Space Politics
Because sometimes the most important orbit is the Beltway…
Archive for June, 2011
June 30, 2011 at 7:09 am · Filed under Campaign '12, Congress, NASA
The least surprising headline of the day is from Aerospace Daily: “NASA Funding Mired In Budget Politics”. While politics has always played a major role, the article suggests that the situation this year is even more complicated and uncertain than usual. Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), who chairs the Senate appropriations subcommittee whose jurisdiction includes NASA, told Aerospace Daily that the Senate has barely started work on the FY2012 appropriations bills, as it sorts through the consequences of the final FY11 continuing resolution as well as the ongoing debate about raising the debt limit. Mikulski and other appropriations subcommittee chairs have yet to receive their budget allocations, which means that they can’t start work on marking up appropriations bills.
The path is a little clearer in the House, at least from a procedural standpoint. According to the schedule published in May by the House Appropriations Committee, the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies subcommittee (which includes NASA and NOAA) will mark up its appropriations bill a week from today, July 7 (which by coincidence is the day before the last shuttle launch); the full committee will take up the bill on July 13. But the committee is otherwise keeping its plans close to its vest, beyond a budget allocation that suggests the potential for significant across-the-board budget cuts.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL), who does not serve on the appropriations committee, told the Huntsville Times earlier this week. “Hopefully, NASA can survive. But that’s going to be up to the public to decide what they want… That’s going to be a battle.”
In the same interview, Brooks also addressed comments made in a debate earlier this month by Republican presidential candidates about funding NASA. Dismissing perceptions by some who watched the debate that the candidates were not supportive of NASA, Brooks said that any of the candidates would back NASA more than President Obama, and that specifically “you’ve got Mitt Romney and you’ve got [Tim] Pawlenty” as “likely” supporters of the agency. Romney, as previously noted here, does have a modest track record on space policy from his 2008 campaign, but Pawlenty, the former governor of Minnesota, does not.
Those Republican presidential candidates may be getting a visit in the coming months from someone who freely speaks his mind on space policy: Buzz Aldrin. “I’m going to be talking to the people” running for the GOP presidential nomination, he said in a speech this week in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Aldrin, who according to the report “expressed disappointment” that the president made no public speech or other acknowledgement of the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s speech calling for a manned lunar landing by the end of the 1960s, said space exploration needs a “specific public objective”.
June 28, 2011 at 6:15 am · Filed under Other
One year ago today the Obama Administration released its national space policy, a document that, while having much of the same policy foundations as previous documents, differed in both details and tone. The new policy placed a greater emphasis on space sustainability, responsible use of space, and international cooperation, while also supporting commercial space efforts, improved space system procurement, and other initiatives. So, one year later, how is the government doing to implement that policy?
In this week’s issue of The Space Review, I report on one assessment of the policy from a panel discussion earlier this month in Washington. Peter Marquez, who coordinated the development of the policy last year as the director of space policy for the National Security Council (and is now working in the private sector), said in general government is doing a “good job” carrying out the policy. He cited in particular efforts by government agencies, working with industry and other governments, to battle the “existential threat” to GPS posed by LightSquared. However, the government is lagging in other areas, such as support for space situational awareness and progress on export control reform, he said.
Another panelist, Andrew Palowitch, the director of the Space Protection Program, suggested that, for now, the impact of the new policy has been relatively limited. “Everything that happened in this last year, and everything that’s going to happen in the next year, is completely independent of that national space policy,” he said, citing the long lead times of space initiatives. He did, though, call the new space policy “fantastic” that will start having more of an impact in 18 to 24 months. Marquez disagreed with this assessment to some degree, arguing that what the US has been doing “on the international front” has been strong affected by the new policy.
The policy, argued Ben Baseley-Walker of the Secure World Foundation, has helped improve the US’s reputation internationally: “What the national space policy has done is to start to rebuild trust, start to rebuild consistency, and start to rebuild the reliability of the US as an internationally-engaged partner.” However, panelists agreed that while the new policy is consistent in its general themes with the European Union’s proposed code of conduct for outer space activities, it does not mean the US will, or should, sign on to that code.
June 28, 2011 at 5:49 am · Filed under Congress, NASA
It appears that the threat of a Senate subpoena was sufficient to get NASA’s attention. Florida Today reports that NASA is providing the Senate Commerce Committee with documents it requested last week. The report is unclear whether the agency had actually delivered those documents to the committee by its deadline of 6 pm Eastern time yesterday, or had simply agreed to provide the documents and made other arrangements. In a letter last week to NASA administrator Charles Bolden, the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee warned they would issue a subpoena for documents regarding NASA’s plans for the Space Launch System and Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle if NASA didn’t comply with their request by Monday.
June 24, 2011 at 8:32 am · Filed under Campaign '12
Jon Huntsman, the former Utah governor and ambassador to China who formally announced his candidacy for president earlier this week, opened his national campaign headquarters yesterday in Orlando. Being in central Florida, so close to the Space Coast, it’s not surpring someone asked him about his space policy views. His answer, in essence, was to stay tuned.
“We always want to be at the cutting edge of space flight. Today it’s an affordability issue,” he said, the Orlando Sentinel reported. “When we get around to space policy, we’ll come down here and make sure people are fully aware of what our hopes are.” He added, according to the article, that he puts a top priority on improving the nation’s economy, and that the “long term return on investment” from space programs can aid in that.
June 24, 2011 at 5:59 am · Filed under Congress, NASA
Members of the Senate Commerce Committee, and their staff, have made it clear for months that they have been frustrated with the lack of information they have received from NASA about its plans to implement provisions of the 2010 NASA authorization act, particularly regarding the Space Launch System (SLS) heavy-lift rocket. Last month they formally requested a comprehensive set of documents from NASA on various programs, including SLS, the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, and commercial crew initiatives.
The committee’s patience may have finally run out. In a letter Wednesday to NASA administration Charles Bolden, Sens. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), the chair and ranking member of the full committee, warned NASA that if it did not provide specific documents to the committee by the end of the day Monday it would issue a subpoena for them. “While NASA has provided a partial response to our May 18 letter, you have thwarted our oversight activities by withholding key documents that describe NASA’s compliance with the 2010 Act,” the letter states. It adds that in one case “NASA was withholding at least 19 separate drafts of a report it is required to submit to Congress under Section 309 of the 2010 Act.” That section of the 2010 authorization act requires NASA to provide a “detailed report” on the agency’s plans to implement the SLS and MPCV. NASA released a draft report in January but has yet to provide the final report.
So, will this subpoena compel NASA to release the documents? Or, perhaps, encourage NASA to accelerate release of the final report and make a formal decision on its SLS plans, which recent reports indicate are all but a done deal?
June 23, 2011 at 7:57 am · Filed under Congress, Other
It’s tough enough to raise the billions of dollars needed to build out a nationwide hybrid satellite/terrestrial wireless network, as LightSquared has found. But when that system may interfere with one of the most crucial satellite systems anywhere, those problems are, well, squared, something that Congress will be looking into during a hearing today.
Scrutiny of LightSquared’s system has grown in recent weeks after tests by come in industry indicated that the company’s wireless signals would interfere with GPS signals, in the worst case making GPS receivers useless. Recent reports, including one by the White House-chartered National Space-Based Positioning, Navigation, and Timing Systems Engineering Forum, have confirmed that LightSquared’s system would interfere with GPS signals.
LightSquared (formerly SkyTerra) has one satellite in orbit, launched last year; that satellite will be augmented by a terrestrial system that the company is seeking to raise money to build out. While the company originally argued that there was no danger of interference, the company this week admitted there was an interference issue but that there was an easy fix: it would instead shift to a different block of spectrum for its initial service, one that “largely free of interference issues” expect for some high-precision GPS receivers. An industry group, the Coalition to Save Our GPS, is skeptical of LightSquared’s claims, claiming that the company’s proposal “borders on the bizarre”.
Concerns about LightSquared’s potential impact of GPS will be aired at a hearing this morning by the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. The hearing will feature a number of government and industry witnesses, including an executive with LightSquared.
June 21, 2011 at 7:10 am · Filed under NASA, Other
In this week’s issue of The Space Review, I reviewed the new book Falling Back to Earth by Mark Albrecht, who was the executive secretary of the National Space Council during the George H.W. Bush administration and, later, president of International Launch Services. Much of the book, as I note in the review, talks about his time on the space council, including development of the Space Exploration Initiative and clashes with NASA regarding implementing SEI. Albrecht is pessimistic about the future of human spaceflight, citing the failures of SEI and the Vision for Space Exploration, saying “it is hard to imagine” another president making a major push in this area.
At the end of the book, though, Albrecht does state that “changes are urgently needed at NASA” for there to be any hope of reviving human space exploration, reforms that are not themselves sufficient but “necessary preconditions for success” of any new exploration initiative. At the heart of these proposed changes is a greater reliance on public-private partnerships “that recognize that the center of technical development and manufacturing excellence has shifted to the private sector.” (This approach sounds similar to NASA’s COTS and CCDev efforts, although he doesn’t explicitly mention either.) He also endorses greater participation by international entities “based purely on financial and technical capability” as opposed to policy considerations.
Separately, he calls for a radical restructuring of NASA as it relies more on these partnerships. The agency, he argues, should be focused on space science and human space exploration; other efforts, including aeronautics and Earth sciences, should be transferred to other agencies. He advocatesfor closing unneeded NASA centers through a BRAC-like process. Congress should support this by resisting earmarks for local center projects, and also through supporting “permissive statutory contexts for aggressive public-private initiatives.”
NASA, he argues in the book’s conclusion, can again achieve the heights it experienced early in its history, “but to do so will require a sober self-assessment, a desire to change, and a willingness to let go of what has long brought institutional comfort at the expense of national achievement.” Whether his proposed reforms can achieve those changes, or are even feasible, is an open question.
June 17, 2011 at 6:20 am · Filed under Congress, NASA
Reports on Thursday indicated that NASA has settled on a design for the Space Launch System (SLS) heavy-lift booster that would be largely shuttle-derived, but would offer some room for competition. According to Aviation Week and NASASpaceFlight.com, the SLS design will be only slightly different from the reference design released in an interim report to Congress in January, using a core stage based on the shuttle’s external tank and fitted with Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSMEs), later transitioning to the RS-25E expendable variant. The upper stage would use the J-2X engine slated to begin test firings this month at the Stennis Space Center.
That reference design had originally called for the use of five-segment solid rocket boosters. While the reports indicated that SRBs will be used for initial launches, there will be a competition between SRBs and a liquid-propellant booster built by Teledyne Brown and powered by a variant of Aerojet’s AJ-26 engine (itself based on Russian NK-33 engines), at least for the “evolved” beyond Earth orbit SLS version. That approach would at least partially address calls for an open SLS competition made earlier this week by Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), which came on the heels of a similar letter by Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), especially since Teledyne Brown is based in Alabama and Aerojet is headquartered in California.
According to NASASpaceFlight.com, a formal announcement of the SLS plan would come on July 8, the same day as the last shuttle mission is scheduled to launch. That could address some concerns about the lack of details about the follow-on to the shuttle. The NASASpaceFlight.com article cites an “impassioned” speech by shuttle launch director Mike Leinbach after a recent countdown simulation where he was critical of the lack of information regarding what happens after the shuttle. “The end of the shuttle program is a tough thing to swallow and we’re all victims of poor policy out of Washington DC, both at the NASA level and the executive branch of the government,” Leinbach said. “I’m embarrassed that we don’t have better guidance out of Washington DC.”
June 15, 2011 at 10:08 pm · Filed under Congress, NASA
What does Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) have in common with California’s two Democratic senators? He, like Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, is now calling on NASA to hold an open competition for the development of the Space Launch System (SLS). In a letter to NASA administrator Charles Bolden last Friday, Shelby said that while he wants the SLS developed as quickly as possible, he does not want “to foreclose the possibility of utilizing competition, where appropriate”, noting that the language in the NASA authorization act passed last year calls for the use of existing contracts and other resources “to the extent practicable”.
Shelby was particularly critical in the letter to the possibility of basing the SLS on shuttle hardware. “Designing a Space Launch System for heavy lift that relies on existing Shuttle boosters ties NASA, once again, to the high fixed costs associated with segmented solids,” Shelby writes.
“I have seen no evidence that foregoing competition for the booster system will speed up development of SLS or, conversely, that introducing competition will slow the program down,” Shelby concludes in his letter to Bolden. “I strongly encourage you to initiate a competition for the Space Launch System booster. I believe it will ultimately result in a more efficient SLS development effort at lower cost to the taxpayer.”
Shelby’s conclusion is similar to the one in another letter to Bolden from Boxer and Feinstein in late May, where the two also called for “a competitive bidding process” for the SLS. In some respects, though, it’s not that surprising: when Aerojet and Huntsville-based Teledyne Brown Engineering announced a joint venture earlier this month to develop rocket engines for various projects, including SLS, it got an endorsement from Shelby. “Congress directed NASA to develop a 130-metric ton Space Launch System with a first and second stage that leverage our Ares investments. The Teledyne-Aerojet team could have a critical role to play designing additional elements of the system, and I hope NASA looks at their capabilities carefully,” Shelby said in a comment provided to the Huntsville Times when the joint venture was announced.
June 15, 2011 at 7:47 am · Filed under Congress, Lobbying
Plutonium 238 (Pu-238), the radioactive isotope used in the radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), is essential to a number of spacecraft missions, particularly those bound for the outer solar system. However, getting the relatively modest funding (no more than a few tens of millions of dollars a year) needed to restart Pu-238 production in the US to ensure that a supply of the isotope is available for future missions has been difficult in recent years. The latest push is taking place this week. The Obama Administration included $10 million each for NASA and the Department of Energy (DOE) to restart Pu-238 production, but a draft version of the Energy and Water appropriations bill in the House does not include that funding. The full House Appropriations Committee is scheduled to markup the bill in a hearing today.
Emily Lakdawalla of The Planetary Society reported yesterday that the American Geophysical Union (AGU) is making a last-minute push to get the money added to the appropriations bill. In an email, the AGU said that Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), whose district includes JPL, plans to introduce an amendment to the bill to include the Pu-238 funding. (The AGU alert is not included in its list of “Science Policy Alerts” on its web site; it apparently went out to AGU members whose representatives are on the committee.) The AGU asked its members to contact their congressmen and ask them to support the Schiff amendment, providing a variety of talking points to use in those calls.
Getting that amendment through may be tough, however. In the report accompanying the draft appropriations bill, the committee criticized the administration’s plan to split the Pu-238 costs between NASA and DOE. “The Committee remains concerned that the Administration continues to request equal funding from NASA and the Department of Energy for a project that primarily benefits NASA,” the report states at the top of page 98. “The Committee provides no funds for this project, and encourages the Administration to devise a plan for this project that more closely aligns the costs paid by federal agencies with the benefits they receive.”
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