Space Politics
Because sometimes the most important orbit is the Beltway…
Archive for May, 2009
May 15, 2009 at 7:37 pm · Filed under NASA, White House
Throughout the day Friday news reports, like this AP report, indicated that it was virtually a done deal: Charles Bolden would meet with President Obama on Monday, and very shortly thereafter—maybe even that day—would be formally nominated to become NASA administrator. While the early reports were based on anonymous sources, that appear to be confirmed by White House press secretary Robert Gibbs in a press conference Friday afternoon:
Q And on Monday, Robert, will there be a NASA administrator announcement?
MR. GIBBS: I think you know that the President will meet with somebody that he hopes will — wants to meet with somebody about filling the important role of future NASA administrator.
Q Charles Bolden?
MR. GIBBS: He will meet with him on Monday, and we’ll see how that goes.
So it looks like a done deal: everyone’s saying Bolden will meet with the President and, most likely, be nominated. Until, that is, someone managed to talk with Bolden himself.
Space News reached Bolden on Friday and got a surprising response when asking Bolden about that planned meeting and nomination:
However, reached by phone May 15, Bolden told Space News he had not been asked to take the job and had no plans to meet with White House officials to discuss it.
“I am hearing the rumors, and as far as I know there is no truth in the rumors,” Bolden said. “You can’t say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ when you haven’t had a conversation. I haven’t had that conversation and I don’t have one scheduled.”
So what’s going on? Is Bolden really not in contention? Has the White House simply not gotten around to asking Bolden to come meet the President on Monday? Or was their some kind of miscommunication between the reporter and Bolden?
May 14, 2009 at 10:50 pm · Filed under Congress, NASA, White House
One NASA-related highlight of the House Science and Technology Committee hearing that features John Holdren was his statement that a nominee for NASA administrator could be announced “soon”, as he said at one point in response to a question. Later, he said:
I also have some reason for optimism that the President will be nominating a permanent administrator for NASA very shortly, and that that will help put at least that concern to rest, because I think it will be an outstanding person. The President’s concern has been to get the right person for that job. That fact that we don’t have one until now is not for lack of effort.
That may sound promising, but it’s not the first time we’ve heard such statements. Holdren told Nature he hoped to have “a new administrator in place in the next month”—in an interview a little over a month ago, for example. And President Obama himself said he planned to make a pick “soon”—in comments back in March. So initially it was hard to get one’s hopes up too much about this.
But this time the value of “soon” might indeed be measured in days, rather than weeks or months. NBC News reported late this evening that the administration will nominate Charles Bolden after a White House meeting on Monday. (The article says that Bolden will be “appointed”; the position of administrator requires Senate approval, so it would only be a nomination.) The news comes from a source kept anonymous “because there was no official authorization to speak about it publicly”.
If true, though, (and keeping in mind that this is not the first time a nomination was said to be imminent) Bolden would be an interesting choice. After all, Sen. Bill Nelson has been pushing for him since Bolden’s name first surfaced in connection with the job in January, even while the Obama Administration considered other candidates, some of whom were reportedly rejected by Nelson and other members of Congress. Bolden would likely have a smooth, and possibly very rapid, confirmation process in the Senate, barring an unforeseen problem or anonymous hold. However, why would the administration wait until now to nominate Bolden? Had they run out of other potential candidates? Did they strike some kind of understanding with him and/or Nelson? And what does the nomination say—if anything—about the independent review of NASA’s human spaceflight programs led by Norm Augustine that’s starting soon?
May 14, 2009 at 7:30 am · Filed under Congress
The House Science and Technology Committee is holding a hearing titled “An Overview of the Federal R&D Budget for FY 2010″ this afternoon at 2 pm. The witness will be OSTP director John Holdren. While that’s a pretty broad scope, a few questions about NASA and related policy issues seem likely. There will also be a separate hearing next week on NASA’s FY10 budget proposal with acting administrator Chris Scolese scheduled to testify.
May 14, 2009 at 7:25 am · Filed under NASA, White House
It is, perhaps, a little surprising that nearly a week after the White House announced that it would conduct an independent review of NASA’s human spaceflight plans, few additional details about that review have been announced. Beyond the chairman, Norm Augustine, the other members of the panel haven’t been announced, nor any additional details about that review beyond what Augustine conveyed in a brief telecon with reporters last Friday. With only about 90 days to perform their work, one assumes those details will be forthcoming very soon.
In the meantime, though, the lack of detail has allowed people to make their own, widely varying guesses about what the panel will conclude. Sen. Bill Nelson said that he expects the panel to endorse the current Constellation architecture. “Then if the president will get behind pushing that, we can speed up development of the new rocket,” Nelson said, according to WDBO radio. Robert Lightfoot, acting director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, told the Huntsville Times that it will be “a very fair study”. Curiously, he adds that not only will Marshall have a member on Augustine’s panel, “all the centers will” (which makes you wonder how independent this panel is, if correct.) On the other hand, in an essay in this week’s issue of The Space Review, Michael Huang fears the worst for human spaceflight given Augustine’s work on his 1990 commission, which emphasized space science over human spaceflight.
And from the Department of Bad Timing, Aviation Week published an interview with Augustine, but with nothing about the panel he would be chairing. Presumably the interview took place prior to Augustine’s appointment to run the panel, with no opportunity to follow up before publication.
May 13, 2009 at 9:19 pm · Filed under Other
Remember last year when then-candidate Barack Obama recalled growing up on Star Trek and believing in the final frontier? Turns out he’s not the only global leader who claims finding inspiration in space (real or fictional) at an early age. On Wednesday the Canadian Space Agency announced its two newest astronauts, an announcement that warranted a statement from Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper. The statement includes some generic platitudes about the two men selected and the “incredible depth of talent in Canada” in the form of the 5,351 applicants for the two openings. “I am excited to meet these two Canadians who may be travelling into space,” Harper added. “I was one of many young people who were inspired to dream of space travel after hearing of the first manned spaceflights.”
May 8, 2009 at 7:12 am · Filed under Congress, NASA
As expected, the White House has ordered an independent review of Constellation to be chaired by Norm Augustine and be completed by August. That exploration architecture is at the heart of Mike Griffin’s legacy at NASA administrator. So it was interesting that someone reminded me that both Augustine and Griffin were witnesses at the same hearing of the House Science Committee back in March 2004, when the committee was taking an initial look at the Vision for Space Exploration announced two months earlier. Augustine appeared in his role as former chairman of the “Committee on the Future of the U.S. Space Program” (aka the Augustine Commission) in 1990, while Griffin spoke as president of In-Q-Tel and incoming head of the Space Department at APL (the hearing took place almost exactly one year before Griffin was nominated to become NASA administrator).
Given that one of the major criticisms of Constellation has been its cost (in addition to technical and schedule issues, which also affect its cost), it was interesting to see some of their comments in the prepared testimony. Augustine had this to say about spending:
[I]t would be a grave mistake to try to pursue a space program “on the cheap”. To do so is in my opinion an invitation to disaster. There is a tendency in any “can-do” organization to believe that it can operate with almost any budget that is made available. The fact is that trying to do so is a mistake—particularly when safety is a major consideration. I am not arguing for profligacy; rather, I am simply pointing out that space activity is expensive and that it is difficult. One might even say that it is rocket science!
Griffin, meanwhile, addressed costs in greater detail in his remarks, suggesting that the initial estimates of the cost of developing the infrastructure needed to return to the Moon might, if anything, be “somewhat high”. He adds:
Additional perspective can be gained by noting that the cost of the entire Apollo program was about $130 B in today’s dollars. This included massive technology and infrastructure development, as well as the operational cost of eleven manned missions, including six lunar landings. It does not seem reasonable that 40% or more of this figure should be required to execute a single mission of a similar class today.
For advocates of spaceflight, including myself, more money is always better, and is certainly preferable to less money! But I would submit that our first order of business is to examine our culture, the aerospace culture, and ourselves, to understand why we believe it costs so very much more to operate in space than to perform almost any other human activity.
According to a committee press release, Griffin, when asked by Congressman Dana Rohrabacher about the costs of going to the Moon and Mars, said, “I believe that the first expeditions to Mars should be accomplishable within an amount of funding approximately equal to what we spent on Apollo…in today’s dollars, about $130 billion. Certainly that would envelope it. I believe that it should be possible to return to the moon for in the neighborhood of $30 billion in today’s dollars. And those are both fairly comfortable amounts.”
With the costs of returning to the Moon now significantly higher than what Griffin personally estimated five years ago, a key question for Augustine and his new panel is whether current plans are simply expensive and difficult, or profligate.
May 8, 2009 at 6:27 am · Filed under NASA, White House
This afternoon presidential science advisor John Holdren will appear on NPR’s “Science Friday” broadcast to talk about, among other issues, “the road ahead for NASA”. Potential topics there could include the human spaceflight review announced yesterday, the status of the recreation of the National Space Council, and the FY2010 budget.
May 7, 2009 at 6:47 am · Filed under Uncategorized
I am tied up all day today at a space debris workshop at McGill University in Montreal, so I won’t be providing updates on the budget details released later today until tonight. So I’m leaving this post open to comment on the budget and any other policy announcements (such as the anticipated Constellation review) that might come out today.
May 7, 2009 at 6:42 am · Filed under Other
the aftermath of the attempted acquisition of MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates’ (MDA) space unit by American company ATK, a deal that was eventually blocked by the Canadian government. Shortly after that a Canadian think tank, the Rideau Institute, issued a white paper on Canadian space policy calling for, among other things, the appointment of a permanent president of the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and the formulation of a national space policy.
Yesterday the Rideau Institute released a 2009 version of its assessment of Canada’s space sector, and saw signs of improvement. Plans by the Canadian goverment to add C$110 million to CSA’s budget over the next three years, as well as the appointment last fall of Steve MacLean as CSA’s new president, are favorably assessed in the report, as is an ongoing effort to develop a strategic plan for the space agency. The report adds that despite the current recession “observers of the Canadian space sector are optimistic about the year ahead.” However, the report notes that “the underlying problems affecting the agency [CSA] have remained largely unsolved” and that they are no closer to a government-wide space policy desired by many in the Canadian space field.
May 6, 2009 at 9:12 pm · Filed under Congress, NASA, White House
It would seem that shuttle supporters have won a victory in their efforts to last keep all the remaining missions on the manifest despite the looming September 2010 deadline for its retirement—and chose an unusual means of announcing it. “White House tells me the president will fly all nine remaining shuttle missions – even if it means flying the shuttle an extra year,” said Sen. Bill Nelson (or at least someone representing the senator) via the microblogging service Twitter. Nelson didn’t say anything else, although Florida Today provides a little more detail: that news came out of briefings with the White House over the last two days, although the White House still believes that the remaining missions can be flown by the end of FY 2010.
« Previous entries ·
Next entries »
