Space Politics
Because sometimes the most important orbit is the Beltway…
Archive for July, 2011
July 31, 2011 at 1:39 pm · Filed under Lobbying, NASA, Other
As the debate grinds on in Washington about a deal to raise the debt ceiling, there have been questions about what will happen should an agreement not be reached by the current deadline of Tuesday. On Friday NASA administrator Charles Bolden sent out message to the agency’s workforce, effectively telling them it will be business as usual this coming week at the space agency. “I am sending this note to remind you that NASA employees should plan to come to work next week, as scheduled, at their normal place and time,” he wrote in the memo, obtained by SpaceRef.
POLITICO examined Friday the lobbying practices of aerospace companies in this new space policy era. Much of the article is less about NASA than about efforts by SpaceX to win business from the Air Force for military launches, arguing that its rockets are just as good as those built by United Launch Alliance but cost much less. SpaceX, the article notes, is on a pace to exceed its 2010 lobbying expenses of $600,000, much more than the $120,000 a year spent by ULA but a small fraction of that spent by ULA’s corporate parents, Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
That article leads, though, with the belief that the president and SpaceX founder Elon Musk are good friends—”President Barack Obama’s élan for Elon Musk”, as the article cleverly puts it—based on Musk’s donations to Obama and “multiple personal visits”. Musk, though, quashes any idea the two are close. “People think Obama is my best friend. If he has been my best friend, he sure hasn’t been very good at helping me out,” Musk told POLITICO. “Obama has been doing a good job within the scope of what he can do … but not pushing further. And Congress has done quite a bad job.”
Speaking Friday morning at the NewSpace 2011 Conference at NASA Ames Research Center, Virgin Galactic president and CEO George Whitesides spent most of his time talking about the status of his company and the progress they’re making in developing a suborbital vehicle. However, the former chief of staff to NASA administrator Bolden also touched upon space policy issues for part of his talk. Whitesides noted he had just come from the EAA AirVenture show in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and wondered when the space field would be able to host a show of a similar type and scale. “While we cannot be sure that the current national policy will get us to that future, I think we can be reasonably sure the path we were on before would not get us to that future,” he said.
He said that if we had continued down the path of an “Apollo-like” program, there would be little funding available for technological innovations that could lower the cost of space access in general and create an “exothermic reaction” of activity in space. “I really do believe—and I was involved in some of these conversations—that the underlying motivation for these new national policy changes is a desire to go further, and to go sustainably,” he said. “What is motivating, I think, this policy is absolutely not a desire to kill human spaceflight, but it is a desire to essentially press the reset button on human spaceflight, and to try to get it into a pathway that really can fulfill our dreams.” He added it was ironic that some viewed the policy as killing human spaceflight when instead it’s intended “to encourage human spaceflight to thrive, ultimately.”
July 30, 2011 at 9:48 am · Filed under NASA, White House
Former presidential science advisor John H. Marburger III passed away Thursday at the age of 70. Marburger headed the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) for the full eight years of the George W. Bush Administration, which put him in the middle of many key changes in the nation’s space policy during that time.
For many, though, Marburger is best known for a speech he gave at the 2006 Goddard Memorial Symposium where he offered an economic underpinning for the Vision for Space Exploration. “As I see it, questions about the Vision boil down to whether we want to incorporate the Solar System in our economic sphere, or not,” he said, a phrase that resonated with portions of the space community, particularly those who have supported greater commercial activities in space. In that speech, he advocated for a human return to the Moon in part to utilize its material to support additional space activities. “The greatest value of the Moon lies neither in science nor in exploration, but in its material.” He was also cool to the idea of rushing to Mars, saying that “we do not know how to send humans to Mars and return them safely within a reasonable cost envelope.”
Two years later Marburger gave another speech at the Goddard symposium, where he focused on the need for space exploration to be sustainable over the long haul. “If the architecture of the exploration phase is not crafted with sustainability in mind, we will look back on a century or more of huge expenditures with nothing more to show for them than a litter of ritual monuments scattered across the planets and their moons,” he said.
“I think we are psychologically conditioned to want to model national policy on the highly successful Apollo program, starting with its huge budget,” he noted in that speech. “But the Apollo program was a unique response to a singular set of events at the height of the Cold War. I cannot prove it except by pointing to the history, but it seems that the pace and scale of the Apollo program was unsustainable.”
As it turns out, NASA’s implementation of the Vision for Space Exploration was deemed unsustainable by the Obama Administration less than two years after Marburger’s second Goddard speech, but that warning of not trying to model programs after Apollo lives on in comments like those given just earlier this week by NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver. Will the current administration’s policy, with its greater emphasis on partnering with commercial providers and investing in technology development, be more successful in that goal from Marburger’s 2006 speech of seeking to “incorporate the Solar System in our economic sphere”?
July 29, 2011 at 4:16 pm · Filed under Congress, NASA
Last week NASA officials raised alarm in some corners of the space industry about its proposal to shift from a pure Space Act Agreement (SAA) for the next Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) round towards a hybrid approach that incorporates elements of both an SAA and a traditional contract. Not surprisingly, this topic came up again Thursday at the NewSpace 2011 Conference, although some made it clear contracting mechanisms were the lesser of their concerns about the future of CCDev.
Brent Jett, deputy manager of the Commercial Crew Program at NASA, told attendees during one panel session of the conference that he was aware of the concerns industry has raised since he and program manager Ed Mango outlined their proposed approach last week. “I know there’s a lot of angst in the community about the direction of the Commercial Crew Program,” he said. “There’s a group of people out there who strongly feel that Space Act Agreements is the only way to do it, the only way a program can be successful. There’s another group of people out there—not in this room, but within the government, within NASA—who strongly feel that to ensure crew safety, a cost-plus contract is the only way to it. So it’s almost like the debate in Washington over the debt ceiling.”
Companies have made clear their concerns about shifting from the SAA structure of previous CCDev rounds to this hybrid approach, which would incorporate many more elements of Federal Acquisition Regulations (FARs). But beyond general worries about an increase in paperwork associated with the FAR, what are the specific problems with NASA’s proposed approach?
Mark Sirangelo, head of Sierra Nevada Corporation’s space systems division, said he didn’t absolutely reject NASA’s approach request. “From our company’s perspective, we don’t really have a concern, one way or another,” he said. However, the hybrid approach NASA is proposing could have some sticking point, he said, such as how to account in a FAR-based contract for the coinvestment companies are supposed to make in their systems, as well as how to account for the cost and schedule impacts of any changes imposed by NASA. “It’s not that these are things that can’t be overcome, but it’s an unusual set of circumstances, and I think that’s why many people are looking at one more round of Space Act Agreements leading to a FAR contract.”
Garrett Reisman, the former astronaut who is managing SpaceX’s CCDev-2 work, said his company wanted to stick to the fixed-price milestone-based approach used in CCDev and COTS. A FAR-based approach would require SpaceX to hire “a whole bunch more accountants” to deal with the overhead imposed by the FAR, he said. “In addition, it’s a big corporate culture change,” he said, noting that SpaceX engineers don’t fill out timecards. “It’s all an overhead burden we don’t currently have.”
How to handle the contract for the next round of CCDev might be overshadowed by a bigger concern: how much funding, if any, that will be available for it in the next round of the program. The House version of the FY12 appropriations bill that funds NASA would give CCDev $312 million, the same as for FY11 but well below the administration’s request of $850 million.
“What we really need is money, and support from Congress and the executive branch,” Jett said. Support from the executive branch is there, but Congress, given what it’s proposed so far in FY12, is lagging. He noted the CCDev budget is about one tenth the budget of the Space Launch System (SLS) and Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV), which combined would get just over $3 billion in FY12 in the House bill.
“I can tell you that if that number holds for the next year, it’s going to be very challenging for us to maintain multiple partners, to maintain the type of progress we’ve made, and meet a goal to fly folks in the mid part of the decade,” Jett said. “At some point we’re going to have to spend more than a couple hundred million dollars a year.”
Company officials agreed with that concern. “The bigger issue [than contracting mechanisms] is making sure we have the proper funding for this program and making sure all of us make our milestones and go forward,” Sirangelo said.
“These are the things that keep me up at night,” Reisman said. “Worrying about how we can possibly succeed with the budgets cut way down.”
July 29, 2011 at 8:53 am · Filed under NASA
At some point a “prepared for delivery” version of NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver’s speech Thursday might show up on the NASA web site, but it will likely be different from the speech she actually gave to kick off the Space Frontier Foundation’s NewSpace 2011 Conference at NASA Ames Research Center in California. Garver instead scanned through the agenda of the three-day conference, using the topics of sessions ranging from orbital and suborbital commercial spaceflight to public-private partnerships to discuss a number of relevant issues, including the roles of the public and private sectors in space going forward.
“The whole basis and underpinning of what we are trying to do in this administration is to return NASA to that more classical role of our 1958 Space Act of investing in technologies that will then help create new markets, so that the private sector can come in, benefit from this technology investment, and then we move on to do the next hard thing,” she said, summarizing the agency’s approach of working with companies and catalyzing private sector activity in space. “We’re not here to compete with the private sector—in fact, that’s not legal,” she added.
“That’s not our only job,” she noted. “Our job is also to expand farther.” One thing that is not NASA’s goal, though, she said, is to create a spacefaring civilization, a long-held goal of many space advocates in the conference audience—and of Garver herself, she noted, when she was the executive director of the National Space Society. “Go back to the Space Act. That’s not it. We’re here to push the envelope and learn new things.” It’s up to the private sector, she said, to follow that lead. “Your role of helping there to be folks who follow is what’s really going to get” civilization moving off-world.
In her speech she touched upon a number of areas where NASA was taking this role of developing technologies and leading expansion into the solar system while working with the private sector, from its support for commercial and orbital spaceflight to a planned human mission to a near Earth asteroid in the middle of the next decade. On that last point, she emphasized that such a mission was a natural steppingstone towards further exploration, and a not another destination-driven goal that has been tried in the past unsuccessfully. “Destination-driven budgets are, we know, problematic,” she said. “We’ve been trying to relive Apollo since the 1960s, but not successfully. Presidents make big statements, set goals and dates, and we don’t meet them. So that is not what this is.” She mentioned in passing that she had recently met with an unnamed company that claimed that it had a way of achieving that asteroid mission goal as soon as 2019.
She also said that low cost reliable access to space was a key goal of the current administration, one that it was willing to pursue despite the criticism that erupted last year with the announcement that NASA would cancel Constellation. “We’ve invested a lot of political capital on this, folks,” she said. “The President of the United States has decided that this is an area for NASA to develop that is meaningful, that will open up space for all humanity.”
“Does anyone think that the president has gained a lot of political ground over this shift at NASA?” she asked. “Probably it would have been the politically conservative thing to do to stick to the plan, not cancel existing contracts, even though those contracts were leading human spaceflight off a cliff.”
During the brief Q&A session that followed her speech, someone asked Garver what the audience should to to help. She suggested helping communicate the broader message to the public. “We get into these debates in Washington about how a rocket’s built or exactly what configuration this architecture will have. Is that the important thing? You guys know the important thing, which is that we do this in a way that doesn’t take all of our NASA budget, so that we can go further.”
July 28, 2011 at 4:58 pm · Filed under Congress, NASA
For weeks now the Senate Commerce Committee has been threatening to subpoena NASA to obtain documents related to the agency’s exploration plans, citing the frustration in not getting documents from NASA about its plans despite numerous requests. Now, finally, it appears that the Senate reached its breaking point. NASA Watch reports that the committee has issued a subpoena for the documents. There has been no formal announcement, although a committee spokesman confirmed the subpoena to Space News. A NASA spokesperson told both publications what NASA officials, including administrator Charles Bolden, has previously said on this subject: that the selection of the Space Launch System (SLS) is so important that the agency and the administration need to take the time required in order to get it right.
July 28, 2011 at 12:35 pm · Filed under NASA, Other
NASASpaceFlight.com reported late Wednesday on a draft manifest for the Space Launch System (SLS) under a “budget restricted” scenario. According to that document, the first SLS launch would take place in 2017 and send an uncrewed Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) on a circumlunar trajectory. The next SLS mission would not take place until 2021, and carry a crewed Orion on the same type of mission. Those initial SLS missions would use the initial SLS configuration with shuttle-derived components. The “evolved” SLS, with a capacity of 130 metric tons to LEO, would not debut until 2032. Those initial milestones would appear to match up with comments by NASA administrator Charles Bolden at a House hearing earlier this month, where he said the SLS would debut in 2017 carrying an uncrewed Orion, but that the SLS would not be human-rated until “late this decade, early ’20s”.
Another poll released yesterday adds to the volume of polling data about the public’s perceptions about the end of the shuttle program and NASA’s future. The IBOPE Zogby found that 59 percent of respondents disagree with the decision to end the shuttle, with nearly three quarters saying that the shuttle was a good use of government resources. Echoing some other polls, 48 percent said that “future space exploration” should be done by both NASA and private companies, versus 28 percent who said NASA alone should do it. (The poll does not define what “space exploration” means in this context.) Three in five respondents said the were very or somewhat concerned that the US would fall behind other nations in the ability to explore space.
July 27, 2011 at 6:18 am · Filed under Congress, NASA, White House
There’s a bit of a lull in space policy now, after the shuttle has landed and with Congress and the administration preoccupied with much bigger, pressing issues. A few items of interest:
In the post-shuttle era, NASA administrator Charles Bolden is optimistic, reiterating that the end of the shuttle doesn’t mean the end of NASA human spaceflight. “fact, we are recommitting ourselves to human spaceflight and taking the necessary — and difficult — steps to maintain American pre-eminence. Our leadership will continue because we have laid this foundation for success,” he says in an Orlando Sentinel op-ed. “There’s no doubt that this transition period at NASA is a challenge. But we have always risen to meet such challenges, just as we did during the transition from the Apollo program to shuttle.”
While Bolden is optimistic, Johnson Space Center director Mike Coats is less so. “It’s a tough time right now. We’re going to be in a period where we can’t put humans into orbit for the first time in 50 years,” he tells Houston’s KHOU-TV. (As previously noted, there have been previous gaps in NASA’s ability to launch humans into orbit.) Coats said that probable budget cuts will make it unlikely that NASA will be able to meet the goal in last year’s authorization act of fielding the MPCV spacecraft and SLS launcher by 2016. “Given the deficit situation, and the emphasis right now on reducing government, almost across the board, especially discretionary programs, I don’t think that we’re going to have the funding that’s going to enable us to meet those dates,” he said.
On another topic of long-running interest, export control reform, an administration official said this week that many of the White House’s proposed reforms can be enacted without Congressional approval. Michael Froman, deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs, said Monday that he believes “around 80 percent” of its proposed reforms can be done through “executive authority”, The Hill reports. Last year the administration put forward a plan featuring what’s been dubbed the “four singles” that would create a single export control list with multiple tiers, a single licensing agency, a single enforcement agency, and a single IT system. While the article doesn’t explicitly state it, one area that likely falls into the 20 percent that would require congressional approval is the area of greatest interest to the space industry: the potential move of commercial satellites and related components off the US Munitions List (USML); those components were put on the USML by Congress in the late 1990s.
July 24, 2011 at 12:46 pm · Filed under NASA, Other
The end of the shuttle program, in addition to prompting its share of political reactions, was also a cue for pollsters, who used the occasion to seek out the public’s views on a variety of space issues. The responses suggest the public, while generally supporting NASA, is reluctant to let the shuttle go and also not eager to give the agency more money.
On the shuttle, Rasmussen Reports poll from mid-July found that 50% of respondents concluded the shuttle program was worth the expense to taxpayers, versus 27% who didn’t think it had been worth it. A CNN/ORC poll last week also found that half of respondents thought the end of the shuttle program would be “bad” for the US, versus a third who thought it would have no effect and 16% who thought it would be good. An Investor’s Business Daily (IBD)/TIPP poll from last week also found that 56% opposed ending the shuttle.
There’s still interest in human spaceflight and space exploration in the post-shuttle era, though. The Rasmussen poll found that 74% thought it to be at least somewhat important for the US to have a human spaceflight program (73% also supported robotic space exploration), while the IBD/TIPP poll found that 65% thought the US should have a “leading” or “active” role in space exploration. The IBD/TIPP poll, though, noted that 72% didn’t believe the current administration has a “clear plan for space exploration”. The CNN/ORC poll reported that 64% of respondents believe it’s very or fairly important for the US to be ahead of other countries in space exploration, and 75% thought the US should develop its own crewed spacecraft.
Those programs, though, will likely to have to be done with NASA budgets no greater than today’s. The IBD/TIPP poll reported that only 10% of respondents want to increase NASA’s budget; 49% want to keep it at current levels while 28% want to cut it (and an additional 8% want to see the budget cut entirely.) The Rasmussen results were only a little better for NASA advocates: it found 18% who wanted to increase spending on space exploration, versus 40% who want to keep it at current levels and 30% who want to spend less.
There’s also some support for increased reliance on the private sector to support human spaceflight and exploration. The CNN/ORC poll noted that 54% thought that the US should rely more on private companies for human spaceflight, versus 38% who preferred the government. The IBD/TIPP poll found that 59% agreed that “the U.S. could get into space faster, better and more effectively if ‘we get the space program out of Washington and cut out the bureaucracy.’” The Rasmussen poll reported that 38% thought the government should fund “the space program” (without being more specific), while 33% thought that should be the responsibility of the private sector.
As always, there are caveats with these polls: how the survey instrument (questionnaire) is worded can have a major effect on responses. And the language can also be imprecise: when people say, for example, that the private sector should fund the space program, are they referring to everything NASA does or the more visible elements, like human spaceflight? Combined, though, they suggest the public wants the US to remain a leader in space exploration, including human spaceflight; they’re just not willing to spend more money to do so.
July 23, 2011 at 9:25 am · Filed under Congress, NASA
Rep. Pete Olson (R-TX) kept his statement Thursday about the end of the final shuttle mission largely apolitical, thanking those who worked on the program and promising that it is “by no means the end of human space flight”. However, in an op-ed published Friday in POLITICO and co-authored by former astronaut Walt Cunningham, he is more pointed in his criticism of the administration’s space policy. “President Barack Obama shifted NASA policy away from human spaceflight,” they write of the administration’s move to cancel Constellation and support development of commercial crew capabilities, adding that “NASA’s plan for deep space exploration… leaves them without a specific destination and timetable. Really, without a mission.” (The administration has set some destinations and deadlines, including a human NEO mission by 2025 and Mars orbit by the mid-2030s, but these have been often criticized as vague or too far into the future.)
Cunningham and Olson devote some attention to NASA’s commercial crew initiative, saying it diverts “billions of dollars to a group of companies – most devoid of experience in manned space vehicles”. “We don’t believe that a private market capable of supporting a low-earth orbit system, independent of government, exists in the near-term. If it did, it wouldn’t need government support,” they write, concluding that “Space exploration is likely to continue to be a government-sponsored mission for the foreseeable future – if the U.S. is to retain its preeminence in space.”
While these criticisms of the agency’s plans are hardly original, they do add something new. “In coming weeks we, with others committed to the HSF [human spaceflight] program, will offer a more detailed plan to return to flight,” they state. They don’t disclose exactly when that plan will be released, but do offer some key elements of it:
•Spell out a coherent HSF mission, goal and timeline for the next 20 years. Manned missions to the Moon, and then Mars, should be part of this timeline.
•Return to the earlier NASA model of success: Adopt best practices to reform contracting, foster better communication between centers, eliminate activities not essential for space exploration and clear away bureaucracy.
•Assess the near-term potential and costs for commercial space companies to support both cargo and manned LEO missions to better understand the potential investment required by private investors, and the degree it may free NASA resources to focus on the deep-space mission.
•Make a quick decision on a heavy launch system and the necessary related technologies.
They don’t state what they will do with the plan once they release it other than a goal for “a long-term strategy, with specific policies, led and endorsed by Congress”.
July 22, 2011 at 7:11 am · Filed under Congress, NASA, States, White House
Yesterday’s successful landing of Atlantis at the Kennedy Space Center marked the end of the 30-year space shuttle program and the beginning of a period of some uncertainty for NASA’s human spaceflight program. That milestone would appear to be another opportunity for critics of the Obama Administration’s space policy in Congress and elsewhere to voice their concerns and complaints. Yet, with a few notable exceptions, most instead used the opportunity to praise the agency and the thousands of people who worked on the shuttle program.
Rep. Sandy Adams (R-FL), whose district includes KSC, noted with “great sadness” the final shuttle landing, but also said it was a time to look forward, adding she was “elated” when a Florida organization was selected last week to manage research on the ISS. In a neighboring district, Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL) called yesterday a “historic, but bittersweet day”, using his statement to laud the program and those who worked on it. Rep. Pete Olson (R-TX), whose district includes the Johnson Space Center, recognized those who worked on the shuttle program while adding that America “will need your expertise and skills to take us to the next level of human space exploration.” Another Houston-area member, Rep. John Culberson (R-TX), acknowledged the “uncertain future of the program” but said that “Houston is destined to build on its legacy of exploration and discovery.” Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) said “Texans should take pride” in their work on the shuttle program; in a longer op-ed in the Houston Chronicle, he does express concern about the NASA and the administration’s slow movement on the Space Launch System, but adds, “Leveraging the potential of the private sector will be a key to closing the new space gap between America and our international rivals.”
Some, were a bit more critical of the administration’s policy. George LeMieux, who spent a year and a half in the Senate serving out the remainder of Mel Martinez’s term and is now seeking the Republican nomination to run against Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL), came out against Nelson and the administration Thursday in a speech in Lakeland, Florida, saying he would push for “greater direction and greater emphasis” on space if he returns to the Senate. “There was a mood among my colleagues when I was in the Senate, to do more. I am certain there is wasteful spending where the money could go to the space program instead. Sen. Nelson should have held the president accountable (for continuing a strong space program),” he said, according to a report by the Lakeland Ledger. LeMieux previously claimed that Sen. Nelson “allows 23,000 space jobs to die”.
LeMieux’s comments, though, were mild compared to those made by Texas governor Rick Perry. In a press release from his office, he came out swinging against the White House. “The Obama Administration continues to lead federal agencies and programs astray, this time forcing NASA away from its original purpose of space exploration, and ignoring its groundbreaking past and enormous future potential,” he stated, not mentioning exactly how the administration was redirecting NASA. “Unfortunately, with the final landing of the Shuttle Atlantis and no indication of plans for future missions, this administration has set a significantly different milestone by shutting down our nation’s legacy of leadership in human spaceflight and exploration, leaving American astronauts with no alternative but to hitchhike into space.” Perry doesn’t note that this need to “hitchhike” can be traced back to the original Vision for Space Exploration by President George W. Bush, which directed the shuttle’s retirement by 2010 and a successor vehicle by 2014; the gap was a major issue long before the current administration took office. Perry’s comments carry particular import because, in addition to being governor of a state with a significant NASA presence, he is reportedly considering a run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012.
The end of the shuttle program and the expected losses of thousands of jobs came up at Thursday’s White House press briefing. The administration’s NASA policy, press secretary Jay Carney said in response to a question, “means more jobs for the country, more American astronauts in space over the next decade and more investments in innovation relative to the prior administration’s plan,” adding on more than one occasion that this policy has “bipartisan support” in Congress. The president, Carney added, “looks forward to NASA’s future and moving forward with space exploration in the future” and has “tremendous regard for the program and for all the folks at NASA who participated in making it such a tremendous success.”
In an interview Thursday with Bloomberg TV, NASA administrator Charles Bolden also acknowledged the Bush Administration’s space policy. “I really applaud the Bush Administration for the decision to migrate from shuttle, phase it out in an orderly fashion, which is what we just completed today,” he said about five minutes into the interview. “If I had a criticism of them, and the Congress, it would be that together they did not adequately fund the space program to be able to bring about a viable exploration program for beyond low Earth orbit and certainly did almost nothing to help us facilitate the success of commercial entities. That’s an area where President Obama has stepped forward, where no one did that since the beginning of NASA.”
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