Space Politics
Because sometimes the most important orbit is the Beltway…
Archive for December, 2010
December 30, 2010 at 8:24 am · Filed under Congress, NASA, Other, States
The Orlando Sentinel’s article about the continued funding of Ares 1 despite being effectively canceled in the NASA authorization act has gotten fairly wide coverage during a slow news week, with Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) getting much of the blame because of his provision in the FY2010 appropriations bill, still in force during the ongoing series of continuing resolutions, that prohibits NASA from terminating any Constellation programs. (Winner of the most lurid headline contest? “Sen. Shelby’s Pork Lust Forces NASA To Spend $500 Million On Canceled Rocket Program”.) A spokesman for Sen. Shelby, though, tells the Huntsville Times that’s not the case. “NASA is just making excuses and continuing to drag its feet, just as it has done for the past two years under the Obama administration,” Jonathan Graffeo told the paper. “The Shelby language is unambiguous and sends a clear message to NASA: Use the money Congress appropriates as intended – to build a rocket that will maintain our leadership in space.”
Meanwhile, everyone agrees that there is ambiguity in New Mexico: will Rick Homans keep his job as executive director of the New Mexico Spaceport Authority, which runs Spaceport America? Gov. Bill Richardson, a Democrat who appointed Homans to the post, is leaving after two terms in office, and Republican Susana Martinez will take office on January 1. Homans tells the Santa Fe New Mexican he’d like to stay on, but wants “further discussions” with the new administration about their plans for the spaceport and its governance. “I’d say it’s a fluid situation,” he said. He has been campaigning, of sorts, to stay on, with an op-ed outlining the spaceport’s accomplishments in 2010 in NMPolitics.net. He also has the support of the Las Cruces Sun-News, which called for Gov.-elect Martinez to retain Homans and his team in an editorial Tuesday.
When Orbital Sciences announced its CCDev plans this month, it was heralded in many quarters as a new entrant. Others, though, recalled that Orbital had similar concepts—a winged vehicle launched atop an EELV or other rocket—dating back over a decade. As I noted on NewSpace Journal yesterday, Orbital’s vision back then of how such a system should be developed and operated was quite similar to NASA’s current plans and the proponents of present-day CCDev proponents. In particular, there’s this passage from testimony of Orbital’s CTO at a hearing of the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee in October 1999: (emphasis in original)
We envision this Space Taxi to be industry owned and operated; however, the cost of development, production, and operation of the Space Taxi System would be paid for predominantly out of government funds because it satisfies unique NASA needs that are not currently aligned with those of commercial industry. The launching of this Space Taxi System, however, could be competed among commercial RLV or EELV suppliers that meet the cost and safety requirements. These future RLVs would be commercially developed with private capital and would be commercially owned and operated. Their development will be enabled by NASA’s current and planned future investments in RLV technologies and could be enhanced by government-backed financial incentives, such as tax credits, loan guarantees or advanced purchase agreements. Once a truly commercial Space Station becomes operational or the current Space Station becomes sufficiently commercialized, NASA and industry launch needs will be in almost complete alignment, and a completely commercial Space Taxi may become a viable business opportunity. We strongly believe that industry ownership of the Space Taxi from initial operation is critical to enable the eventual development of such a commercial Space Station.
The name of Orbital’s CTO at that time? Mike Griffin.
December 29, 2010 at 6:47 am · Filed under Congress, NASA, White House
More end-of-the-year odds and ends:
Among the new members of Congress taking office next week is Rep.-elect Sandy Adams (R-FL), who defeated Suzanne Kosmas in November in Florida’s 24th district, which includes the Kennedy Space Center. In an op-ed in the Daytona Beach News-Journal today, Adams says she’ll seek to make human spaceflight the “core mission” of NASA. “I will work to educate my colleagues about the importance of restoring human space flight as the mission of NASA — not as an afterthought or something that would be ‘nice’ to do, but as the core mission of the agency,” she writes. Her concerns are based on what she perceives to be “a national security issue” (“We cannot and should not be forced to rely on the Russians and Chinese to get our astronauts into space”) but also a local jobs issue. She does not get into specifics, though, about what she will do to achieve that goal.
Adams and others, though, may have to fight on another front: against scientists and others who would like to see funding for space research spent instead on studying the oceans. In a CNN.com commentary, Kevin Ulmer of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution argues that the planet “needs a Hubble for its oceans”, specifically, a global monitoring network that would provide real-time information on ocean conditions. He has an idea of where the money could come from for such a system: space programs like the James Webb Space Telescope. “I, for one, would gladly wait a bit longer to learn of oceans on distant planets in return for the ability to see our own precious seas with the clarity and detail that will be required to insure the continued existence of life on this planet.”
How the administration will propose to allocate funding for NASA and other federal agencies in 2012 will be delayed a bit, POLITICO reports. Typically budget proposals are released on the first Monday of February, which would be February 7, but administration officials now say the FY12 proposal will come out a week later, around February 14. The delay is due to the belated Senate confirmation of new OMB director Jack Lew and continuing delays in finalizing appropriations for FY11. Space advocates will have to wait a bit longer, then, to see how much love the administration has for NASA.
December 28, 2010 at 8:42 am · Filed under Congress, NASA, White House
A few items of interest for those catching up from the holidays:
Regular readers know that Congress’s inability this month to pass either an omnibus spending bill or a full-year continuing resolution means that provisions in the FY10 appropriations bill remain in effect, including one that prevents NASA from terminating any elements of Constellation. An Orlando Sentinel article Monday puts that into perspective: it means NASA will spend nearly $500 million until March on Ares 1 in fiscal year 2011, even though the program was effectively killed by the NASA authorization act signed into law in October. NASA officials say while it might look like the money is being wasted, much of it is “directly applicable” to the heavy-lift vehicle included in the authorization act—provided a shuttle-derived architecture for the system is selected.
In a separate article, the Sentinel wonders if NASA can afford to continue business as usual for Orion given the successes in the past year by SpaceX. One passage indicates that SpaceX has some supporters within NASA who are seeking to cut down on the layers of bureaucracy and get things done cheaper:
Inside NASA, some employees have taken to wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the letters “WWED,” which stands for “What Would Elon Do?” — a reference to SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk, the Internet tycoon who invested his own fortune in pursuit of his dream of sending humans into space at affordable prices.
In the article, NASA Orion project manager Mark Geyer said the agency is getting the message and is “scaling back layers of supervision and looking at other ways to cut costs.” The article also notes, though, that under current plans, Orion would not be ready to transport astronauts to the ISS until 2018. By comparison, NASA officials involved with CCDev stated this month that commercial vehicles could be ready to begin service by late 2016; commercial advocates would no doubt argue that such vehicles could enter service even sooner.
The commercial option is looking attractive to agencies outside the US as well. Canadian Space Agency president Steve MacLean told the Canadian Press that he would be open to buying seats on an American commercial vehicle to allow Canadian astronauts to visit the ISS. “If everything goes well, and if it shows that to our satisfaction everything is OK, everything is safe and secure, yes, it’s possible,” he said.
All of these policy changes in the last year, though, represent a significant change from Obama’s 2008 campaign white paper on space policy, which included an endorsement of the Vision for Space Exploration’s central goal of a human return to the Moon by 2020 and plans to “expedite the development of the Shuttle’s successor systems”. Salon has flagged that change as an example of one of the “promises Obama wants you to keep forgetting”. Salon cites this and other examples to disprove a statement by the president: “There’s not a single thing that I’ve said that I would do that I have not either done or tried to do.”
December 23, 2010 at 11:29 am · Filed under Other
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed last week, author Homer Hickam called for a human mission to the Moon’s south pole without adding “a cent to the paltry amount NASA gets”. He didn’t describe specifically how to get that done, only suggesting that “its excellent engineers” would figure out a way. If they did, they might end up with something like what Paul Spudis and Tony Lavoie have proposed, an architecture that they claim can result in “a fully functional, human-tended lunar outpost capable of producing 150 metric tonnes of water per year” for $88 billion. The schedule for achieving this is flexible, but Spudis notes that it could be done in about 16 years, with peak annual funding of $7.1 billion. Missing from the technical analysis, though, is what’s needed to win political support for such a venture from the White House, Capitol Hill, and the various other constituencies in the space community.
The Moon, though, might seem passé for Loren Thompson, COO of the Lexington Institute. In a Forbes.com column, Thompson identifies space as one of four areas where America “could materially improve the nation’s outlook without costing much money or leading to further political polarization.” Specifically, he wants NASA to mount a human mission to Mars by the early 2030s, “and do it without spending any more money than NASA was planning to spend anyway.” Human spaceflight “seems to be in its death throes” under the current administration’s policies, he claims, “and the only near-term human space flight initiative on the books is a handout to rich California businessmen to update old technology,” an apparent reference to NASA’s commercial crew and cargo program, which includes awards to Elon Musk’s SpaceX (but also a number of other companies not backed by “rich California businessmen”.) “By organizing the human spaceflight program with Mars in mind, NASA can develop a near-term investment and exploration agenda that gets us somewhere interesting without any additional commitment of funding,” Thompson claims. How exactly NASA would do that, though, is apparently left as an exercise for the agency’s excellent engineers (although one assumes Bob Zubrin would have some ideas in that regard.)
December 22, 2010 at 10:31 am · Filed under Congress, NASA
Yesterday the House and Senate, as expected, approved another continuing resolution (CR), this one funding the federal government through March 4 at FY2010 levels. The passage means that it will be up to the new Congress—one with a new Republican majority in the House and a narrower Democratic majority in the Senate—to deal with FY2011 spending. As previously noted, the CR doesn’t contain any new anomalies or other provisions related to NASA, which means that, among other items, the prohibition in the FY10 appropriations bill that prevents NASA from terminating any Constellation programs remains in effect, despite the human spaceflight plan enacted in the NASA authorization act signed into law in October.
The extended CR has raised questions about NASA’s ability to carry out various initiatives, including an additional shuttle mission authorized in the new act. However, Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) told Florida Today this week that the new CR should not imperil that mission or other NASA priorities. That, though, may be based on the assumption that NASA would get in 2011 no less than the FY10 topline of a little over $18.7 billion versus the authorized (and requested) level of $19 billion. In a hearing at the beginning of December Nelson said he expected NASA to carry out the provisions of the authorization act if funded at the 2010 level, and, in particular, got a commitment that NASA could carry out the additional shuttle mission if funded at that level. However, there remains the possibility that a new, more fiscally conservative Congress might seek to cut funding below the 2010 levels, either overall or for specific programs, when it convenes in January.
December 19, 2010 at 8:18 pm · Filed under Congress
The passage by Congress Friday of a very short continuing resolution (CR), lasting only three days, raised hopes that the Senate might yet be able to find a way to pass either its own omnibus spending bill or the House’s year-long CR, giving NASA and other federal agencies some budgetary certainty. No such luck, it appears. Late Sunday the Senate Appropriations Committee announced its plans for another CR, this one extended through March 4, 2011. The new CR contains some additional “anomalies”, or changes, to FY2010 spending levels, but none of the anomalies listed in the Senate’s summary affect NASA or other civil or military space efforts beyond instituting a two-year pay freeze for federal civilian employees, a decision the Obama Administration announced earlier this month. Assuming this goes forward, it will be up to the next Congress to decide FY11 spending levels.
December 17, 2010 at 1:02 pm · Filed under Congress
It looks like the final FY2011 budget for NASA and other federal agencies won’t come until well into calendar year 2011. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid pulled from consideration an omnibus spending bill introduced earlier this week because there weren’t 60 votes to stop debate. Last week the House passed its own year-long continuing resolution (CR) with NASA funding levels and other provisions similar to the Senate bill, but POLITICO reports that the Senate is also unlikely to vote on that. Instead, both the House and Senate will have to pass another CR to fund agencies at 2010 levels, most likely into February.
[Update 7:45 pm Friday: As Space News and others have reported, the House has passed a short-term, three-day CR instead of a longer one, to try and buy time for the Senate to either pass the House's year-long CR or another measure.]
In the House, the leadership and membership of the House Science and Technology Committee is taking shape after Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX) was picked last week to chair the committee. Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), as expected, has been selected by House Democrats to be the ranking member of the committee next year; she declared her candidacy for the post last month. Also, former committee chairman Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) will serve as vice-chairman, handling “mean things” that Hall said he wouldn’t to do as chairman. Sensenbrenner, who chaired the committee from 1997-2001, took on the vice-chairmanship under a deal whereby Hall will back Sensenbrenner to be the committee’s top Republican in two years when Hall reaches his term limits on the committee, according to POLITICO.
Among Republicans selected to serve on the committee is Rep.-elect Mo Brooks (R-AL), elected in November from the district that includes NASA Marshall. Brooks succeeds Parker Griffith, who was on the committee when first elected as a Democrat two years ago; he lost his committee post when he switched parties a year ago, but was able to participate in some hearings.
December 16, 2010 at 12:55 pm · Filed under Other
There has been a renewed effort by the US government to reach out to China and find ways to cooperate in space, including a brief mention of cooperation in space exploration last year when Presidents Obama and Hu met, as well as NASA administrator Bolden’s visit to China in October. Yet, those discussions have yet to result in any concrete steps for joint projects or other cooperative ventures between the two countries, apparently to the surprise and disappointment of some within the administration. One expert believes that it’s because China doesn’t need to cooperate with the US as much as American officials think it does.
At a space security forum Wednesday organized by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) in Washington, Gregory Kulacki, senior analyst and China project manager for UCS, said China’s current space efforts were motivated by a single event: President Reagan’s 1983 SDI speech. That speech, he said, was a “Sputnik moment” for China, in particular scientists who convinced the leadership that this demonstrated the importance of space. “The United States was going to make another Kennedy-sized investment in this whole area of technology and China just could not be left behind,” he said. If China didn’t invest in space, “in the way the scientists put it in their letter to Deng Xiaoping, [it] ‘would make us a second-rate power again.’” China’s space capabilities, therefore, are tied closely to their national prestige and status, he said.
The growth of Chinese space capabilities during time, Kulacki said, means that cooperation with the US is simply not a high priority now. “As far as the technical community, there’s no real incentives. They don’t need anything” from the US, he said. He added that Chinese space professionals aren’t interested in cooperation with the US because it’s “nothing but problems”, interfering with their current efforts. Any push for cooperation would have to come from the political side, but space is not a high priority there, he noted.
“We need to get past the idea that the Chinese need us more than we need them,” Kulacki said. “We have to find something of value to bring to China if China is going to be enthusiastic about our efforts to engage them on this.” That’s a challenge, he said, since the administration in the US right now is more interested in taking small steps that are of little interest to the Chinese. “The United States doesn’t want to bring anything major to the table, but the Chinese need something major on the table in order for cooperation to ge started.” What could that “major” thing be? He suggested some kind of unspecified civil space project: “Somewhere to go together, something to do together, something to build; an actual, important project.”
December 15, 2010 at 7:00 am · Filed under Congress, NASA
The Senate Appropriations Committee has issued its proposed FY2011 omnibus appropriations bill, after the House passed its version of a 2011 spending bill last week. The NASA sections begin on page 184 and appear to be very similar, of not identical, to the House version, including several key items:
- $1.8 billion for HLV development, with the requirement that its initial capacity be not less than 130 tons;
- $1.2 billion for the multipurpose crew vehicle (aka Orion);
- $250 million for commercial crew and $300 million for commercial cargo
One minor addition to the Senate bill: it includes $15 million for a reimbursable agreement with the Department of Energy to restart plutonium production for use in RTGs, something the science community has been pushing for in recent years in order to support outer solar system and other missions where solar panels are impractical.
December 14, 2010 at 6:41 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Homer Hickam claims he knows how to fix NASA in three easy steps, as he describes in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. First, he says, “suck it up and fund SpaceX” and other companies to take over access to low Earth orbit. Second, “convince the president to install new management at NASA.” Why? Hickam believes the president “has opted out of the decision-making process” and turned things over to presidential science advisor John Holdren and the administrator and deputy administrator of NASA, people Hickam clearly isn’t happy with. (He curiously claims that NASA administrator Charles Bolden, a former astronaut, “has never led anything more complex than a six-person shuttle crew”; he and the Journal’s editors may have forgotten that Bolden is a retired two-star Marine Corps general whose last posting was as commander of the Third Marine Aircraft Wing, which presumably is more complex than a shuttle crew.) The third step: “order up a mission beyond Earth orbit” analogous to the Apollo missions to the Moon; he specifically suggests a base at the Moon’s south pole. How much will that cost? “You don’t have to add a cent to the paltry amount NASA gets,” he claims, just point it in the right direction “and watch its excellent engineers pull it off.” He notably doesn’t give a specific timetable for establishing that base on NASA’s current budget.
North of the border, Matt Gurney of Canada’s National Post is worried the US is risking the expertise NASA has built up over the years with its current plans and funding levels. “Under President Obama, NASA has become an afterthought. There is no plan in place to return to the moon or Mars, no manned missions planned to the asteroid belt,” he claims (although the president did set a goal of a human mission to a near Earth asteroid by 2025 in his April 15 speech at the Kennedy Space Center). He also oddly warns that “NASA might need a continuing resolution to stay afloat”: NASA, like the rest of the federal government, has in fact had to use CRs to “stay float” since the fiscal year started almost two and a half months ago. Unlike Hickam, Gurney doesn’t offer a three-step (or any-step, for that matter) solution to the perceived problem, beyond worrying that the current policy is “crippling America’s ability to explore – and if necessary, wage war in – space.”
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