Space Politics
Because sometimes the most important orbit is the Beltway…
Archive for Other
November 18, 2009 at 7:06 am · Filed under Other
After Tuesday’s meeting between Presidents Obama and Hu, the two countries issued a joint statement covering a wide range of issues, including one paragraph about space issues:
The United States and China look forward to expanding discussions on space science cooperation and starting a dialogue on human space flight and space exploration, based on the principles of transparency, reciprocity and mutual benefit. Both sides welcome reciprocal visits of the NASA Administrator and the appropriate Chinese counterpart in 2010.
Space also merited one sentence later, on security issues: “The two sides believed that the two countries have common interests in promoting the peaceful use of outer space and agree to take steps to enhance security in outer space.”
The former passage sounds similar to efforts in the last several years to start to develop greater cooperation between the two countries in space, including a 2006 visit to China by then-administrator Mike Griffin. Those cooperative efforts were hindered by the January 2007 Chinese ASAT test, which leads to the latter passage, although it’s not clear what might be involved in steps to “enhance security” in space.
November 16, 2009 at 8:34 pm · Filed under Congress, Other
On Thursday Time magazine released its annual “best inventions” list. Topping the list as the best invention of the year, in the minds of the magazine’s staff, were NASA’s Ares rocket, dubbing the Ares 1 “a machine that can launch human beings to cosmic destinations we’d never considered before”. Nitpickers would note that the Ares 1 could not qualify as the “smartest and coolest thing built in 2009″ since the full-fledged Ares 1 is still in the design stage: only a suborbital prototype, the Ares 1-X, was built and flown this year.
That did not stop the chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee, Bart Gordon, and the chair of the space subcommittee, Gabrielle Giffords, from praising Time’s selection in a press release today. “This recognition by TIME is further proof that in spite of a challenging budgetary environment, NASA continues to demonstrate technological leadership,” Gordon said in the statement. “I’d like to congratulate NASA and all of the people who have worked on the development of the Ares rockets.”
Coming from the opposite direction, though, was the Space Frontier Foundation, who sharply criticized the selection in its own press release today. Foundation co-founder Rick Tumlinson called the award a “publicity hoax”, saying, “There was no boy in the balloon and there most definitely was no Ares rocket launched in Florida last month.”
While Time might have considered Ares the invention of the year, it’s not a sentiment shared by its readers, who have the option online of rating the importance of each of the 50 inventions profiled on a 1-to-100 scale. Ares comes in tied for 13th place (as of early Monday evening), with an average rating of 72. That puts it well behind the frontrunner, an electronic eye to allow the blind to see, a low-power but bright lightbulb, and a roof shingle/solar panel. Ares, though, is doing much better than another top-50 invention, the no-punt offense, whose standing probably plummeted (in New England, at least) after Sunday night’s Pats-Colts game.
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.’”
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