Space Politics
Because sometimes the most important orbit is the Beltway…
Archive for Campaign '08
May 6, 2008 at 7:44 am · Filed under Campaign '08
It seems like there are more articles these days about the lack of space policy specifics from the presidential candidates than there are articles about what policy statements they have made. The latest in that former category is a report by the public radio program Marketplace, which reviews the lack of discussion about space policy from the campaigns and some of the space issues that the next president will face.
Compared to the recent CNN report that was rather thinly sourced and concentrated on building up the (perceived) threat of China, the Marketplace report takes a broader, and more thoroughly researched, review of the issue. For example, the report includes comments from a number of experts: Lori Garver, Theresa Hitchens of CDI, John Karas of Lockheed Martin, and others. Also, rather than focusing on issues like the gap or the rise of China, the article looks at a bigger range of issues, from space weaponization to workforce concerns.
Garver, representing the Hillary Clinton campaign, does offer space advocates a bit of hope: “I think as president, she would encourage more international cooperation, more commercial development, and if it requires more money, she would support that.” But the report in general is not hopeful about getting more specifics about space policy from the campaigns in the next six months: “[S]pace policy now has bigger down-to-earth competition for the candidates’ attention: high food prices, oil prices and foreclosure rates. It seems those with billions staked on the next president’s space policy will just have to wait and hope.”
April 29, 2008 at 7:06 am · Filed under Congress, NASA, Campaign '08
On Monday several members of Congress, including Sen. Bill Nelson and Congressmen Tom Feeney and Dave Weldon, held a “workshop” on space issues Monday in Brevard County, Florida, where people are understandably concerned about life after the space shuttle. According to Florida Today, Nelson said that his subcommittee had proposed holding a field hearing this summer to review the future of KSC but that NASA was opposed: “I’m sad to tell you, NASA has asked me not to have a meeting, because they don’t want to stir up the people.” A NASA spokesman later contacted by the paper said that the agency would support any hearing the committee held.
The Orlando Sentinel focused on another claim made by Nelson: that space could, in effect, be a key issue in the general election because of the pivotal role of Florida, and within the state, the “I-4 corridor”, including the Space Coast. “The next president is going to decide a lot [about the space program],” Nelson said. “And East-Central Florida has an opportunity to influence the next president because, at the end of the day, Florida is going to be important this November.” However, as the Republican primary this January showed, space may not nearly be as critical issue in the state or region as some supporters hope.
April 29, 2008 at 6:51 am · Filed under Campaign '08
In case you missed it, on Saturday CNN aired a brief report on space and the lack of attention it was getting on the campaign trail in this presidential election. While you’re unlikely to learn much new about the topic from the report if you’ve been reading this and other resources on the topic in recent months, the report was disappointing in another way: it focused almost entirely on building up a space race between China and the US. Among the claims made by the CNN piece: “Chinese scientists talk about mining the lunar surface for possible nuclear energy resources that are plentiful there but rare on Earth.” That’s a reference, of course, to helium-3, and such mining might indeed be useful—in that day in the far future when we actually have operational helium-3 fusion reactors.
“But there is genuine and growing fear among some scientists that if space does not become a higher priority, the Chinese program will be on par with America’s by the end of the next president’s second term,” the piece concludes. It’s not clear that CNN talked to any scientists in the article—the only experts quoted are Robert Zubrin and a military analyst—and some scientists might have very different opinions about current space policy depending on, for example, the status of their budgets. There’s no discussion in the piece about concrete, near-term issues like the impending retirement of the shuttle and the gap between it and Constellation, something that the next president will have to immediately grapple with.
It does raise an interesting question, though: should US space policy, and the candidates’ positions on the issue, be judged against the “threat” (real or perceived) of China or other nations, or should it be judged against whatever national goals we have for it, regardless of what other countries are doing?
April 25, 2008 at 7:45 am · Filed under Congress, Campaign '08
Friday’s Orlando Sentinel reports that senator and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has introduced legislation designed to support the Arecibo radio observatory in Puerto Rico. The giant radio telescope is in danger of closing because of budget pressures on the National Science Foundation’s astronomy programs, much to the consternation of astronomers who use the facility for a variety of applications, including tracking near Earth objects.
The Sentinel article plays up the timing of Clinton’s legislation, introduced last week: the commonwealth will hold a primary on June 1, one of the last of campaign. “Arecibo has been in peril for a while now,” a co-director of Barack Obama’s Puerto Rico campaign told the paper. “The timing is more than suspect.” Clinton does have a legitimate case in introducing the legislation, since the observatory is run by Cornell University in New York state, but her Senate office didn’t explain why the bill was introduced now.
One thing the Sentinel article missed, though, is that Clinton’s bill, S. 2862, is effectively word-for-word identical to HR 3737, a bill introduced last October by Luis Fortuño, the commonwealth’s non-voting representative, and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA). (A press release issued by Clinton’s Senate office does note that a “similar” bill was introduced in the House, and includes a quote from Fortuño.) HR 3737 was assigned to the House Science and Technology Committee, which has not acted on the bill; the Senate, interestingly, sent S. 2862 to the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, and not the Commerce, Science, and Transportation committee.
April 24, 2008 at 5:56 pm · Filed under Campaign '08
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has won the endorsement of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE), a union that represents scientists, engineers, and other technical professions at various companies and organizations, including NASA. Space (or even more general science) policy did not factor into the IFPTE’s decision, at least according to the statement the union released, which instead cited issues ranging from H-1B visa reform to health care.
The IFPTE release includes a statement from Sen. Obama, who did make a passing reference to NASA: “I’ll support vigorous reinvestment in our federal research and development agencies, including NASA, to maintain America’s leadership in Science and Technology and to foster economic competitiveness.”
April 24, 2008 at 6:47 am · Filed under Campaign '08
“Although the MSM [mainstream media] has largely ignored Barack Obama’s plans for NASA, the issue is likely to bubble up during the general election campaign, if he’s the Democratic nominee,” claims Lee Cary in an essay in American Thinker, a right-leaning online publication. Cary never really explains why he believes this will happen: after all, while space got more attention that some might have expected during the primary season, it never became a major topic (outside of, say, Brevard County in Florida). In a general election between Obama and John McCain, it’s hard to see space getting much attention, particularly given the increasing concern about the economy (in particular food and fuel prices), the ever-present debate about Iraq, and so on.
Cary largely rehashes what’s been previously said about Obama, including his pledge to delay Constellation for five years to help pay for his education programs. Cary then cites the campaign’s quasi-official space policy where Obama pledges to “support the development of this vital new platform [the Orion CEV] to ensure that the United States’ reliance on foreign space capabilities is limited to the minimum possible time period.” “Now is that in human or dog years?” is Cary’s rejoinder, one of a number of parenthetical, italicized comments littered throughout the document in an apparent effort to be witty. Cary doesn’t note, though, that this “reliance on foreign space capabilities” (aka “the gap”) is going to be an issue for whomever is elected president.
A more balanced analysis comes from Rand Simberg in a PopularMechanics.com article. He examines what the three campaigns (Obama, McCain, and Hillary Clinton) have said to date on space, and how the facts back up (or don’t) their rhetoric. No clear winner emerges. “For voters already behind NASA’s targeted human spaceflight, don’t get your hopes up—none of the three major candidates are likely to fund the current plan, because they’ll all face the budgetary pressures implied by an aging population and a burgeoning federal deficit,” he writes. “So perhaps the real question to ask McCain, Clinton and Obama is not what they’re going to do for NASA, but whether they’re going to come up with a more innovative federal space policy overall.”
April 14, 2008 at 7:52 am · Filed under Campaign '08, Lobbying
At a town hall meeting in Columbus, Indiana, on Friday, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama was asked again about NASA. Specifically, a “young man” asked him, “What do you plan to do with the space agency?” Obama’s answer was pretty much the same as what he has said recently: that it was time to revisit what NASA should be doing and how. “I think it needs to be redefined, though,” he said. “We’ve kind of lost a sense of mission in terms of what it is that NASA should be trying to achieve and I think that we’ve gotta make some big decisions about whether or not, are we going to try to send manned, you know, space launches, or are we better off in terms of what we’re learning sending unmanned probes which oftentimes are cheaper and less dangerous, but yield more information.”
If there was one relatively new thing in his comments, it was that it appears that he would defer any decisions on exactly how NASA’s mission should be redefined until after he becomes president (assuming, of course, he’s elected.) “[T]hat’s a major debate I’m going to want to convene when I’m president of the United States,” he said. “What direction do we take the space program in? Once we have a sense of what’s going to be most valuable for us in terms of gaining knowledge, then I think we’ll able to adjust the budget so that we’re going all out on what it is that we’ve decided to do.”
Such language is unlikely to mollify space advocates concerned about the potential changes a President Obama might make to NASA. Then again, there hasn’t been nearly the outcry against Obama’s proposals, including a proposed five-year delay for Constellation, as some might expect. In an article last week in The Space Review, Greg Zsidisin describes Obama’s proposed changes and the response he got from Obama when he asked the candidate a question during a Wyoming town hall meeting last month. Zsidisin followed that article up this week with a review of the positions, or the lack thereof, space industry organizations and advocacy groups have taken in response to Obama’s proposals, or those of the other candidates, for that matter.
Zsidisin blames a lot of the relative silence on the issue on the fact that many of these groups are 501(c)(3)’s, organizations with tax-exempt status from the IRS that strictly limits what they can do in terms of political lobbying. (A contributing factor, he adds, is the degree of conservatism—in the sense of cautiousness, not as a region of the political spectrum—in space advocacy, which Zsidisin blames on the fact that so many members of advocacy groups are also employed in the space industry.) What’s needed, he argues, are more 501(c)(4) lobbying groups like ProSpace, which do not have the same restrictions on lobbying as their 501(c)(3) cousins.
And, as it turns out, one such lobbying group is now forming. In another essay in today’s issue of The Space Review, Jeff Brooks describes the formation of such a group, called the Committee for the Advocacy of Space Exploration. Brooks describes the group as “the country’s only fully-empowered Political Action Committee (PAC) designed to support pro-space candidates in federal elections.” In the essay, he argues, “Politicians must be made to know that they will gain by supporting space exploration and will suffer if they don’t. Until the space advocacy movement learns to play political hardball, its efforts will continue to be largely ineffectual.”
April 9, 2008 at 9:22 am · Filed under Congress, Campaign '08
A runoff in Texas District 22 on Tuesday has determined who will oppose Congressman Nick Lampson this fall. Former Senate aide Pete Olson defeated Shelley Sekula Gibbs by a 2-to-1 margin in the Republican runoff, after neither candidate captured a majority in the primary last month. Sekula Gibbs ran against Lampson in 2006 and lost, although she won a separate special election that allowed here to serve out the final weeks of Tom DeLay’s term during the 2006 lame duck session. That district includes NASA JSC, and, according to the AP report, Lampson’s campaign is already using that to take aim at Olson. “Congressman (Nick) Lampson has promoted NASA while his opponent didn’t know the name of the Johnson Space Center in a recent debate,” Anthony Gutierrez, Lampson’s campaign manager, said.
March 24, 2008 at 1:34 pm · Filed under Campaign '08
“Because of the 2008 presidential election, our nation’s human spaceflight program is at a perilous crossroad,” claims Douglas MacKinnon in an op-ed Sunday in the Houston Chronicle. MacKinnon, a former White House and Pentagon official who is now director of federal affairs and communications for a K Street law firm, believes none of the three remaining major candidates is sufficiently committed to carrying out current national space exploration policy (aka the Vision for Space Exploration), although he singles out Barack Obama for particular attention. (A quibble: MacKinnon writes that “Obama went on record as saying he planned to pay for his $18 billion education plan by taking it out of the hide of NASA”; rather, Obama said he would pay for his education plan in part by delaying Constellation by five years. He also did not specifically mention Ares and Orion in the statement, contrary to what MacKinnon writes, although the campaign has been vague about what exactly they meant, especially since they have not issued a formal space policy statement to date.)
MacKinnon believes that the next president, whomever he or she is, needs to “stay the course” and continue the program. Drawing parallels to JFK, who said in a 1962 speech that “Our leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to become the world’s leading spacefaring nation,” MacKinnon writes: “No matter who is our next president, he or she is either going to have to buy in completely to the premise of that young president, or stand aside and watch as other nations lay claim to the promise of space. There is no middle ground.”
If that rhetoric isn’t strong enough for you, MacKinnon has more: “Should the next president decide to delay or cancel our next generation spacecraft and rockets for partisan reasons, he or she will be condemning the United States to second-class status in space for decades to come.” Second class in space? For decades? That is strong stuff.
Unfortunately, it’s not clear that it is all that attached to reality. MacKinnon doesn’t explain how not developing Ares and Orion would affect issues like national security and commercial space, which are not directly tied to Constellation yet arguably are just as important, if not more so, to US “status in space” than the ability of putting humans in space (it’s just that the latter is far more visible to the public than launching reconnaissance or communications satellites.) The ability to “lay claim to the promise of space” is not dependent solely, or even primarily, on developing Ares and Orion.
Essays like MacKinnon’s though, appear part of a theme that has emerged over the last several months: rather than selling the current space exploration policy on what it can do for the nation, sell it instead on the perceived dire consequences if it is altered or cancelled. But does fearmongering make for good space policy?
March 8, 2008 at 3:06 pm · Filed under Campaign '08
I exchanged emails today with Greg Zsidisin, who was not only at the Obama rally yesterday in Casper, Wyoming, but asked Obama the question about space policy that was mentioned in the previous post. Greg told me exactly what he asked Obama:
“My question is about the human space program. You say you’d delay NASA’s program to build a Space Shuttle replacement for 5 years, in order to increase the education budget a grand total of 7 percent. But everyone knows that this effectively ends the US human space program. Why are you specifically pitting the space program against education, and where’s the vision in shutting down the [human] space program?”
He wasn’t able to give the exact response Obama provided, but was able to fill in a few extra details:
He didn’t really address the space vs. education aspect - that is, why he is singling out human spaceflight to de-fund for education. He did say he was born in 1961, and that space inspired him in his youth. He then mentioned Star Trek and the other quoted parts (’NASA doesn’t inspire now’). He also said that NASA can’t get the engineers now that the increase in education would fund (!).
He never specifically mentioned delaying a Shuttle replacement or the return to the Moon, saying he’d defer ‘certain segments’ of the space program. (Single quotes - I don’t remember the phrasing well enough for doubles.)
Later on, talking about energy issues, he did say that we needed an Apollo Program for energy. He did so rather pointedly, saying (referring to me), “And THAT, sir, should be our next Apollo Program.”
Next entries »
