Space Politics
Because sometimes the most important orbit is the Beltway…
Archive for Other
November 6, 2009 at 7:18 pm · Filed under NASA, Other
Members of Alabama’s Congressional delegation have spoken out in recent weeks in favor of continuing the current Constellation program, including the Ares 1 launch vehicle; now that message is reaching down to local politics as well. As the Huntsville Times reported Friday, Huntsville, Alabama, mayor Tommy Battle says the city needs to support continued development of the Ares 1:
Speaking to a sellout crowd of 1,300 people at the Von Braun Center’s North Hall, Battle said the Rocket City has to find a way to keep the Marshall Space Flight Center-managed program alive. Last month, the White House’s Augustine Commission recommended that NASA scrap the Ares I and focus instead on the Ares V large cargo rocket.
Battle drew loud applause when he said Huntsville needs to “convince Congress, convince the White House that we have the finest pool of intelligence and technologically advanced people that have ever been on earth in the business of space.
“If you ever let that pool disperse,” he said, “you’ll never get it back.”
Of course, the “Augustine Commission” might be surprised that it recommended that the Ares 1 be scrapped, since the report included no recommendations and did feature options that use the Ares 1. And while some members of the committee might prefer other options, we know that at least one member, Lester Lyles, supports the “program of record” and said he personally wanted to see the development of Ares 1 continued.
October 29, 2009 at 6:11 am · Filed under NASA, Other
The AIAA is planning an event this Monday afternoon, November 2, titled “Aerospace Industry Leaders to Debate America’s Next Steps in Space” on Capitol Hill. The half-day event will feature two panels, one discussing access to LEO and servicing of the ISS and the other focusing on heavy-lift launch vehicle development and exploration beyond LEO. The event is free and open to the public.
October 20, 2009 at 9:22 pm · Filed under NASA, Other
At a joint WSBR-WIA luncheon Tuesday, Retired Air Force General Lester Lyles, one of the members of the Augustine committee, noted that he couldn’t go into much detail about the final report since it doesn’t come out until Thursday afternoon. “I don’t want to preempt some of the things that Norm [Augustine] and Ed [Crawley] might get into,” he explained. However, he did provide a few interesting opinions and insights about the committee’s work.
One key thing that came across was that Lyles himself was a supporter of the current Constellation architecture, while acknowledging, as the committee has, that there isn’t enough funding for it. “The current program of record, in my opinion, seems to be the right one,” he said, saying that the Air Force has concerns about human-rating EELV “not from a technical standpoint, but a program interruption standpoint for the national security space activities.”
In the Q&A session after his speech, he reiterated his preference. “I’m a big, big believer in the need for rocket technology, so I personally want to see Ares 1 going, and see the program going as it’s currently structured,” he said. “Now, we may look at some other options, and that might be the right thing to do–probably is, always, just to play it safe–but I certainly would not want to disrupt” the current program, which he called “very, very successful”.
Asked what he thought it would take for NASA to get more comfortable with buying commercial cargo and crew services, Lyles admitted he didn’t know. “I know there are concerns about how you structure commercial programs,” he said. He did say he was “blown away about the attention to detail” during a visit to SpaceX during the summer, saying that he had “naively” expected to see something “not as rigorous” as what he experienced during his career in the Air Force.
Lyles was also asked about the $3-billion-a-year NASA budget increase mentioned in the committee’s report, since there was some confusion about whether that increased would be gradually phased in over several years or added all at once. Lyles believed it to be the latter. “I will tell you going in, in our final session, we were talking about not a ramp up, we were talking about $3 billion a year” added immediately, a “step increase”.
Lyles noted that the summary report states that if the space program is to be successful, “it must have the right mission, it must have the right resources, and it must have the right organization.” “The latter,” he added, “was sort of a ‘foot stomp’ saying that we, probably, in our findings, thought that NASA today is perhaps larger than it needs to be given the mission that it currently has.” Lyles said the same issue came up five years ago on the Aldridge Commission, on which he also served, “and we punted a little bit on what we wanted to say”. The commission has wanted to recommend a NASA “BRAC”, but concluded that option would not be politically expedient.
October 17, 2009 at 10:44 am · Filed under NASA, Other, White House
Just over a year ago astronomers discovered a tiny asteroid headed for the Earth. The asteroid, thought to be no more than a few meters across, entered the Earth’s atmosphere over northern Sudan and burned up, causing no damage but creating a shower of tony fragments, some of which have been recovered by scientists.
However, there was just enough concern about the meteorite that NASA emailed the White House asking them to alert the Sudanese government. That’s what former White House press secretary Dana Perino said in a speech to public relations professionals in Colorado, according to the Denver Business Journal:
It [the email] arrived 9:30 one night, from NASA, with “HEADS UP” in the subject line. It warned that an asteroid was headed toward Sudan. “Asteroids usually break up,” Perino said. “But the email asked us to call the Sudanese and let them know it’s coming.”
The unusual request surprised Perino. Fortunately, the asteroid did break up before hitting Earth, and she was spared the problem.
Perino said the request was “perhaps the most unusual email she received” during her time as press secretary for President George W. Bush. Who at NASA sent the email, and why it was sent to the press secretary instead of (or at least in addition to) other White House officials wasn’t mentioned.
October 15, 2009 at 9:17 pm · Filed under Other, White House
The Washington Times reported today that the Obama Administration has quietly moved to shift authority for approval of missile and space technology to China. Under a presidential determination issued on September 29, the president delegated authority to the Secretary of Commerce “the functions of the President under section 1512 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1999 (NDAA).” That section of law, part of the Strom Thurmond National Defense Authorization Act for FY1999, requires that the president certify to Congress at least 15 days before any export of “missile equipment or technology” to China that the export does not hurt the US space launch industry and that the technology “will not measurably improve” China’s missiles and space launch capabilities.
The Times article, by Bill Gertz, gets plenty of quotes from conservative experts convinced that the decision is a “step backward”, “foolish”, “dangerous”, and even “shocking”, while Commerce Department officials say the move won’t cause the controls on such exports to become looser. What isn’t answered by the article, though, is why the administration made the move. Gertz speculates that the move “appears aimed at increasing U.S.-China space cooperation” but leaves it at that.
This moves comes while export control reform for space issues is being debated and discussed (and working its way through Congress). Is this move by the White House a step towards greater reform, or is an unrelated move with other intentions?
October 15, 2009 at 1:10 pm · Filed under Other
Any day now, either later this week or early next week, the Augustine committee is set to release its final report. Around that time a couple members of the committee will be making public appearances inside and outside the Beltway, hopefully providing a little more background and detail about their work now that the report is complete.
Greason and Lyles have already been speaking about the committee’s work, Lyles at a forum at GWU’s Space Policy Institute and Greason at the Space Investment Summit 7 in Boston at the end of September. Depending on the timing of the final report’s release, they may be free to talk in additional detail about the report’s findings at these later events.
[Disclosure: I had a cameo role in organizing the WSBR-WIA luncheon with Lyles by suggesting that the two organizations work together to plan a joint event rather than do separate events.]
October 1, 2009 at 5:59 am · Filed under Other
The AIAA announced yesterday that it will host an online broadcast of a panel discussion about the Augustine committee report on October 5. The panel, moderated by David Livingston of The Space Show, includes Frank Culbertson, Scott Horowitz, John Klineberg, Elliot Pulham, and Harrison Schmitt. The audio-only broadcast is scheduled for 2 pm EDT on the 5th, with this caveat in the AIAA release: “Scheduling is subject to the actual release of the final report”. The final full report has not been released yet, and and may not be out until mid-October as committee members work on final drafts of the document, so either the event will be postponed or the panelists will soldier on without it.
Update 6pm: according to David Livingston, the AIAA plans to go ahead with the panel on Monday even though the full report won’t be released until later in the month.
September 29, 2009 at 7:56 am · Filed under Lobbying, NASA, Other
At yesterday’s meeting on the Space Coast, speakers said Florida must demand that president fund an “ambitious” space exploration program, in large part to protect jobs there. Or, as Florida Today put it, “President Barack Obama is in for an earful from Florida elected officials and space industry leaders”. The event referenced the Save Space letter-writing effort launched yesterday (as discussed here) as well as then-candidate Obama’s August 2008 speech where he said he would “close the gap” between the shuttle and its successor.
Florida Today is one of the sponsors of Save Space, so it’s no surprise it endorses the effort in an editorial Tuesday, asking readers to write letters to the president asking him to keep that campaign promise.
Increased funding for NASA was also endorsed in a recent editorial by the Cleveland Plain Dealer. It notes the expense of Constellation, but adds that despite concerns about “today’s depressed economy and growing federal debt”, NASA should get that additional funding, particularly to develop Ares and Orion, which it calls “necessities”.
Also worth noting is op-ed in Sunday’s Washington Times by Michael Bloomfield, a former astronaut and current vice president of ATK. He argues that “crew safety is of utmost importance in evaluating shuttle replacements” based on the lessons of Challenger and Columbia, and that Ares 1/Orion would be “tops for safety against any other option by a significant degree”. Regarding commercial alternatives, he claims that “they still lag behind Ares I safety by a factor of 3 to 5 and do not meet the Columbia investigation’s clear assertion that America should replace the shuttle with a vehicle that is ’significantly safer.’”
September 27, 2009 at 9:55 am · Filed under Other
When I mentioned in an earlier post that the discovery of lunar water wasn’t a reason itself for human exploration of the Moon but improved the prospects if advocates could establish a “compelling case” for doing so, it raised a debate in the comments on what would constitute such a rationale. For a government-funded (or at least a government-led), what would convince the White House and Congress to invest more in NASA’s human spaceflight program, given that the Augustine committee concluded that current funding was insufficient for human missions beyond LEO on anything like the current timescales?
I asked that question in an essay in Monday’s issue of The Space Review and found the current arguments lacking. National security, technological innovation, spinoffs, and education, among others, don’t seem strong enough separately or even in aggregate to support the billions of dollars a year of additional funding the Augustine committee claimed it needed. That compelling case—if it does exist—is still out there waiting to be found.
I noticed earlier this week the unveiling of GoBoldlyNASA.org, a web site that intends to explain “how space exploration is important to you, the nation, and our future”. (While not explicitly stated there, the site is apparently a project of the Young Professionals branch of the Citizens for Space Exploration.) The site, though, just rehashes many of the old arguments, the ones that have not proven compelling in the past. The site includes a letter you can sign to send to your representatives, but the call to action is weak: “I urge you to provide adequate investment in our nation’s space program.” What may be one person’s “adequate investment” may be another’s wholly inadequate—or simply unaffordable.
September 25, 2009 at 7:34 am · Filed under NASA, Other
The discovery officially announced yesterday of more, and more widespread, water on the lunar surface has potential implications on space exploration policy: does it improve the case for the US—or someone else—to send people to the Moon? It’s a question addressed in a couple of pieces in The Times of London and The Independent, both of whom play up the potential for a new race to the Moon.
“This information could prove highly influential,” Howard McCurdy tells The Times, noting that it “increases the case” for a return to the Moon in a fiscally constrained time. The Independent gets a bit more hyperbolic, arguing that because India was involved in the discovery, it will force China to “intensify their efforts” in lunar exploration. “But what if the Chinese – or the Indians, or anyone else – goes ahead with an attempt to establish the first true lunar base? Will the US, the nation which planted its flag there, really stand by and let that happen without becoming involved itself?” The Independent even goes so far as to question the timing of yesterday’s announcement: “Do we really think the timing is a coincidence – of a Nasa announcement about lunar water which implies that establishing a Moon base might be more feasible than we thought in the past?” The folks at Science, who published the findings, might disagree.
Overall, it’s hard to see this discovery of water as a reason in and of itself for humans to go to the Moon. However, from the standpoint of making a human presence there potentially easier and less expensive, it may improve the odds of justifying other reasons to return to the Moon—if advocates can put together a compelling case.
Next entries »
