument strategy”: claiming a high-profile program will be affected if a budget cut is enacted.
March 24, 2008 at 1:34 pm · Filed under Campaign '08
“Because of the 2008 presidential election, our nation’s human spaceflight program is at a perilous crossroad,” claims Douglas MacKinnon in an op-ed Sunday in the Houston Chronicle. MacKinnon, a former White House and Pentagon official who is now director of federal affairs and communications for a K Street law firm, believes none of the three remaining major candidates is sufficiently committed to carrying out current national space exploration policy (aka the Vision for Space Exploration), although he singles out Barack Obama for particular attention. (A quibble: MacKinnon writes that “Obama went on record as saying he planned to pay for his $18 billion education plan by taking it out of the hide of NASA”; rather, Obama said he would pay for his education plan in part by delaying Constellation by five years. He also did not specifically mention Ares and Orion in the statement, contrary to what MacKinnon writes, although the campaign has been vague about what exactly they meant, especially since they have not issued a formal space policy statement to date.)
MacKinnon believes that the next president, whomever he or she is, needs to “stay the course” and continue the program. Drawing parallels to JFK, who said in a 1962 speech that “Our leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to become the world’s leading spacefaring nation,” MacKinnon writes: “No matter who is our next president, he or she is either going to have to buy in completely to the premise of that young president, or stand aside and watch as other nations lay claim to the promise of space. There is no middle ground.”
If that rhetoric isn’t strong enough for you, MacKinnon has more: “Should the next president decide to delay or cancel our next generation spacecraft and rockets for partisan reasons, he or she will be condemning the United States to second-class status in space for decades to come.” Second class in space? For decades? That is strong stuff.
Unfortunately, it’s not clear that it is all that attached to reality. MacKinnon doesn’t explain how not developing Ares and Orion would affect issues like national security and commercial space, which are not directly tied to Constellation yet arguably are just as important, if not more so, to US “status in space” than the ability of putting humans in space (it’s just that the latter is far more visible to the public than launching reconnaissance or communications satellites.) The ability to “lay claim to the promise of space” is not dependent solely, or even primarily, on developing Ares and Orion.
Essays like MacKinnon’s though, appear part of a theme that has emerged over the last several months: rather than selling the current space exploration policy on what it can do for the nation, sell it instead on the perceived dire consequences if it is altered or cancelled. But does fearmongering make for good space policy?
March 21, 2008 at 9:10 am · Filed under Other
The Canadian government on Thursday delayed for 30 days a decision on approving the sale of the space business of MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates (MDA) to US company Alliant Techsystems (ATK). The $1.3-billion deal was announced in January, and Industry Canada had until Saturday to approve the deal, but exercised its right to extend that deadline 30 days. No reason for the delay has been given. MDA shareholders recently approved the sale by an overwhelming margin.
In the days leading up to the original deadline, various groups in Canada had expressed their opposition to the sale, concerned about giving up the country’s leading space technology company to foreign ownership. Two Canadian political parties not currently in power, Liberal and NDP, issued statements Thursday in opposition to the sale. A Canadian think tank, the Rideau Institute, issued a press release in conjunction with the Canadian Auto Workers (a union that represents some MDA employees) arguing that the sale could restrict Canadian access to RADARSAT-2 radar imagery because the MDA-owned satellite would now be under the control of a US company. Even the National Post, a newspaper that tends to be supportive of the ruling Conservative party, published a column opposing the sale earlier this week, drawing parallels to the decision 50 years ago to end the Avro Arrow fighter program.
March 19, 2008 at 6:57 am · Filed under Congress, NASA
Houston has a big interest in the fortunes of NASA, given the presence of the Johnson Space Center. The Hampton Roads area of Virginia also has a similar interest because of the Langley Research Center. So it’s not surprising that newspapers in both areas are pleading for more money for NASA—although taking somewhat different angles on the issue.
In Monday’s Houston Chronicle, an editorial claims that it is “unfortunate that our nation’s leaders have allowed a vital program essential to our national security to reach such an impasse”. The Chronicle is not referring to Space Radar or FIA or other milspace programs usually associated with “national security”, but rather NASA’s manned spaceflight capabilities. The Chronicle is concerned about the “humiliating prospect” of purchasing Soyuz rides from Russia as well as the specter of China getting to the Moon before NASA.
“With national resolve, it is possible to prevent an irreversible slide into U.S. space mediocrity,” the editorial offers, saying that COTS could provide a “shortcut” while pressing for more money to accelerate the development of Constellation. “Congress should heed U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, and other lawmakers who are pressing for an additional $2 billion to speed up the construction of the Orion vehicle.”
The Hampton Roads Daily Press is also concerned about NASA’s funding, but is concerned about too much of an emphasis on the Vision for Space Exploration, rather than too little. While the editorial does note the “setback in prestige, capacity and security” caused by the impending gap, it complains that NASA’s focus on “manned missions to the moon and Mars” has hurt other NASA programs, like the aeronautics work at Langley, since the Vision’s unveiling in 2004. “The president hasn’t pushed the Mars idea since then, or fully funded it, but billions have been spent. And the initiative may be shunted to the back burner by the next president. Because it is expensive. And it’s not popular with either the public or those scientists who think unmanned exploration makes more sense.”
The editorial leads off with the lament that “Virginia doesn’t have anyone on the House of Representatives subcommittee that oversees funding for NASA” who could champion additional funding for the center. It hopes in conclusion, though, that Virginia’s Congressional delegation can “restore the rationality and the investment in pragmatic goals that the Bush NASA budget lacks.”
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