Space Politics
Because sometimes the most important orbit is the Beltway…
Archive for July, 2010
July 13, 2010 at 11:34 pm · Filed under Congress, NASA
In late May NASA reassigned Constellation program manager Jeff Hanley, a decision most people first heard about during a House Science and Technology Committee hearing featuring administrator Charles Bolden. That decision triggered a strong reaction among some members of Congress who considered the move a form of retribution against a manager who opposed the agency’s plans to end Constellation. Two key senators, Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), the chair and ranking member respectively of the Senate Commerce Committee, went so far as to request an investigation by the NASA Office of the Inspector General (OIG) regarding “whether his removal as program manager was related to Mr. Hanley’s well-publicized efforts to preserve the Constellation Program.”
The OIG did conduct an investigation and, in a letter to Sens. Rockefeller and Hutchison on Tuesday, Inspector General Paul Martin reported no evidence of wrongdoing by the agency in its decision to reassign Hanley to a newly-created position at the Johnson Space Center. The reassignment, Martin said, was “a management decision” after Hanley “sent a series of e-mails to senior NASA officials that caused them to conclude that he could not effectively lead Constellation” during the program’s current political turmoil. In addition, Hanley himself “does not claim he was retaliated against”, and the OIG “uncovered no evidence of unlawful reprisal.” The reassignment, the letter added, did not “foreclose Congress’s ability to consider meaningful alternatives” to the FY11 budget proposal, echoing language in the original letter by the senators.
The seven-page letter provides a detailed chronology of events that led up to Hanley’s May 26th reassignment. In particular, we learn that Bolden considered removing Hanley from his position as Constellation manager almost a month earlier, in response to an email Hanley sent Bolden after the administrator spoke at JSC. In the email Hanley was sharply critical of the decision to cancel Constellation: “…to hear NASA leadership and administration officials further spread the spin and accusations of others without giving us a chance to rebutt [sic] or respond, does not align with the core values you recited to us today.” Bolden told the OIG that in “normal circumstances” he would have reassigned Hanley, but instead chose at the time to keep him in place, chalking up the email to frustration. Hanley was warned, but on May 18 wrote another email, this one to Doug Cooke, the associate administrator for exploration, criticizing the agency’s position on termination liability as “untenable”. A day later, according to the OIG, Cooke met with Bolden and both agreed that Hanley needed to be reassigned.
July 12, 2010 at 11:59 am · Filed under Events, Other
The Arms Control Association has made available a transcript of the panel discussion on the new national space policy hosted earlier this month by the association and the Secure World Foundation. (I included some quotes from that discussion in a piece last week on the new policy in The Space Review.)
Tuesday morning Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX), ranking member of the House Science and Technology Committee, will be the featured speaker at a Space Transportation Association (STA) breakfast on Capitol Hill. Certainly the status of a House version of a NASA authorization bill will be a subject of discussion at that event. The STA will also be presenting an award to Gary Payton, the Deputy Under Secretary of the Air Force for Space Programs, who is retiring this month.
On Wednesday afternoon The Planetary Society is hosting the first in a series of webcasts on NASA’s new space exploration plan. This first webcast, at 5 pm EDT, will focus on destinations in the new plan and will feature Bill Nye and Louis Friedman, the incoming and outgoing executive directors of the organization.
July 12, 2010 at 11:51 am · Filed under Congress, NASA
While Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) played up the fact that “the biggest part of the president’s goals are being fulfilled” in the NASA authorization bill being considered this week, today’s Orlando Sentinel has another take. Based on a review of the draft of the bill it obtained, the Sentinel found that while Constellation would not survive in its present form, the bill included language that “kills President Barack Obama’s proposed shakeup of the agency’s human-spaceflight program” by cutting funding for technology development and commercial crew programs. A key excerpt:
[T]he bill would provide three-year appropriations totaling $250 million for robotic missions intended to pave the way for human deep-space exploration, $1.7 billion for technology research and development and $890 million to help commercial rocket companies develop space taxis for astronauts.
By comparison, the administration had proposed $1.3 billion for robotic missions, $5.5 billion for technology development and $3.3 billion on commercial rocket companies between 2011 and 2013. [...]
The bill would forbid NASA from spending any money on service contracts with commercial-rocket companies in 2011 and allow it in 2012 only if NASA can satisfy six requirements. Those include coming up with standards that commercial rocket firms would use to make their rockets safe for humans, along with devising a congressionally approved system to buy private rocket services for astronauts.
Some of the language above is a little vague: what does it mean, for example, to “forbid NASA from spending any money on service contracts” with commercial launch providers in 2011. Does this apply to commercial crew only, or does it extend to existing contracts for commercial ISS cargo delivery or other services?
Another unanswered question is why Sen. Nelson, who chairs the subcommittee that is handing the legislation, would support something that others quoted in the article claim would hurt his home state. “I don’t know who Bill Nelson is listening to, but it’s not his constituents,” Space Florida Frank DiBello told the Sentinel. (Nelson did not respond to a request for comment from the paper.)
Meanwhile, the Commercial Spaceflight Federation released a “myths and facts” document about commercial crew, just in time for the upcoming authorization debate. The eight-page document is intended to address some of the arguments against commercial crew transport to the ISS, ranging from “unproven capabilities” to long development times, high costs, and safety concerns.
July 9, 2010 at 2:35 pm · Filed under Congress, NASA
[Apologies for the tardy post; I'm out of town visiting relatives.]
Senate authorizers appear ready to put their stamp on the proposed new direction for NASA, according to a report published late Thursday by the New York Times. The NASA authorization legislation, scheduled to be marked up next Thursday by the Senate Commerce Committee’s space subcommittee (although the hearing doesn’t yet appear on the committee’s online calendar) would, as many have expected, add “at least” one more shuttle flight to the manifest and also accelerate the development of a heavy-lift booster. It would also “restore full capabilities” to the Orion spacecraft, meaning it would be developed as a full-fledged spacecraft for missions beyond Earth orbit instead of as just a lifeboat for the ISS.
The Times article was based in part by comments from Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), the ranking member of the space subcommittee. The committee’s chairman, Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL), confirmed many of those details in a meeting with reporters in Orlando Friday morning. “We’ve got quite a few senators that are coming together, senators that have been very critical of the president’s proposals,” Nelson said, according to the Florida Today report. “I think that by next Thursday we’ll be able to join all together.”
What this means for other aspects of the White House’s proposed changes for NASA are uncertain. The Times article states that the bill would “slow down a rush to invest in commercial rockets by requiring companies to demonstrate their capabilities” before they could get “large contracts” for ISS crew transportation. However, the plan calls for $6 billion in funding over the next five years to develop capabilities for crew transportation, and would not (presumably) immediately award contracts for such services. Also left unstated is where the funding would come from to pay for extended shuttle operations (through all of FY11, most likely, to cover an additional mission), accelerated HLV development, and any changes to Orion, assuming they don’t change the proposed $19 billion overall budget proposed for NASA in FY11.
Incidentally, while Sen. Vitter is among the bipartisan group working on this authorization bill, according to the Times article, he took some time yesterday to criticize the agency and the administration. Speaking at a ceremony for the delivery of the final shuttle external tank, he took aim at the “radical” proposals for NASA, according to Florida Today. “You all deserve better, and the nation deserves better,” he said, also commenting on Bolden’s widely-discussed comments in his al-Jazeera interview.
Update: Saturday’s Florida Today article has a few more details about the “compromise” bill the subcommittee is drafting, which suggest the changes to the president’s plan aren’t nearly as radical as one might have previously thought (in particular from the New York Times headline). The $6 billion for commercial crew development will still be in the bill, Sen. Nelson said, but will be spread out over six years instead of five. The technology development program could be trimmed to cover costs for other programs but would still be “robust”, Nelson said. He believes the White House understands that, under this proposed bill, “the biggest part of the president’s goals are being fulfilled.”
July 8, 2010 at 6:30 am · Filed under NASA, Other
“Welcome to the 24-hour gaffe reel,” reads the lede to a Wall Street Journal article yesterday about the verbal missteps people in the media limelight often make. “It seems as if every day some celebrity, politician, four-star general or random blogger is committing a verbal blooper—and then profusely apologizing for his or her ‘poor word choice.’ We’re constantly reminded of the consequences of saying something stupid or unintentionally insensitive.”
Add to that list of people the NASA administrator. Charles Bolden presumably had no idea what he was triggering when he said in an interview with al-Jazeera that President Obama charged him with “foremost” with the mission “to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with predominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.” And trigger something he did.
Although the video, posted July 1, showed up on NASA Watch almost immediately thereafter, it wasn’t until the holiday weekend, when it was noticed by primarily right-wing blogs, cable news shows, and talk radio programs, did it get much more attention. Maybe the space community shrugged its shoulders, knowing that NASA’s mission is clearly more than education, international relations, and making Muslim nations “feel good”. Maybe they realized that Bolden at times can be less than completely clear when responding to questions. Or maybe it was just the holiday weekend.
But Bolden’s statements did catch fire primarily among conservative commentators, who expressed varying degrees of outrage about Bolden’s comments, but have done little else, like digging into the issue to see if NASA’s actions, beyond the administrator’s comments, matched their rhetoric. That’s one of the lessons of this event: there are plenty of people with hair triggers ready to pounce on their keyboards, microphones, and cameras at the least little offense to their worldview. This is true on both the liberal and conservative ends of the political spectrum: recall the controversy Bolden’s predecessor, Mike Griffin, generated when he said back in 2007 that while he agreed that global warming existed, he wasn’t sure it was an urgent problem by questioning whether the current climate “is the optimal climate”, a statement he later admitted was impolitic.
NASA, though, isn’t an innocent victim of bloodthirsty bloggers and commentators. The agency waited until late Tuesday, long after the issue had gained traction, before the agency responded to criticism of Bolden’s statements, a response that has done little to slow the negative reaction. Yes, there was a three-day weekend in the middle of that, but that doesn’t stop the flow of news nor the response to it: the blogosphere operates continuously and 24-hour news channels have, well, 24 hours of programming a day to fill.
“We’re far too thin-skinned, starting federal investigations every time someone says something stupid,” syndicated radio host Michael Smerconish told the Journal, something he blames in part on “political partisanship and a 24/7 media looking for ‘gotcha’ moments.” Since neither partisanship nor the continuous media cycle appears likely to go away anytime soon, the agency is going to need to react better to it: faster, more effective responses and, preferably, a better choice of words to begin with. That’s going to be an interesting challenge for David Weaver, the agency’s new associate administrator for communications. Hopefully recent events haven’t given him second doubts about starting the job later this month.
July 7, 2010 at 7:11 am · Filed under NASA, White House
In this week’s issue of The Space Review, I provide an overview of the new policy and some reactions, particularly on areas of international cooperation and commercialization. While international cooperation is “woven throughout the new policy”, in the words of one White House official and there’s language in the policy (re)opening the door to space arms control accords, that doesn’t mean a treaty banning weapons in space is imminent or even likely for the near future. Also, the lack of specific details about space export control reform is not an oversight, but instead reflects the fact that such reform is ongoing.
The Marshall Institute has a much more thorough examination of the new policy, comparing sections of it side-by-side with the 2006 Bush Administration policy. “In general terms, the new policy builds on the old policy, much as one expects,” Marshall Institute president Jeff Keuter notes in the white paper. He adds, though, that the policy features some new terminology such as “sustainability” and “responsible behavior”. “How those terms come to be interpreted and subsequently reflected in decisions about other policies and programs will be of considerable interest to U.S. departments and agencies, policy analysts, and foreign governments.”
One of the more curious reactions came last week from the Greater Houston Partnership, which decried what it called the “Obama ‘United Nations’ NASA Space Plan”. “While we think the Administration’s plan is well-intended, we question the wisdom of its United Nations approach to our homeland security,” Jeff Moseley, president and CEO of the partnership, said in a statement. Homeland security? He explains that “it is important from a competitive standpoint that we not abandon the independence of our space exploration program and allow any country to forge ahead of us in space leadership. Our national security and economy is very dependent upon a space program that should remain independent and uncompromised.” Left unstated in the release is that many Houston-area people are working on something of a “United Nations” space program: the International Space Station.
July 2, 2010 at 6:54 am · Filed under Congress, NASA
When shuttle advocates have talked about a shuttle program extension, they usually mean adding additional flights to the manifest, or at least stretching out the remaining flights over an extended period. Delaying the final two shuttle missions by a month and a half (for STS-133) and three months (STS-134), as NASA announced Thursday, doesn’t sound like much of an extension, but for two shuttle advocates in Congress, it’s a start.
“Today’s news that the Shuttle program has been officially extended until at least February of next year is a welcome development that will help preserve jobs and ease the transition for the Space Coast,” Rep. Suzanne Kosmas (D-FL) said in a statement. And from Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX): “The decision to extend America’s shuttle program by moving these flights will safeguard our nation’s human spaceflight capability while providing needed support and equipment for the International Space Station.”
Both Hutchison and Kosmas would like to see more, but have different end states in mind. Hutchison, in her statement, called for one additional shuttle mission using the “Launch On Need” (LON) hardware that would be used for a rescue mission if there was a problem with STS-134. “The Administration must now work with members of Congress to add the launch-on-need flight as an actual shuttle flight as well,” she said, calling this “an important first step” as Congress and the White House work on “a bipartisan compromise on NASA’s future.” Kosmas also wants to see the LON hardware converted into an additional mission, but she wants more shuttle flights added as well “to fully service and support the extension of the International Space Station through 2020.”
Then there’s the issue of cost. The White House’s FY11 budget proposal included funding for an additional three months of shuttle operations, though the end of calendar year 2010; shuttle managers have since found additional cost savings that can stretch this money into March, enough to cover the rescheduled STS-134 mission. Further delays, or the addition of the LON mission to the manifest, would require more funding. With that additional mission slated for late July or August of 2011, that would require nearly a complete fiscal year’s worth of shuttle funding, which would likely have to come from elsewhere within the agency. All that assumes, though, that there is a final FY11 appropriations at some point in the next year…
July 1, 2010 at 7:10 am · Filed under Congress, NASA
Earlier this week, a group of House members led by Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-AL) introduced legislation, HR 5614, intended to compel NASA to spend its FY2010 Constellation funding on program activities, and not hold it in reserve to cover contract liability costs. In a blog post for The Hill this week, Aderholt explained his introduction of the legislation as necessary to protect a human spaceflight program threatened by the White House’s plans for NASA. “Since February, I have fought the President’s proposal to cancel Constellation because it will forfeit America’s leadership in space and it will cut thousands of jobs in Alabama and the entire nation,” he states. Referring to layoffs already underway to comply with the administration’s use of the Antideficiency Act, he added, “President Obama and NASA are putting American jobs in jeopardy because of a drastic proposal that isn’t even actual law.”
That argument—that potentially thousands of jobs could be lost if the plan goes through—is being criticized by some conservatives as contradictory, and even, in the words of one, an example of “hypocrisy”, given Republican opposition to other administration initiatives like stimulus spending. “You can’t criticize the idea that government should create jobs through stimulus programs and then go out and stop the elimination of an unnecessary over-budget space program just because it will save jobs in your district,” argued Tad DeHaven of the Cato Institute in an article in The Daily Caller published today.
Aderholt defended his support for NASA but opposition to other government programs to The Daily Caller. “There are a lot of government programs that need to be cut,” he said. “But when it comes to our defense and our space industry, I see them in a different category.”
July 1, 2010 at 6:46 am · Filed under Congress, White House
As noted here earlier this week, the new national space policy did not say that much when it comes to export control reform, and much of it was similar to the 2006 policy. Both policies contained short sections titled “Effective Export Policies”; the 2010 section notes that “space-related items that are determined to be generally available in the global marketplace shall be considered favorably with a view that such exports are usually in the national interests of the United States”. The 2006 policy, by comparison, notes that “space-related exports that are currently available or are planned to be available in the global marketplace shall be considered favorably” but without the language that such exports “are usually in the national interests”.
One reason for the lack of details may be that the administration already laid out its plans for comprehensive export control reform, including an approach dubbed the “four singles” that would consolidate the existing, multiple lists, agencies, and other systems. The administration is continuing to push this plan, including a speech yesterday by National Security Advisor Jim Jones, where he impressed upon a Senate Aerospace Caucus audience the need for reform and current work. This includes creating a tiered control list structure the prioritizes items on current export control lists and makes it easier to add and remove items. “Currently a bracket or screw used in an F-18 is treated the same for control purposes as the aircraft itself,” he noted in his prepared remarks. “I think we can all agree that an advance fighter jet poses a much higher threat than a screw that is merely cut to a specific length.”
However, as DoD Buzz reports, there is Congressional opposition to one element of the reform plan, the creation of a single export licensing agency. Some people on the Hill, according to the report, are worried about repeating the mistakes made when a number of agencies were put together in the Department of Homeland Security, as the creating of a single licensing agency would require bringing together people from existing offices in the Commerce, Defense, and State Departments. “It’s a massive change for a single agency, and rationale has not yet been provided,” a “congressional source” told the publication.
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