Space Politics
Because sometimes the most important orbit is the Beltway…
Archive for January, 2012
January 31, 2012 at 7:11 am · Filed under Campaign '12, Lobbying
Yesterday the space advocacy organization Tea Party in Space (TPIS) formally endorsed Newt Gingrich for the Republican presidential nomination. “Newt Gingrich is the only credible candidate in this primary race in Florida who has any credibility when it comes to America’s future in space,” TPIS president Andrew Gasser said in a statement. The organization said it based that endorsement of an evaluation of the candidates’ space policy positions and a grading on “tea party core values of fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government, and free markets”, where Gingrich was ranked as “superior”.
Although the statement made no mention of the other GOP candidates, a previous post on the TPIS web site by Gasser criticized a lack of vision by Mitt Romney in his policy, in large part because one of those people advising the Romney campaign on space is former NASA administrator Mike Griffin. “While we all agree that Dr. Griffin is well educated in physics and engineering, his track record suggests he is not grasping the economic condition of this country,” Gasser writes. “Moreover, NASA was crippled under Dr. Griffin’s leadership.”
While TPIS has come out strongly for Gingrich in advance of today’s primary in Florida, other space organizations have remained noncommittal. The National Space Society said it was “pleased” Gingrich released a space policy, the organization said in a press release last week. The organization stopped short of formally endorsing that policy, but noted the plan “contained many details that align with NSS goals”. The NSS asked other candidates to release their own policies (the release is dated January 26, a day before Romney’s space speech.)
The Space Frontier Foundation also didn’t formally endorse Gingrich’s policies, citing its desire to remain non-partisan, but the organization was clearly pleased with its emphasis on space settlement. “The SFF applauds Speaker Gingrich for embracing space settlement and is celebrating that support for space settlement has grown to include large parts of NASA, the current administration, and Speaker Gingrich,” it stated in a release Thursday. The organization was less welcoming of Romney’s plan, though, citing, like TPIS, Griffin’s association with the Romney campaign. Recalling Romney’s comment in Thursday’s debate that he would have “fired” any executive that came to him with a multi-hundred-billion plan for a lunar base, the Foundation’s executive director, Will Watson, said, “Confronted with Mike Griffin’s plan to return to the Moon, Mitt Romney would have fired Griffin and rightly so.” The Foundation called for the Romney campaign to “cast a much wider net for space policy advisors”.
While these organizations tend to show more support for Gingrich than for Romney, it doesn’t appear it will do the former Speaker of the House much good: latest polls showed that Romney was headed to a sizable victory in Florida today.
January 31, 2012 at 6:43 am · Filed under Other, White House
The space policy news cycle—such as it is—has been dominated in the last week by developments in the Republican presidential race, thanks to speeches and debate appearances by the major candidates. However, there are a few other things that have taken place during the last week worth mentioning:
The Obama Administration has delayed the release of its fiscal year 2013 budget proposal by a week. The budget was to be released on February 6, but instead will be released on February 13. Federal law officially requires the budget proposal to be released on the first Monday of February, but the administration has missed that date in previous releases. (Plus, presumably everyone will be talking on February 6 about the Super Bowl the previous night, or at least the commercials that aired during the big game…)
While Americans have been discussing the space policy positions of Republican candidates, Indians have been witness to an emerging controversy involving the former head of the nation’s space agency. Last Wednesday the Indian government formally barred former Indian Space Research Organisation head G Madhavan Nair and three other officials from any future government positions. The government cited their roles approving a deal between ISRO’s commercial arm, Antrix, and a telecommunications company, Devas, in 2005, giving the company a chunk of S-band spectrum in violation of existing regulations. The government canceled the deal last year as part of its investigation. Nair has been fighting back against the ban, and on Monday he formally asked Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to revoke the ban and probe the government’s actions.
Satellite broadband company LightSquared continues its debate with the government officials about the potential interference the company’s proposed ground-based portion of its system would have with GPS signals. An interagency group concluded that there’s no way for LightSquared to operate with GPS without causing interference, a conclusion LightSquared disputes, as Aviation Week reports. Meanwhile, the company has filed an ethics complaint with NASA’s Office of the Inspector General, claiming that the vice chairman of the government’s National Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing Advisory Board, Bradford Parkinson, has a conflict of interest with a GPS terminal manufacturer flighting the LightSquared system.
This weekend, the Northeast Junior State Congress Convention will take place in the Washington area, including a Model Congress. Interestingly, according to the press release announcing the event, the legislation students will be considering during the Model Congress includes “a bill to promote privatized human space exploration”.
January 29, 2012 at 8:49 am · Filed under Campaign '12
[Updated at 10:45 am to include some clarifications from Eric Anderson.]
After Mitt Romney talked about space on Friday in Cape Canaveral, Florida, I had the opportunity to talk with Eric Anderson, who is one of the people who signed the open letter endorsing Romney on space also released Friday. He provided some insights into what Romney’s views are about space, particularly the commercial sector.
Anderson, in a phone interview, said he was contacted a few months ago by the Romney campaign to serve on a space working group, whose members are those who signed Friday’s letter; he added he’s met Romney several times and talked to him “one-on-one” on commercial space in particular. “He had not thought a lot about commercial space,” Anderson admitted, but in those personal conversations, Romney indicated to Anderson his enthusiasm for the private sector’s recent developments in human space flight capabilities. Anderson believes that if Romney won the presidency he would be an advocate of commercial space.
Anderson continued, “You must remember, Mitt Romney is a very experienced businessman. People in business of course believe in private industry! They know that if you can find goods and services in the private sector then clearly those would be preferable to the government recreating that capability.”
Of course, both President Obama and Romney’s chief rival for the GOP nomination, Newt Gingrich, have also spoken out in favor of, or taken action to support, commercial space. Anderson’s company, Space Adventures, is an indirect beneficiary of NASA’s commercial crew initiative: it is partnered with Boeing, one of the companies that has won funded Space Act Agreements from NASA for development of commercial crew transportation systems. Anderson acknowledged that, but suggested that the administration should have done more since rolling out its plans almost exactly two years ago. “In terms of commercial support, the current policy is not a bad one at all,” he said. “However, the execution of that policy and its support evaporated after that initial period,” adding that there was “the general sense that the White House didn’t really back the plan up.”
Anderson said there was also “good and bad ideas” in Newt Gingrich’s plans to use billion-dollar prizes to incentivize the private sector to go to the Moon and Mars. Prizes, he noted, have been effective on smaller scales when carefully tailored, citing the $10-million Ansari X PRIZE in particular, but he’s not sure that they would work on the much larger scale proposed by Gingrich. “It has to be realistic,” he said.
Anderson agreed that Romney hasn’t provided many specifics, but said that’s the right approach for now. “It’s not the right thing to do now to set goals,” he said. “He doesn’t know enough about it to pick this over that.” Anderon believes, though, that a President Romney is “by far the likeliest” to select a plan that could be carried out over one or two terms of office. “NASA has been kicked around like a pinball. We can’t keep stopping and starting,” he said. A new plan “can’t break the bank like Constellation, and it can’t be directionless.”
“Should he win the White House,” Anderson said of Romney, “he would take decisive action on what NASA’s mission should be.”
January 28, 2012 at 7:59 am · Filed under Campaign '12
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney spoke late Friday afternoon at an Astrotech facility in Cape Canaveral, Florida, and, as expected, address his views on space policy in his relatively short (approximately 15-minute) speech. As in his previous discussions in two debate earlier this week, Romney said little about what he thought NASA and the national should be doing in space, but did describe what he would do to create a new vision for NASA if elected.
“So I’m not going to come here today and tell you precisely what the mission will be,” he said. “I’m going to tell you how I’m going to get there.” He said he would bring in people from various sectors of the space community, including the Defense Department, “astrophysicists from some of the leading institutions of the world”, industry executives, and NASA officials. They, he said, “will talk about each of those missions, each of those objectives, and then determine which mission for NASA, which mission for space, will most effectively carry out those missions.” That approach, he said, would make sure the job was done right and would support the nation as well as “protect ourselves from threats from space.”
Romney, in the passage above, was using “mission” in two different contexts: one being the plan for NASA that this interdisciplinary team—which sounds like something along the lines of blue-ribbon panels like the 2009 Augustine Committee and its predecessors—would develop, but also the objectives for the space program. In his speech Romney identified four objectives for American space efforts: “existential” studies of things “going on in the universe that could dramatically affect the Earth”, supporting commercial efforts, increasing the health and well-being of Americans through research and spinoffs, and national defense. “Each of them is, in and of itself, a critical priority, but collectively they suggest our space program is an integral part of America’s exceptionalism, and we must have a space program that combines all four of those missions.”
This approach to developing a mission for American space efforts was rooted in his experience in the private sector, where people collect data and and then make decisions based on the analysis of those data. That approach was different from others, he admitted, in comments that perhaps indirectly referred to Newt Gingrich’s speech two days earlier where he called the creation of a permanent lunar base by 2020. “In the politics of the past, to get your vote on the Space Coast, I’d promise hundreds of billions of dollars, or I’d lay out what my mission is,” he said. “I’m not going to do that. I know that’s something very attractive, very popular, but it’s simply the wrong thing to do.”
While Romney did not mention his rivals for the GOP nomination by name in the speech, he did directly attack President Obama. “If you wanted to put together a list of President Obama’s failures, it’s a long, long list, indeed. But the one in particular I want to talk about today is his failure to define a mission for the space program for this nation,” he said. “People are suffering because of that, we’ve lost technology because of that, people have lost jobs because of that. It’s time to have a mission for the space program of the United States of America.” Later in the speech he criticized the administration on more general grounds, such as the economy; the latter two-thirds of his speech, in fact, said little about space except for an anecdote about a Boy Scout troop that flew a flag on Challenger’s final mission and eventually got it back.
January 27, 2012 at 3:07 pm · Filed under Campaign '12
In advance of his appearance Friday afternoon in Cape Canaveral, the campaign of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney released a letter from several key figures in the American space community endorsing him, calling him someone who “will restore America’s space program”. “We have watched with dismay as President Obama dismantled the structure that was guiding both the government and commercial space sectors, while providing no purpose or vision or mission,” they write. “This failure of leadership has thrust the space program into disarray and triggered a dangerous erosion of our technical workforce and capabilities. In short, we have a space program unworthy of a great nation.”
They repeat earlier comments by Romney that he would bring together the civil, commercial, and military space sectors to find common ground and perhaps share resources. “He will create conditions for a strong and competitive commercial space industry that can contribute greatly to our national capabilities and goals,” they write. “And he will ensure that NASA returns its focus to the project of manned space exploration that uniquely affirms American strength and values around the globe.”
Among the letters signatories are former astronauts Bob Crippen and Gene Cernan; the latter has been one the most vocal ex-astronaut critics of the Obama Administration’s space policy. Former NASA administrator Mike Griffin is also a signatory, along with several other former space officials: Scott Pace (now head of George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute), Mark Albrecht, and Peter Marquez. (Albrecht has been critical of NASA’s evolution into a “risk-averse feudal empire”, as he put it in a talk in November.) The commercial side is represented by Eric Anderson of Space Adventures.
January 27, 2012 at 7:14 am · Filed under Campaign '12
While a lot has been written about Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich’s proposal for a lunar base by 2020 and related initiatives, Space News has some insights from the candidate on some more near-term space issues. Regarding the Space Launch System (SLS) heavy-lift rocket and Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV), he said he’d want to examine them in “the context of how rapidly alternatives could be developed and whether or not there was a way to actually have lots of competition to actually fly something.”
Gingrich added that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) needs a “serious review” in light of its cost overruns. “The fact that the Webb telescope has gone from $1.5 billion to $9 billion — and I’m told that people don’t believe that at $9 billion it’s going to be on budget — at some point you have to stop and say, ‘There’s something systemically wrong when you get into this scale of an overrun.’”
Meanwhile, Gingrich’s rival, Mitt Romney, will likely expound on his space policy ideas later today in a campaign appearance in Cape Canaveral. The time has shifted to later in the day—4:45 pm—at an Astrotech Space Operations facility. However, Rick Santorum has canceled an appearance on Florida’s Space Coast. He was scheduled to speak at a luncheon Saturday, but informed event organizers yesterday he would not be able to attend for undisclosed reasons.
January 26, 2012 at 10:04 pm · Filed under Campaign '12
For the second time in less than a week, space became a topic of discussion at a presidential debate Thursday night. At the Republican presidential debate in Jacksonville, Florida, held by CNN, the candidates were given an opportunity to describe their policies regarding human spaceflight in particular, three days after the same topic came up at a debate in Tampa and a day after Newt Gingrich’s space policy speech on the Space Coast.
Mitt Romney was first, asked specifically to respond to Gingrich’s speech. “That’s an enormous expense,” he said of Gingrich’s proposal to create a permanent lunar base by 2020. “I believe in a very vibrant and strong space program,” he added, reiterating his comments in Monday’s debate to bring together various elements of the overall space community, including the military and the private sector, to help draft a plan for NASA’s future. “I’d like to come together and talk about different options and the cost.”
That plan, though, wouldn’t appear to include a lunar base. “I’m not looking for a colony on the Moon. I think the cost of that would be in the hundreds of billions, if not trillions. I’d rather be rebuilding housing here in the US.”
Gingrich, asked how he could achieve that goal while keeping taxes down, launched into another attack on NASA bureaucracy. “You almost have to wonder, what does the Washington office of NASA do? Does it sit around and think space? Does it contemplate that someday we could have a rocket?” The use of prizes and incentives, he said, and “common sense”—specifically citing human-rating the Atlas 5 rocket—could achieve those goals. “I’d like to have an American on the Moon before the Chinese get there.”
Unlike the Tampa debate, the other two leading Republican candidates, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul, also got to weigh in. Santorum was skeptical about the benefits of spending money on this in an era of massive budget deficits. “I agree that we need to bring good minds in the private sector” so that they’re more involved in NASA that currently, he said. “To go out there and to promise new programs and big ideas; it’s a great thing to maybe get votes, but its not a responsible thing.”
Paul started out his comments with a zinger. “I don’t think we should go to the Moon. I think we maybe should send some politicians up there.” He said he supported government funding for space only for military applications, and “not just for the fun of it.” He suggested that a stronger economy would allow for more private investment in space activities. “If we had a healthy economy and had more Bill Gateses and more Warren Buffetts, the money would be there.”
The discussion returned to Gingrich and his comments yesterday about how he supported statehood for a sufficiently populous lunar colony. Gingrich didn’t specifically discuss his statehood ideas, instead reiterating his plan. “I actually agree with Dr. Paul: the program I envision would probably end up being 90-percent private sector,” he said, getting NASA “out of the business of trying to run rockets.” He concluded, “I do not want to be the country that. having gotten to the Moon first, turned around and said, ‘It doesn’t really matter. Let the Chinese dominate space. What do we care?’ I think that is a path of national decline.”
Romney then weighed in again, saying he was skeptical that a lunar base could be privately financed. “If I had a business executive come to me and say they wanted to spend a few hundred billion dollars to put a colony on the Moon, I’d say, ‘You’re fired,’” he said. “The idea that corporate America wants to go off to the Moon and build a colony there, it may be a big idea but it’s not a good idea.”
The conversation went on from there about spending priorities in general and budget deficits, leaving space behind, perhaps for the last time in a 2012 presidential debate (this is the last debate in Florida before its primary Tuesday, and it seems unlikely the topic will come up again in a debate either in the primary or the general election.)
That exchange offered little in the way of new insights into the candidates’ space positions. Gingrich reiterated his comments made in Wednesday’s speech. Romney again brought up the idea of civil-military-commercial space cooperation that he mentioned on Monday (although this time without mentioning if other agencies and companies would be asked to pitch in financially), while distancing himself from Gingrich’s comments. And Santorum and Paul got to weigh in briefly on the topic, although neither has much of a shot of capturing the nomination given their current standings in Florida and national polls. It may not have been that enlightening, but this rare flurry of attention to space, which may continue through Friday when Romney speaks in Cape Canaveral, was fun while it lasted.
January 26, 2012 at 7:15 am · Filed under Campaign '12
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich offered some new—and attention-grabbing—goals for American space efforts in a speech Wednesday afternoon in Cocoa, Florida. However, while he offered some bold new goals for spaceflight, he didn’t go into much detail about how the US would achieve them, and his underlying political beliefs about space, including support for prizes and a disdain for NASA bureaucracy, remained the same as his previous comments during the presidential campaign.
The pronouncement he made before a reported audience of about 700 people involved the establishment of a permanent lunar base. “By the end of my second term,” he said, a line that itself generated a round of cheers, “we will have the first permanent base on the Moon and it will be American.” In addition, he said, there would be “commercial near-Earth activities” for science, tourism, and manufacturing. “It is in our interest acquire so much experience in space that we clearly have a capacity that the Chinese and the Russians will never come anywhere close to having,” he said, to another burst of applause. He also vowed that by the end of 2020 the US would have “the first continuous propulsion system in space” to allow for far shorter trips to Mars.
He also even suggested that lunar base could some day apply for statehood. Noting that his rival for the Republican nomination, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, had ridiculed Gingrich’s earlier calls for lunar colonies, he suggested Romney had missed something even bigger to poke fun of. “At one point early in my career I introduced the ‘Northwest Ordinance for space’,” he said, a reference to the 1780s act that enabled the creation of several Midwestern states. His act, he said, would allow a lunar base that reached a population of 13,000 to petition to become a state. “I will, as president, encourage the introduction of the Northwest Ordinance for space to put a marker down, that we want Americans to think boldly about the future, and we want Americans to go out and study hard and work hard and, together, we’re going to unleash the American people to rebuild the country we love.” That line got a loud and sustained round of applause.
Gingrich did not go into a great deal of specifics about how he would achieve those goals. One approach he suggested was to be “practical” about using equipment. “The Atlas 5 ought to be interchangeable, and ought to be as usable for NASA projects as it is for Air Force projects,” he said. (The Atlas 5 is, in fact, used for launching some NASA science satellites; an Atlas 5 launched NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory mission just two months ago.) He also called for a radical increase in space launch activity: “We need to learn how to do five or eight launches a day, not one.”
In his second space-related appearance of the day, before a space industry roundtable in Cocoa, he indicated that American space efforts required a sense of urgency reminiscent of wartime. “Let me take a radical example,” he said. “If we decided to human-rate the Atlas 5, how long would take take?” Mark Bitterman of United Launch Alliance noted that those efforts were ongoing as part of ULA’s Commercial Crew Development award and the company projected it would take three to five years. “But I’m asking a different question,” Gingrich responded, saying he wanted to know how long it would take if it was just an engineering problem. “I want to relentlessly adopt the model of World War Two, where we learned to fly B-26′s off aircraft carriers in a matter of months because we had no choice.” Bitterman suggested that, based on that model, human-rating effort could be “accelerated significantly.”
However, while the lunar base goal was new and got a lot of media attention, some of the core themes of his space policy philosophy remained unchanged. He expressed once again his interest in prizes. “I would want 10 percent of the NASA budget set aside for prize money,” he said, reiterating comments he’s made in the past, such as a town hall meeting in Texas in October. This was part of his design “to become lean and aggressive” instead of bureaucratic, as he perceives NASA today. “How can we build a bureaucracy this big and get into a period where we rely on the Russians while we watch the Chinese plan to surpass us, while we sit around bureaucratically twiddling our thumbs with no real reform?”
How well will that rhetoric play on Florida’s Space Coast, which is dealing with the economic fallout of the retirement of the Space Shuttle? We’ll find out on Tuesday when Republicans go to the polls. In the meantime, we may get a response from the Romney campaign later this week: he’s scheduled to make a Space Coast campaign appearance Friday afternoon in Titusville, Florida. In addition, CNN is hosting yet another presidential debate Thursday evening in Jacksonville, where, as in Monday night’s debate in Tampa, a state-specific issue like space could merit a question.
January 25, 2012 at 12:50 pm · Filed under Campaign '12
GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich is making two appearances on Florida’s Space Coast this afternoon, where he is expected to talk about his space policy ideas in greater detail. Both of those events will be broadcast/webcast. At 3:30 pm EST Gingrich will participate in an invitation-only event by the Economic Development Commission of Florida’s Space Coast; that event will be webcast on Florida Today’s web site. (The announcement of the event appears to have a long agenda, but according to the campaign web site it will be wrapped up by 4:15 pm.) At 4:30 pm he is scheduled to speak at a town hall meeting in Cocoa, Florida. That event will air live on C-SPAN and its web site.
Update: Florida Today reports the schedule of events has changed: the town hall meeting will go ahead as scheduled at 4:30, followed by the industry forum at approximately 5:45 pm. Gingrich is apparently running behind schedule, hence the change.
January 25, 2012 at 6:55 am · Filed under Congress
A member of the Republican leadership of the House said Tuesday he supports an extension of a provision that limits the ability of the FAA to enact commercial spaceflight safety regulations. In an op-ed published in the Daily Independent newspaper in Ridgecrest, California, House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) discusses commercial spaceflight, in particular activities at Mojave Air and Space Port, located in his district. “It’s clear that the private sector is ready and willing to step up to keep America at the forefront of space flight,” he writes.
He adds, though, that he’s concerned that regulation could impede future growth of the industry, citing in particular the provision in the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act (CSLAA) of 2004 that prevents the FAA from enacting safety regulations except for cases linked to the “serious or fatal injury” of crew or participants, or events that “posed a high risk” of such injuries, during licensed or permitted flights. The expiration of that provision this December, he claims, “could mean a whole slew of new regulations on the growing $34 billion commercial space flight industry.” (The source of the $34-billion valuation for the industry isn’t cited.)
“There is no question that the safety of crew members and the public is of utmost importance, but unleashing Washington bureaucrats on this industry now could mean the end of private commercial space flight in America before it even gets off the ground,” he concludes. “That is why I am fighting to extend the 2004 provisions.” He doesn’t specify how he’ll seek to extend that regulatory restriction, but as noted here last week, the House version of an FAA reauthorization bill does provide an extension. A final version of the bill is expected to be completed in the coming weeks after House and Senate negotiators hammer out differences between their versions (the Senate version does not contain an extension) after reaching a deal last week on labor language that held up the bill for months.
Should the CSLAA provision not make it into the final FAA reauthorization bill, though, there may be additional opportunities before December 23 to include it in other legislation. For example, Congress will have to take up later this year another extension of commercial launch indemnification, as the current regime expires at the end of this year.
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