Space Politics
Because sometimes the most important orbit is the Beltway…
Archive for January, 2012
January 23, 2012 at 11:29 pm · Filed under Campaign '12
The two current frontrunners in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, both had the opportunity to speak out about space policy during a debate Monday night in Tampa, Florida. Romney mentioned space first in passing as part of a longer comment about the problems experienced in the state during the Obama Administration. “This president has failed miserably the people of Florida,” he said. “His plans for NASA? He has no plans for NASA. The Space Coast is struggling.”
A little later, a moderator asked a specific space policy question: “Governor Romney, this is the state that put the first man on the Moon. America right now has no way to put people into space except to hitch a ride with the Russians. Meanwhile, the Chinese are ramping up their space program. At a time when you all want to shrink federal spending, should space exploration be a priority?”
Romney’s response:
It should certainly be a priority. What we have right now is a president who does not have a vision or a mission for NASA. And as a result of that, there are people on the Space Coast that are suffering, and Florida itself is suffering as a result. So what’s the right way forward? Well I happen to believe our space program is important not only for science but also for commercial development and for military development. And I believe the right mission for NASA should be determined by a president together with a collection of people from those different areas: from NASA, from the Air Force space program, from our leading universities, and from commercial enterprises. Bring them together, discuss a wide range of options for NASA, and then have NASA not just funded by the federal government, but also by commercial enterprises, have some of the research done in our universities, let’s have a collaborative effort with business, with government, with the military, as well as with their educational institutions, have a mission that once again excites our young people about the potential of space and the commercial potential will pay for itself down the road. This is a great opportunity. Florida has technology, the people here on the Space Coast have technology and vision and passion that America needs. And with a president who is actually willing to create a mission and a vision for NASA and for space, we can continue to lead the world.
The moderator then turned to Gingrich. “Would you put more tax dollars into the space race to commit to putting an American on Mars instead of relying on the private sector?” His answer:
The two are not incompatible. For example, most of the great breakthroughs in aviation in the 20s and 30s were the result of prizes. Lindbergh flew to Paris for a $25,000 prize. I would like to see vastly more the money spent encouraging the private sector into very aggressive experimentation, and I’d like to see a leaner NASA. I don’t think building a bigger bureaucracy and having a greater number of people sit in rooms and talk gets you there. But if we had a series of goals that we were prepared to offer prizes for, there’s every reason to believe that you’d have a lot of folks in this country and around the world who would put up an amazing amount of money and would make the Space Coast literally hum with activity because they’d be drawn to achieve these prizes: going back to the Moon permanently, getting to Mars as rapidly as possible, building a series of space stations and developing commercial space. There are a whole series of things we could do that could be dynamic that are more than just better government bureaucracy. They’re fundamentally leapfrogging into a world where you’re incentivizing people who are visionaries and people in the private sector to invest very large amounts of money and finding a very romantic and exciting future.
The other two candidates, Congressman Ron Paul and former Sen. Rick Santorum, were not asked the question and did not volunteer comments on space policy elsewhere in the 100-minute debate.
The responses by Gingrich and Romney are a study in contrasts in more ways than one. Gingrich has spoken on space previously on a number of occasions, far more than any other candidate, as regular readers of this blog know. His comments tonight are very similar to what he’s said before, promoting prizes and denigrating NASA bureaucracy. Romney, on the other hand, has said virtually nothing about space; his comments tonight are perhaps the most substantial comments he’s offered on space during the 2012 campaign. He offered a very different vision, where civil, commercial, and military organizations would collaborate with and even help fund NASA. Without further details, it’s a somewhat puzzling concept: what benefits would the military and commercial sectors get from more closely tying themselves to, and helping pay for, NASA programs? Perhaps over the next week—the Florida primary is a week from Tuesday—the Romney campaign will fine-tune that message.
January 23, 2012 at 8:35 pm · Filed under NASA, White House
Tuesday night President Obama will give his State of the Union speech before a joint session of Congress. Some have wondered if he might sneak a brief mention of space into the speech because the administration disclosed today that former astronaut Mark Kelly will be at the speech, sitting in the First Lady’s box. Of course, the primary reason why he’ll be there has little to do with his NASA career but instead because of his wife, Gabrielle Giffords, who announced Sunday she would resign from Congress this week in order to devote more time to her post-shooting rehabilitation.
Another reason why it’s unlikely space would get much a mention in the address is that the administration may have something along the lines of space policy fatigue. This week’s issue of The New Yorker features a long article that takes readers behind the scenes of the Obama Administration, based on hundreds of pages of internal memos obtained by the magazine. The article takes a broad look at the administration acted and reacted to various issues, including, as it turns out, space.
The article notes that as a candidate for president in 2008, Obama “had promised a bold space program”, a reference to his space policy white paper the campaign released in August 2008. However, according to the New Yorker article, those plans foundered on projections of growing budget deficits. “Especially in light of our new fiscal context, it is not possible to achieve the inspiring space program goals discussed during the campaign,” a November 2009 memo (authorship unstated) advised the president. That sentence, the article noted, was in bold and underlined for particular emphasis. The result:
Obama was told that he should cancel NASA’s Bush-era Constellation program, along with its support projects, like the Ares launch vehicles, which were designed to return astronauts to the moon by 2020. The program was behind schedule, over budget, and “unachievable.” He agreed to end it. During the stimulus debate, Obama’s metaphorical moon-shot idea—the smart grid—was struck down as unworkable. Now the Administration’s actual moon-shot program was dead, too.
Later, the article notes the president received a letter dated February 2, 2010—one day after the release of the 2011 budget proposal that announced plans to cancel Constellation, as Obama was advised the previous November—from a Virginia woman whose husband was working on the program. “I voted for you. I supported you. But I am very disappointed in you. You are not the President I thought you were going to be,” the woman, identified only as “Ginger”, wrote, after criticizing the president for cancelling Constellation while continuing to fund wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Obama’s response to his staff: “can I get a sense of how Ares fit in with our long term NASA strategy to effectively respond”. A few days later he got that information and then instructed an aide to “Draft a short letter for Ginger, answering her primary concern—her husband’s career—for me to send.” What the president was told, and how he decided to respond, aren’t disclosed.
January 22, 2012 at 7:38 pm · Filed under Campaign '12
In an appearance on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” program Sunday morning, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said he would be giving a major speech on space later this week in Florida. The former Speaker of the House, fresh off a victory Saturday in the GOP primary in South Carolina, said he would be giving a series of speeches on various topics in Florida this week in advance of the January 31 primary there. “I’ll give a speech on the Space Coast, for example, about the future of man in space and the future of the United States in space,” he said in the first half-minute of the appearance.
At the 8:10 mark, he also mentions his upcoming speech after referencing his 1984 book Window of Opportunity, which includes a chapter about space. “I’ll be at the Space Coast in Florida this week giving a speech, a visionary speech, on the United States going back into space in the John F. Kennedy tradition rather than the current bureaucracy.” That rhetoric sounds similar to some of his earlier comments that have been disdainful of NASA bureaucracy, such as this appearance in Florida in October.
Gingrich didn’t disclose exactly when he would give this speech, but it’s likely to be on Wednesday. Florida Today reports that Gingrich has two appearances on the Space Coast on Wednesday afternoon, attending a “‘Space & Technology Roundtable’ with Leaders of the Space Community” and, later, a town hall meeting in Cocoa, Florida. According to the same article, another candidate, Rick Santorum, will also speak on the Space Coast on Saturday—which, by chance, also happens to be the 26th anniversary of the loss of Challenger.
January 21, 2012 at 11:10 am · Filed under Congress, Other
National Journal reported late yesterday that House and Senate negotiators had reached a compromise on long-delayed reauthorization legislation for the FAA. The compromise involves organized labor provisions in the bill that had forced a long series of short-term extensions. The compromise clears the way for drafting a version that both houses can pass, a task reported to be “manageable” with the labor deal in place.
The relevance to space policy is that the bill could resolve an issue for the commercial human spaceflight community: a provision in the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act (CSLAA) of 2004 that limits the ability of the FAA to pass safety regulations for such vehicles. That provision is set to expire this December, but as noted here last month, some in the industry have been seeking an extension since the industry has built up less experience than expected when the CSLAA passed. The House version of the FAA reauthorization bill does provide an extension, while the Senate version does not.
It’s not clear yet if the final version of the reauthorization bill—which may take a few weeks to draft—will include CSLAA language, but one group of industry experts is skeptical. Earlier this week Special Aerospace Services (SAS) hosted the 2nd Annual Human Spaceflight Technical Forum in Boulder, Colorado. The event was closed to the media, but Wayne Hale, SAS’s director for human spaceflight programs and a former Space Shuttle program manager, talked about some of the issues raised at the meeting, including that CSLAA provision, in an interview on Friday. Most of the people at the meeting “were not actively lobbying for an extension” of that restriction, he said.
The discussion at the meeting instead revolved around what the FAA would do when its current restriction expires on December 23. Hale said there was an understanding that the FAA would not immediately promulgate a series of new safety regulations, citing the time it takes to develop and make open for public comment any new rulemaking. “No one at the FAA is working in a back office to deliver a bunch of new proposed regulations on December 24th,” he said.
January 20, 2012 at 6:36 am · Filed under Congress, Lobbying, NASA, White House
Early month the White House will release its fiscal year 2013 budget proposal. While most of the details of that budget proposal have been, or very soon will be, nailed down, some organizations are making a last-minute push to lobby for funding for NASA science programs in particular. Others, though, worried about what the budget proposal may contain, are already looking ahead to Congressional action on the budget.
The Planetary Society is in the first camp. This week the organization released a letter it sent to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on NASA science funding. In the letter the society asks OMB for a “small but significant” change in NASA science funding, so that it accounts for 30 percent of NASA’s overall budget. (In FY2012 science accounts for $5.09 billion out of the agency’s $17.8-billion budget, or 28.6%.) This “modest rebalancing”, the society argues, would support the agency’s portfolio of science programs in an era of tight budgets. “If NASA’s overall budget shrinks, we are concerned that the Science program will carry a disproportionate burden of any reduction,” the letter states. “Increasing the share of the NASA budget for Science is the best place for the agency to make the most effective use of the taxpayers’ money in today’s austere budget environment.”
The Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) is more pessimistic about the administration’s budget request, particularly for the planetary science portion of the overall NASA science budget. “The reality is that within NASA’s science budget, planetary science is nowhere near the Administration’s top priority and that does leave us vulnerable to budget pressures,” DPS chair Dan Britt writes in a DPS newsletter published this week. A cut to planetary science funding, he notes, would jeopardize a wide range of missions as well as research funding.
However, he is more optimistic about how Congress will deal with planetary science funding. “Planetary science has a lot of friends on both sides the aisle in Congress. Congress likes the results the planetary science program, they like the consensus plan in the Decadal Survey, and they want to see it continue,” he writes. NASA’s planetary science program got a largely sympathetic hearing by the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee in November, with the OMB blamed for problems like the apparent unwillingness to commit to cooperation with Europe on Mars exploration. Britt adds, though, that Congress won’t act on its own. “While Congress is a potentially friendly forum, it’s going to be up to us, the planetary science community, to make the case for continued priority support.”
January 18, 2012 at 7:11 am · Filed under Other, White House
Last week, a top State Department official surprised many when she indicated the US did not support a proposed “Code of Conduct for Outer Space Activities” endorsed by the European Union. Speaking at a breakfast with reporters on January 12, Ellen Tauscher, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, said the proposed EU code was “too restrictive” and that the US would not sign on to it. “We made it very definitive that we were not going to go ahead with the European Code of Conduct,” she said, according to the Space News account of the breakfast. “What we haven’t announced is what we’re going to do, but we will be doing that soon.”
Tauscher’s comments took some by surprise, since it appeared in recent months that the US appeared willing to at least endorse the principles of the EU Code if not explicitly signing on to them. In an article Monday in The Space Review, lawyer Michael Listner speculated that the US would instead propose its own code of conduct in response. Such he move, he argued, might not necessarily win support from other spacefaring nations (which had expressed opposition to, or simply ignored, the EU document) and might also aggravate the Europeans.
On Tuesday, the US made its move. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton formally announced that the US would support the development of an “International Code of Conduct for Outer Space Activities” in cooperation with the EU and other nations. “A Code of Conduct will help maintain the long-term sustainability, safety, stability, and security of space by establishing guidelines for the responsible use of space,” she said.
News of the new US effort was first reported Tuesday by the Washington Times, who got quotes from several people expressing concern that such a code might jeopardize national security by limiting what the US can do in space. However, Clinton said in her statement that “the United States has made clear to our partners that we will not enter into a code of conduct that in any way constrains our national security-related activities in space or our ability to protect the United States and our allies.”
What isn’t clear is how this “international” code will differ from the EU draft that has been circulating since 2008, including what specifically the US took issue with in the EU document as being too restrictive. A fact sheet about the new initiative in fact praises the EU code. “The European Union’s draft Code of Conduct is a good foundation for the development of a non-legally binding International Code of Conduct focused on the use of voluntary and pragmatic transparency and confidence-building measures to help prevent mishaps, misperceptions, and mistrust in space,” it states.
In at least some respects, then, the US “rejection” of the EU code is hardly a surprise, but part of a long-term effort to craft a more international document. Even EU officials said last year that their proposed code was a draft; one likened it to an “internal memo” that the EU was soliciting feedback upon but not expecting anyone to immediately sign on to. Development of a final international code of conduct might still be well into the future.
January 18, 2012 at 6:36 am · Filed under Congress, NASA
On the final day of last week’s meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Austin, Texas, attendees to made it to the morning plenary got a bonus speaker: Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), a member of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee. In his brief comments he tried to assure the astronomers in the audience that, despite last year’s budget battle over the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), Congress supported that mission.
“I know that some members of the AAS were upset at the prospect of the House Appropriations Committee canceling the James Webb Space Telescope,” he said. Smith explained that the move by the appropriations subcommittee chaired by Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) was to “draw attention to the management and budgetary problems facing the JWST” and get the White House to respond. “I do believe that Frank Wolf has now got the Obama Administration’s attention,” he said. “Contrary to what might have been written at the time, Congress supports the James Webb Space Telescope.”
Astronomers, though, can be excused if they thought otherwise. Just a month earlier, members of the House Science Committee grilled NASA and Northrop Grumman officials about the telescope’s cost overruns and delays, putting them on notice that the latest JWST “replan” was the agency’s final chance for avoiding cancellation. “In my view, NASA’s latest replan for the James Webb Telescope is the agency’s last opportunity to hold this program together,” committee chairman Ralph Hall (R-TX) said at the time.
Smith went on to say that Congressional criticism of NASA’s human spaceflight plans, particular by Hall and ranking member Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), don’t mean they’re similarly critical of the agency’s science activities. Hall and Johnson, he said, “have been unified in their criticism of the Obama Administration’s lack of planning for human spaceflight, and I share their skepticism,” he said. “However, I hope that the broad science community does not translate such criticism of NASA’s programs into a perception that arguments between Congress and the Administration mean that Congress is somehow anti-science.” Even people in Washington, he quipped, “are made humble” by various astronomical discoveries.
January 13, 2012 at 10:36 pm · Filed under Campaign '12
As previously noted here and elsewhere, Newt Gingrich is the Republican presidential candidate who, so far, has talked the most about space during the 2012 campaign by a large margin. Moreover, central Florida is one of the few places in the country where space is a major issue. Thus, it wasn’t surprising that, when Gingrich talked with the editorial board of the Orlando Sentinel Friday, part of a visit to Orlando to open a new campaign office there, that the issue of space came up.
However, the newspaper’s account of that editorial board meeting didn’t provide much in the way of new insights about his thoughts on space policy beyond what he has previously discussed. He said he loves “the romance of space” and believes that NASA should be “more realistic about risk taking”. He also talked up the benefits of prizes, something he has long endorsed. However, he was short on specifics, beyond suggesting that five to ten percent of NASA’s budget be used for prize programs.
The article includes a video with clips from his meeting with the editorial baord, including a couple brief comments about space. In one, he talks about prizes in a little greater detail, while in the other he brings up the criticism of past space-related ideas expressed last month by another Republican candidate, Mitt Romney:
You know, I was very surprised when Governor Romney twice recently sort of poked fun at ideas I’ve had about space. I thought it showed a total lack of vision on his part…
So I want to start with the idea that I believe we need to reclaim John F. Kennedy’s vision and we need to decide to go boldly out into space. I think that I’d like to set at least five, and maybe ten, percent of the NASA budget aside for prizes. Because if you go back and look at the history of aviation in the twenties and thirties, prize money got huge multipliers of effort: Lindbergh crosses the Atlantic for $25,000, for example. If you had set aside just five percent of the NASA budget over the last ten years, you’d have $8 billion in prize money.
January 12, 2012 at 3:44 pm · Filed under NASA
When John Grunsfeld took the podium Wednesday at the NASA Town Hall meeting at the American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting in Austin, Texas, he noted he was just into the sixth day of his new job as NASA’s associate administrator for science, and he had spent three of those days at the Austin conference. That meant that Grunsfeld largely addressed only in broad terms his ideas of the challenges and opportunities the space agency’s science efforts face in the current environment.
“One could say accepting the role of associate administrator at NASA is slightly crazy, and I certainly think it’s higher risk than anything I’ve ever done before,” said the former astronaut who flew on five shuttle missions, including three to service the Hubble Space Telescope. He told the astronomers who packed the ballroom for the hour-long session that “I do feel the full weight and responsibility of carrying an enormous science program to help enable all of you to be great scientists. My job is to help all of you to change the world.”
Grunsfeld indicated he would look beyond the traditional boundaries of NASA’s science programs to leverage capabilities elsewhere in the agency and get the most of out the directorate’s budget. He said he planned to work with Bill Gerstenmaier, the associate administrator for the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, “to see what synergies we have.” He cited in particular the potential use of the Space Launch System (SLS) heavy-lift rocket to launch large science missions. (That, of course, assumes funding will be available to build such flagship-class missions down the road, let alone afford the cost to launch them on the SLS.) He also cited potential cost reductions for science missions from using emerging launchers like the SpaceX Falcon 9, and also opportunities to use the International Space Station as a testbed to demonstrate technologies for use on future missions.
Not surprisingly, much of attention devoted to NASA’s space programs is focused on one of its biggest, and most controversial, missions, the James Webb Space Telescope. “The James Webb Space Telescope is one of the primary goals of NASA, and one of its highest priorities,” alongside utilization of the ISS and development of the SLS and Multi Purpose Crew Vehicles, he said. “That means astrophysics is very important to NASA, and we should all be happy about that.”
Grunsfeld and other NASA officials were upbeat about the “replan” of the telescope’s development developed last year. “We’ve got a really good plan going forward,” he said. “I really do feel that we have a good handle on the programmatics and the science system engineering.”
He acknowledged, though, that the program went through a tough experience last year with the replan and the threatened defunding by Congress. “It was real drama,” he said of the effort to win funding for the telescope, thanking AAS members for their efforts the Congress, which he called “a loud and clear voice about basic science research.”
“About a year ago, I didn’t know we would be having this town hall this year,” Eric Smith, deputy program director for JWST, said Monday at a separate town hall meeting devoted to JWST. That was because of the uncertainty about the telescope’s future at that time. “We are here this year, so I’m very optimistic” about the program’s future.
At Wednesday’s town hall, Grunsfeld acknowledged that NASA’s science programs are facing a “constrained” budget environment that will pose a challenge going forward, but cautioned scientists against internecine battles among the community, or between the science and human spaceflight directorates. “We are only as strong as our whole, and if we pit community against community, everybody loses,” he said.
Grunsfeld and the new acting director of the astrophysics directorate, Paul Hertz, offered few specifics about future funding, since that is pending the FY2013 budget request due for release on February 6. Both talked about the importance of “balance” among funding new missions versus existing missions versus research, but didn’t offer additional details. “I’m not planning any big radical changes,” Grunsfeld said.
While unable to take beyond the current fiscal year, Hertz noted at the town hall that astrophysics, when JWST is included (it is now a separate program but still widely perceived as part of astrophysics), accounts for over $1 billion of NASA’s budget. Therefore, he said, the agency and the scientific community need to maximize the value which that significant amount of money can provide. “That’s not small change,” he said. “We have a substantial allotment of federal funding to support the astrophysics program that we do. We have to spend it wisely.”
January 11, 2012 at 8:20 am · Filed under Lobbying, States
Today, as Florida legislators ramp up their activities for the 2012 session, they’ll be visited by representatives of the state’s space industry for Florida Space Day. This annual event is designed to raise awareness among legislators of the industry and advocate for measures to help support it. As the Space Florida release suggests, industry will both try to demonstrate that Florida is a leading state in the industry, but has room to grow.
This year, Florida Today reports, Space Day participants will press for passage of three relatively modest bills designed to support the state’s commercial space industry. One would formally recognize Cecil Field in Jacksonville, which already has an FAA spaceport license, as a spaceport. Another would revise the definition of “spaceport facilities” to make them eligible for state transportation funding. A third would change how Space Florida gets funding from the legislature, giving the state agency the money for specific projects up front to improve efficiency. None of the bills proved to be particularly controversial in recent committee hearings, Florida Today noted.
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