Space Politics
Because sometimes the most important orbit is the Beltway…
Archive for April, 2010
April 13, 2010 at 7:38 pm · Filed under NASA
There’s some late breaking news about what President Obama will announce Thursday, coming after the end of today’s sessions at the National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs. AP reports (and NASA officials here confirmed) that Orion will be revived as a crew return vehicle for the ISS. It will be launched unmanned and remain docked at the ISS as an emergency return vehicle, according to the reports. In addition, NASA will accelerate development of a heavy-lift launcher, selecting a design by 2015 and starting work thereafter.
Reuters is reporting something similar, and adding that NASA’s budget will increase by $6 billion over 5 years. It’s not clear, though, if this an additional $6 billion or simply repeating the $6 billion additional in the original FY11 budget proposal.
April 13, 2010 at 9:11 am · Filed under Events, NASA, Other
I’m in Colorado Springs this week for the National Space Symposium. Upon arriving at the Broadmoor yesterday afternoon this was the first thing that greeted me:
No, it’s not someone protesting NASA’s planned reliance on commercial ventures to transport crews to LEO. It’s one of the handful of protestors that turn up outside the conference site every year, usually protesting military space activities as well as more general military concerns (“Are Nuclear Weapons Legal?” asked one banner.)
The highlight of today is arguably speech this morning by NASA administrator Charles Bolden; there will also be a panel session in the afternoon on the NASA budget featuring deputy administrator Lori Garver. But perhaps the most intriguing thing on the schedule is this event notice sent out to media: “NASA Optimus Prime Announcement”. If the Autobots are working with NASA, the new exploration plan would seem like a shoe-in (not to mention that Transformers probably count as gamechanging technology.) No word if opponents of the new plan have reached out to Megatron.
April 13, 2010 at 8:07 am · Filed under Events, NASA, Other
A few items of interest as anticipation for this week’s presidential space conference at KSC builds:
More letter writing: a letter signed by a number of former astronauts, as well as former NASA administrator Mike Griffin and others, including Gene Kranz and Chris Kraft, criticizes the decision to cancel Constellation and asks the president to “demonstrate the vision and determination necessary to keep our nation at the forefront of human space exploration”. The letter doesn’t dwell on Constellation (indeed, it’s mentioned only once in the letter, in the very first sentence), but instead focuses on the concerns about abandoning human space exploration. “NASA must continue at the frontiers of human space exploration in order to develop the technology and set the standards of excellence that will enable commercial space ventures to eventually succeed. Canceling NASA’s human space operations, after 50 years of unparalleled achievement, makes that objective impossible.”
Also on Monday, Aerospace Industries Association president Marion Blakey called for specific milestones and deadlines in NASA’s new plan in a speech in Florida. “Kennedy didn’t say we’d go to the moon today; he said, ‘this decade’,” she said. “We need clear goals, milestones and dates, the building blocks and metrics of a concrete commitment to human spaceflight beyond low earth orbit.” She also called for a “national space strategy” that would “set out our goals for at least a generation so long-term investments can be made.”
Sunday’s “Save Space” rally in Cocoa, Florida, went off as planned, with as many as 4,000 people attending to hear speeches covering familiar talking points about saving space (or at least saving space jobs in the region). One comment from Florida Lt. Gov. Jeff Kottkamp, via the Save Space Twitter account: “we need to go back to the moon by 2015 and to Mars by 2020.” Good luck with that.
As for Thursday’s event, invitations have gone out (some as late as Sunday), so Central Florida News 13 asks, “who’s going?”. Some local officials have gotten invites, but surprisingly, neither Rep. Suzanne Kosmas (D-FL) nor Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL) has gotten one.
April 12, 2010 at 6:39 pm · Filed under Congress, NASA
Florida isn’t the only state worried about job losses with the pending demise of Constellation. On Monday Colorado’s two senators, Mark Udall (D) and Michael Bennet (D) announced that they had met with NASA administrator Charles Bolden about Constellation, presenting him with a letter to President Obama expressing their concerns. The letter covers a number of standard issues about the decision to end Constellation: job losses (over 1,000 in Colorado, where Lockheed Martin is doing work on Orion), concerns that it is premature to rely on the commercial sector, and impacts on the industrial base that could affect the Defense Department.
“We recognize that there are significant obstacles you must overcome with the Constellation program as it is currently configured, not the least of which is chronic under-funding,” they write in the letter to President Obama. “However, we believe there is a way forward that balances stimulation of commercial service providers with the proven capabilities of NASA and its industrial partners, a way that responsibly uses limited taxpayer dollars and allows NASA to continue to serve as an inspiration to future generations of scientists, engineers, and explorers.” They don’t specify what they have in mind, though.
The meeting with Bolden was no doubt timed to this Thursday’s presidential space conference at KSC, but it also takes place on the eve of the National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs. The future of Constellation is likely to be a hot topic among attendees (at least those who didn’t get invitations in recent days to go to KSC.) Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter (D) will reportedly talk about “the importance of the Orion program” in a speech Tuesday at the symposium, according to Denver Business Journal. There’s also concern in Colorado, according to the same report, that that Colorado was being “outhustled” by Florida officials, who are apparently lobbying to move some work from Colorado to Florida.
While the language by Sens. Udall and Bennet was pretty mild, the same can’t be said for Rep. John Culberson (R-TX), who spoke out about the cancellation of Constellation in a interview with National Journal’s Hotline On Call. “He’s proposing to cancel America’s manned space program, which is typical of this administration’s pattern of apologizing for America’s success, kowtowing to our enemies, bowing to foreign dictators and their obsession with trying to make terrorists like us,” Culberson says. However, Culberson is bipartisan in his criticism: “This is one of many unfortunate legacies left to us by the Bush administration. Unfortunately, President Bush’s quote, vision for space exploration was nothing more than a press release and a publicity stunt for the 2004 election. Because it was never followed up with sufficient funding to fulfill what he laid out.” Culberson, it should be noted, has served for some time on the subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee whose responsibility includes NASA.
April 10, 2010 at 10:21 am · Filed under NASA, White House
With few officials details released yet about next Thursday’s space conference at KSC, the space community is seizing upon any bit of information about the event. That was the case yesterday when Florida Today reported that, according to the White House, President Obama will spend only two hours at KSC on the 15th, arriving at 1:45 pm EDT, giving a speech at 3 pm, and leaving at 3:45 pm. While it was clear for some time that he wouldn’t be spending the full day there (since he’s also attending fundraisers in Miami that day) many were clearly disappointed that he would not stay longer. Left unanswered, though, is the question of just how long Obama needs to be there: is two hours sufficient for giving his speech, having private meetings with various officials, and whatever else he needs to drum up support for this plan? It doesn’t leave that much time for sightseeing, to be certain.
What Obama will say in his speech is also still a mystery: will it be a defense of the current plan, or will he announce small- or large-scale tweaks to it? (Major changes seem less likely, as they would likely undo the work assignments NASA announced Thursday.) Speaking at the Space Access ’10 conference in Phoenix Thursday night, NASA’s Alan Ladwig offered a hint of one minor thing Obama might mention in his speech: a reference to the impending 20th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope. “Hopefully next week, when the president speaks down in Florida, if we’re able to work this out, he’s going to reveal the most recent photos from Hubble as part of the 20th anniversary,” Ladwig said.
Elsewhere, in an interview with Popular Mechanics, NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver said that despite a slow start, people are beginning to better appreciate the benefits of the agency’s new direction. “While the budget rollout might have been better planned and managed, we recognized the cancellation of Constellation was not going to be initially popular with those who had committed to the program,” she said. “There is a growing segment of the space community that understands what this budget proposal makes possible and strongly supports this program shift.” The challenge for the president next Thursday is to further broaden support in a region—Florida’s Space Coast—where concerns about job losses and their economic impact have generated vocal opposition among many to this new plan.
April 9, 2010 at 12:30 pm · Filed under Congress, NASA
As you might expect, most members of Congress who have expressed varying degrees of opposition to NASA’s new exploration plans were not allayed by NASA’s announcement yesterday assigning the new efforts among the various field centers. An example is Rep. Pete Olson, who posted a statement to his web site reacting to the announcement, noting that NASA administrator Charles Bolden called him to discuss what work the Johnson Space Center, in his district, would get. “I appreciate that assurance but the fact remains that this budget proposal still contains no option for human space flight so what missions will JSC control?” (The International Space Station immediately comes to mind.) He continued: “Opposition to killing Constellation, the program of record, is growing by the day and I will not stop fighting to maintain America’s ability to travel to low earth orbit and beyond without hitching an expensive ride with Russia.”
The new assignments also don’t sit well with members of Alabama’s Congressional delegation, the Huntsville Times reports. “Now that the administration has finally released its planned program assignments, it is clear that this is the end of America’s leadership in space,” Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) said, dismissing yesterday’s announcement as “a plan to rearrange NASA bureaucracy”. Added Richard Aderholt (R-AL): “Although Marshall and their innovative staff will be trusted with new program management opportunities, it doesn’t make up for the proposed abandonment of Ares and NASA’s manned space flight program by the president’s administration.”
Others, though, were cautiously supportive of the assignments. “The White House announcement today of some extra work for NASA in Florida is a step in the right direction – but there are miles to go,” tweeted Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL). (It should be noted that yesterday’s announcement was a NASA one, not a White House one, and the work assignments were made entirely within the agency, according to Bolden.) Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) was quite pleased with how the Glenn Research Center fared in the announcement. “While Constellation will be scaled back, Cleveland gets a whole lot more money, jobs and importance in the whole NASA program,” he said, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Also supportive was Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), although he wanted to learn more. “Now, we’ve got to get down to the details.”
April 8, 2010 at 4:58 pm · Filed under NASA
Today’s short-notice NASA press conference primarily covered organizational issues within the agency: which centers would be responsible for what aspects of the new plan. For example, KSC will host the Commercial Crew Development Program Office, with JSC serving as deputy; the roles are reversed for the Flagship Technology Demonstrations, with JSC in the lead. With a few minor exceptions (like Marshall taking the Centennial Challenges program office, which had been run out of Headquarters) there wasn’t much surprising there, and more importantly, no sign of any significant deviations from the original plan as rolled out two months ago. He also noted that this assignment of projects to various centers was done within NASA, without input from the administration or Congress.
During the Q&A, NASA administrator Charles Bolden was asked about the presidential space conference scheduled for a week from today in Florida (presumably at KSC). “It is a work in progress,” he said. There are several goals for the event, Bolden added, starting with giving President Obama the opportunity “to continue to conversation he has been having with members of Congress”; this will include some “private moments” with members of Congress who will be at the event. Obama will then give a “major space policy speech” that, Bolden said, is designed to try and convince people “that he is dedicated to exploration and to human spaceflight.” That will be followed by several breakout panels (he later said four) on programs in the budget proposal.
But who will be there? Bolden confirmed the event is by invitation only, but exactly who has been invited (or even if there have been formal invitations sent out yet) isn’t clear. “I’m not the writer of the guest list,” Bolden said, but expected that it would include members of Congress and the media. In addition, he said, “there will be people who are involved in future concepts, whether they are commercial spaceflight developers, scientists, engineers, representatives of academia”: what he called “a broad cross-section of people” to offer diverse viewpoints. “We’ll try to cover a lot of ground in a short period of time in the panels.”
April 8, 2010 at 8:44 am · Filed under NASA
NASA announced early this morning that it will be holding a teleconference this afternoon to discuss the “the next steps in implementing the agency’s new exploration initiatives outlined in the new fiscal year 2011 budget.” The only other details about this event, called on rather short notice, is that it will feature much of the agency’s top leadership: administrator Charles Bolden, deputy administrator Lori Garver, the heads of the aeronautics, exploration, science, and space operations mission directorates, and new chief technologist Bobby Braun. The telecon will be at 2 pm EDT and will be streamed on the NASA web site. (I’m currently en route to Phoenix for the Space Access ’10 conference, but hopefully will be on the ground in time to tune in.)
April 7, 2010 at 1:03 pm · Filed under Lobbying
Space advocates on Florida’s Space Coast are gearing up for Sunday’s “Save Space” rally in Cocoa, Rep. Suzanne Kosmas (D-FL) the latest politician to agree to participate in the event. Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL), Sen. George LeMieux (R-FL), and Lt. Governor Jeff Kottkamp, along with other state and local politicians, are participating in the event. Organizers are hoping to attract 5,000 for the late afternoon event.
It’s not the only effort art rallying and lobbying in the region, though. On Sunday a group of Embry-Riddle students organized their own “Roadside Awareness Rally” about the new plan, holding signs along a Daytona Beach road with slogans like “Let Us Go To The Moon” and, bizarrely, “Constellation will REVIVE our WORLD’S ECONOMY!” (um, points for enthusiasm, at least.) The students are affiliated with a group at ERAU called Save NASA”, which appears to be separate from the “#saveNASA” meme that swept through Twitter in November but has since appeared to die out.
Meanwhile, about two dozen Space Coast residents have signed up to participate in the annual lobbying effort by Citizens for Space Exploration in May in Washington. They’ll be going, according to the Florida Today article, “to plead with lawmakers to support the space industry before it evaporates.” Interestingly, if you go to the Citizens for Space Exploration web site, you’ll see a large illustration of an Ares 1 launching with the words, “Our mission is to promote awareness of and support for NASA and the US Space Exploration Policy”. Somehow, though, it sounds like they won’t be in total lockstep with the new policy, as illustrated in the FY2011 NASA budget proposal.
Not everyone, though, is rallying against the agency’s new direction. The Orlando Sentinel reports that Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne will no longer support lobbying efforts for Constellation. “Instead,” the Sentinel reports, “sources say that the company really wants Obama’s proposed 2011 budget to include a new rocket development program, a clear destination and a development time-line which are currently conspicuous by their absence from the White House’s financial plan that still has to be approved by Congress.” The report adds, anecdotally, that Boeing is also preparing for a future without Constellation: it omitted a section about the program in the latest version of its shuttle “Reporters Notebooks” handed out at the STS-131 launch earlier this week.
April 6, 2010 at 6:29 am · Filed under NASA, White House
With still few details publicly announced about next Thursday’s presidential space conference at the Kennedy Space Center, there’s no shortage of speculation and predictions about what may be announced there. On SpaceRef Keith Cowing sees signs of a compromise that would preserve Orion in a scaled-down “Orion Lite” version, along with a shuttle sidemount HLV concept. Ares 1 and 5 would remain dead, and the shuttle program would be stretched out at a low flight rate to close the gap. The Orion Lite capsule would launch on EELVs as a government alternative to commercial vehicles, whose development would continue under the revised plan.
The Mars Society has its own, somewhat different, insights into what may come on April 15. “Information received by the Mars Society indicates that there is a real chance that on April 15, President Barack Obama will announce a bold new space policy that breaks substantially from the disastrous ‘flexible path to nowhere’ policy floated by administration spokesmen before Congress on February 2,” they claim. (It’s not clear what this February 2 event was, as there was no Congressional hearing or other public event on the Hill that day, one day after the budget was released.) The organization suggests there is a camp within the administration advocating for a different approach, one that would also involve the development of an Orion Lite as well as an HLV and some kind of hab module, but with an emphasis on a human mission to a near Earth asteroid (NEA) on an aggressive timetable: by 2016.
“There is REAL SUPPORT for an NEA plan such as that indicated above, but the outcome is by no means certain,” the Mars Society argues (emphasis in original.) “If on April 15, Obama commits to a piloted NEA mission by 2016, we will be well on our way to the Red Planet.” The question is whether there is a real argument within the administration for mounting such a mission, or if this is little more than a case of wishful thinking by Mars advocates.
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