September 4, 2011 at 10:34 am · Filed under Congress, NASA, Other
A couple brief notes on a quiet holiday weekend:
A little over a week ago, Florida Sens. Bill Nelson (D) and Marco Rubio (R) sent a letter to the White House countering claims in another letter by five other senators that money appropriated for the Space Launch System (SLS) was being “misallocated” to facility upgrades at the Kennedy Space Center. Nelson and Rubio argued that the funds were being used appropriately to “decrease development and operations costs” for the SLS. In a statement to the Huntsville Times last week, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), one of the five senators who signed the original letter about the misallocation of SLS funds, tried to find some common ground with his Florida colleagues. “I am glad to see that my colleagues from Florida have joined me in pushing the administration to follow the law and move forward with the development of a Space Launch System,” he said in the statement. However, the portion of the statement quoted in the article suggested Shelby was not backing away from his original claim that SLS money should not be spent on the KSC upgrades.
On Friday the Wall Street Journal reported that Blue Origin suffered a setback in its vehicle development program when a test vehicle flew out of control at its west Texas launch site and was destroyed. The Journal article suggested the failure could affect NASA’s Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program, as Blue Origin is one of four companies with second-round CCDev awards from NASA. “The failure also could set back White House plans to promote commercially developed spacecraft to transport crews to the international space station by the second half of this decade,” the article claimed. However, Blue Origin’s own statement, posted on its web site shortly after the Journal article first appeared, and signed by Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos, suggests the test failure will have little or no effect on its CCDev-2 work: “We’re working on the sub-orbital crew capsule separately, as well as an orbital crew vehicle to support NASA’s Commercial Crew program,” Bezos wrote. The test also does not appear to be closely tied to any of its CCDev-2 milestones, according to a NASA document updated last month.
September 1, 2011 at 7:02 am · Filed under Lobbying, NASA
For Orlando Sentinel columnist Mike Thomas, it’s a question of what’s the lesser evil: “We can either go billions over budget on mismanaged science projects, or we can go billions over budget on even more mismanaged manned-spaceflight programs,” he writes in a column today. Thomas, who has been a critic of human spaceflight activities in the past, unsurprisingly chooses the former, in part because of the money already spent on the James Webb Space Telescope, as well as the scientific and other benefits it can yield: “It would be a big in-your-face to the Chinese, who could never build such a technical marvel, at least not until they’ve downloaded the plans from the NASA computers.” He doesn’t apply similar arguments to the Space Launch System (SLS) and Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV), and is skeptical of the cost estimates reported last month. “Factoring in the usual NASA cost overruns and delays, this rocket will cost $200 billion and go up in the year 2525.” (If man is still alive…)
The advocacy group Tea Party in Space (TPIS) sees last week’s Soyuz launch failure as proof Congress should fully fund NASA’s Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program in order to ensure American access to the ISS, the conservative news site NewsMax reports. CCDev would be faster and cheaper than SLS, the organization argues; a TPIS official called congressional support for SLS “a pretty warped sense of priorities”. “Tea Party in Space officials see NASA’s cost overruns as a microcosm of the larger bureaucratic snafus that plague the federal government generally,” the report adds.
Back in July, SpaceX hired Mark Bitterman, who had spent nearly 20 years at rival Orbital Sciences Corporation, most recently as vice president of government affairs, as its new senior vice president of government affairs. But Space News reported this week that, after less than two months on the job, Bitterman has resigned; a company spokesperson said “family obligations” require more of his time than the job would allow. (The version of the press release announcing his hiring is no longer listed on the SpaceX web site, although in addition to the Business Wire version listed above, there’s a cached version from earlier this week.)
