Space Politics
Because sometimes the most important orbit is the Beltway…
Archive for April, 2008
April 20, 2008 at 1:46 pm · Filed under Congress, NASA
The space subcommittee of the House Science and Technology Committee is holding a hearing this Thursday morning on “NASA’s International Space Station Program: Status and Issues”. The rather crowded list of witnesses:
- Mr. William Gerstenmaier, Associate Administrator, Space Operations Mission Directorate, National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- Ms. Cristina T. Chaplain, Director, Acquisition and Sourcing Management, Government Accountability Office
- Dr. Edward P. Knipling, Administrator, Agricultural Research Service, Department of Agriculture
- Dr. Cheryl Nickerson, Associate Professor of Life Sciences, Arizona State University
- Mr. Thomas Pickens, III, President and CEO, Spacehab, Inc.
- Dr. Louis Stodieck, Director, BioServe Space Technologies and Aerospace Engineering Science, University of Colorado at Boulder
- Dr. Jeffrey Sutton, Director, National Space Biomedical Research Institute
April 20, 2008 at 1:37 pm · Filed under Other
Just as NASA is asking Congress to extend its authority to purchase Soyuz spacecraft after 2011, Russian officials are making statements that may raise a few eyebrows in the US. The Associated Press published Saturday comments made by Roskosmos head Anatoly Perminov after the Soyuz TMA-11 spacecraft made a ballistic reentry and landing several hundred kilometers off-course:
Later, Perminov referred to a naval superstition that having women aboard a ship was bad luck when asked about the presence of two women on the Soyuz.
“You know in Russia, there are certain bad omens about this sort of thing, but thank God that everything worked out successfully,” he said. “Of course in the future, we will work somehow to ensure that the number of women will not surpass” the number of men.
Challenged by a reporter, Perminov responded: “This isn’t discrimination. I’m just saying that when a majority (of the crew) is female, sometimes certain kinds of unsanctioned behavior or something else occurs, that’s what I’m talking about.” He did not elaborate.
April 18, 2008 at 7:46 am · Filed under Congress, NASA
While NASA is not focusing on crew transfer services as part of the COTS program right now, it is pretty much going all-in on cargo resupply with COTS. Aerospace Daily reported Thursday that NASA is not asking for an Congressional extension of its authority to purchase Progress missions after the current authority to purchase Progress and Soyuz missions, granted in the Iran Nonproliferation Amendments Act of 2005, expires at the end of 2011. NASA has formally requested to Congress that it be able to purchase Soyuz flights for crew transfers after 2011, but instead plans on relying on one more commercial providers to transport cargo to the station. (The NASA proposal would end authorization for Soyuz purchases once Orion or a commercial crew transportation provider enters service.)
And what if SpaceX, Orbital, or anyone else isn’t ready by the end of 2011? NASA associate administrator Bill Gerstenmaier told Aerospace Daily that NASA would “live off the spares” that the final shuttle flights will bring to the station. (Presumably there will be enough consumables brought on Progress, ATV, and/or HTV missions for this strategy to work.) It does suggest that NASA feels confident enough that someone will be ready to start carrying cargo to the station by the beginning of 2012, but that confidence doesn’t extend to crew transportation.
April 18, 2008 at 7:24 am · Filed under Other
As the previous post noted, space exploration isn’t a high priority among the British public. Yet, they certainly like to talk about space policy. The BBC reported this week that the British government is planning a “major revamp” of its space policy, including reorganizing and relocating its space office. The British National Space Centre (BNSC) is being moved from London to Swindon, which is also home to the Science and Technology Facilities Council, which funds space sciences research in the UK. Some of the BNSC’s responsibilities will also be transferred to another office, the Technology Strategy Board, according to the BBC report. This comes after earlier complaints that the BNSC is, in general, not effective, and should be replaced with a full-fledged space agency like NASA.
One of those who called last year for a UK space agency was Lord Martin Rees, the president of the Royal Society. Lord Rees was in the news this week when he said that Europe should abandon human spaceflight and instead endeavor to get the “world lead” in robotic spaceflight. “We can be more effective in space if we focus all our budget on miniaturisation, robotics, and fabricators and avoid manned spaceflight,” he told the BBC. He added: “If I was an American, I would be opposed to a return to the Moon and going to Mars.” Rees’s arguments aren’t new: back in 2003, before President Bush announced the Vision for Space Exploration, Rees was skeptical about the future of government-run human spaceflight, saying only the private sector was able to accept the risks inherent with such exploration. “I think the future of manned spaceflight will only brighten if it’s done by people prepared to cut costs and take risks in a fashion that’s seemingly unacceptable to the U.S. public in a NASA project,” he told SPACE.com in December 2003.
Update: Flightglobal.com reports that Rees’s comments have caused a “backlash” in the UK space science community, at least among those who have advocated that the UK participate in European human spaceflight activities. One Royal Astronomical Society official, Ian Crawford, said that Rees’s comments suggested that he “ought to be more familiar with the scientific benefits” of human spaceflight in areas such as planetary geology and life sciences. And retired BBC spaceflight commentator Reg Turnill had this to say: “Rees’ attitude to human spaceflight is at least a century out of date, but does have the huge merit of getting the subject discussed. He can also be assured that future generations will remember him for all the wrong reasons.”
April 18, 2008 at 7:01 am · Filed under Other
This blog has noted on a number of occasions, to the consternation of hardcore space advocates, that space ranks pretty low on the list of priorities of the general public (and, thus, fairly high on the list of government programs they would be willing to cut). Another reminder of this came out earlier this month, when the Fairfax County (Virginia) Economic Development Authority released a poll ranking the top priorities for “technological breakthroughs” as perceived by the American public. “Fuel efficiency and alternative fuels” and “Medical” ranked at the top of the list, with two-thirds of the respondents selecting one or the other as their highest priority. “Space exploration” made the list, but only barely: just three percent ranked it as their highest technological priority, ahead of only “Telecommunications and media” and “Don’t know/not sure”.
The same poll was also performed in the UK at the same time, with similar results. While medical and fuel efficiency/alternative fuels flipped-flopped at the top, space exploration remained near the bottom, getting selected by only one percent of the public, tied for last with telecommunications and media.
April 16, 2008 at 8:18 am · Filed under Congress, NASA
That’s the argument made in an article yesterday in the Orlando Sentinel, which makes the case that Lampson’s fight to raise NASA’s budget will help keep jobs at KSC. Lampson, the article notes, wants an extra $3 billion for NASA’s budget to reduce the Shuttle-Constellation gap. To aid those efforts, he organized a meeting between NASA administrator Mike Griffin and a group of fiscally conservative “Blue Dog” Democrats, and also organized a Congressional trip to last month’s shuttle launch.
However, those efforts hold a slim chance of success. The article hints that House Democratic leaders might be willing to increase NASA’s budget to help Lampson in a tough reelection battle in his Texas district (which includes JSC); the question is, is his seat worth $3 billion—or $1 billion or less—to party leaders? Recall last fall that there was a push to get the House to sign onto the $1-billion “Mikulski Miracle” as a way to help Lampson, but that effort failed. And, as the article notes, there may be other ways to help Lampson without spending billions, such as simply asking fellow Democrats who are critics of the agency or human spaceflight to keep quiet this year. One fellow Democrat who was on the shuttle launch junket last month was unconvinced of the need to spend billions to close the gap. “Of course they [NASA] told us that they weren’t getting enough money,” Rep. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) told the Sentinel, saying that NASA should focus instead on “efforts that could bear the most fruit”, like robotic spaceflight.
One additional tidbit at the end of the article: Lampson said that if he does win reelection this fall, he hopes to become chair of the space subcommittee of the House Science and Technology Committee. That position is currently held by Rep. Mark Udall (D-CO), who is running for the Senate seat being vacated by Wayne Allard.
April 14, 2008 at 8:01 am · Filed under NASA
In response to the avalanche of comments to an earlier post about a presentation Charles Miller gave at the Space Access conference last month about the budgetary pressures NASA is facing and one potential solution, Charles approached me about fleshing out that talk into a more detailed essay. Part one of that essay appears in Monday’s issue of The Space Review and goes into detail about the budget crunch NASA and other discretionary spending programs will be facing in the near future as the Baby Boomers retire. That wave of retirements will cause mandatory spending (Social Security, Medicare, etc.) to increase, putting pressure on other programs. While NASA has done reasonably well in the current administration, when there has been little pressure to balance budgets, it did suffer a cut of nearly 20 percent during the Clinton Administration when there was a bipartisan push to balance the budget—a portent of what may come when there are similar pressures to cut spending.
A key paragraph from the article:
These fiscal pressures will force the next president—regardless of whoever is elected in November—to make some hard decisions in the years to come about discretionary spending. It is unrealistic to expect that NASA will somehow be immune to pressures to cut spending. A budget cut in the next Administration that is equivalent to last decade’s cut would result in reduction of NASA’s budget of over $3 billion per year. If that happens, it will be difficult, if not impossible, for the current exploration architecture to continue in anything resembling its current form and schedule. It will be significantly delayed, radically altered, or even cancelled.
The next part will focus on what Charles proposed in his Space Access talk on how to preserve the Vision in such an austere budgetary environment.
April 14, 2008 at 7:52 am · Filed under Campaign '08, Lobbying
At a town hall meeting in Columbus, Indiana, on Friday, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama was asked again about NASA. Specifically, a “young man” asked him, “What do you plan to do with the space agency?” Obama’s answer was pretty much the same as what he has said recently: that it was time to revisit what NASA should be doing and how. “I think it needs to be redefined, though,” he said. “We’ve kind of lost a sense of mission in terms of what it is that NASA should be trying to achieve and I think that we’ve gotta make some big decisions about whether or not, are we going to try to send manned, you know, space launches, or are we better off in terms of what we’re learning sending unmanned probes which oftentimes are cheaper and less dangerous, but yield more information.”
If there was one relatively new thing in his comments, it was that it appears that he would defer any decisions on exactly how NASA’s mission should be redefined until after he becomes president (assuming, of course, he’s elected.) “[T]hat’s a major debate I’m going to want to convene when I’m president of the United States,” he said. “What direction do we take the space program in? Once we have a sense of what’s going to be most valuable for us in terms of gaining knowledge, then I think we’ll able to adjust the budget so that we’re going all out on what it is that we’ve decided to do.”
Such language is unlikely to mollify space advocates concerned about the potential changes a President Obama might make to NASA. Then again, there hasn’t been nearly the outcry against Obama’s proposals, including a proposed five-year delay for Constellation, as some might expect. In an article last week in The Space Review, Greg Zsidisin describes Obama’s proposed changes and the response he got from Obama when he asked the candidate a question during a Wyoming town hall meeting last month. Zsidisin followed that article up this week with a review of the positions, or the lack thereof, space industry organizations and advocacy groups have taken in response to Obama’s proposals, or those of the other candidates, for that matter.
Zsidisin blames a lot of the relative silence on the issue on the fact that many of these groups are 501(c)(3)’s, organizations with tax-exempt status from the IRS that strictly limits what they can do in terms of political lobbying. (A contributing factor, he adds, is the degree of conservatism—in the sense of cautiousness, not as a region of the political spectrum—in space advocacy, which Zsidisin blames on the fact that so many members of advocacy groups are also employed in the space industry.) What’s needed, he argues, are more 501(c)(4) lobbying groups like ProSpace, which do not have the same restrictions on lobbying as their 501(c)(3) cousins.
And, as it turns out, one such lobbying group is now forming. In another essay in today’s issue of The Space Review, Jeff Brooks describes the formation of such a group, called the Committee for the Advocacy of Space Exploration. Brooks describes the group as “the country’s only fully-empowered Political Action Committee (PAC) designed to support pro-space candidates in federal elections.” In the essay, he argues, “Politicians must be made to know that they will gain by supporting space exploration and will suffer if they don’t. Until the space advocacy movement learns to play political hardball, its efforts will continue to be largely ineffectual.”
April 10, 2008 at 10:14 am · Filed under Other
The planned sale of the space division of MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates (MDA) to Alliant Techsystems (ATK) has hit a roadblock that is unprecedented but not necessarily surprising. The deal required the approval of the Canadian government since MDA is a Canadian company and ATK is an American one, but this week Industry Minister Jim Prentice issued a letter blocking the sale, telling ATK that “based on the information received at this time” the deal is not “likely to be of net benefit to Canada.” It’s the first time since the current Canadian law that governs sales of companies to foreign entities was enacted in 1989 that such a deal was blocked.
However, there had been strong opposition to the sale among some groups in Canada, with particular concern regarding the control of MDA’s RADARSAT-2 radar imaging satellite. That satellite was funded by the Canadian government, but would be owned by ATK if the deal went through; this led to concerns that ATK or the US government could block access to radar imagery to Canada. ATK now has 30 days to provide additional information to Industry Canada to make their case for the deal, and/or try to restructure the deal to address Canadian concerns.
April 9, 2008 at 9:22 am · Filed under Campaign '08, Congress
A runoff in Texas District 22 on Tuesday has determined who will oppose Congressman Nick Lampson this fall. Former Senate aide Pete Olson defeated Shelley Sekula Gibbs by a 2-to-1 margin in the Republican runoff, after neither candidate captured a majority in the primary last month. Sekula Gibbs ran against Lampson in 2006 and lost, although she won a separate special election that allowed here to serve out the final weeks of Tom DeLay’s term during the 2006 lame duck session. That district includes NASA JSC, and, according to the AP report, Lampson’s campaign is already using that to take aim at Olson. “Congressman (Nick) Lampson has promoted NASA while his opponent didn’t know the name of the Johnson Space Center in a recent debate,” Anthony Gutierrez, Lampson’s campaign manager, said.
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