Space Politics
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Archive for Other
February 2, 2012 at 6:27 am · Filed under Congress, Other
Yesterday House and Senate conferees released the final, compromise version of a long-delayed FAA reauthorization bill that Congress is expected to pass in the coming days. While the debate about the bill revolved primarily around labor provisions in the bill, the commercial space transportation industry was waiting to see if it would contain an extension of a provision in the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act (CSLAA) of 2004 that restricts the ability of the FAA to enact safety regulations for crew and spaceflight participants on FAA-licensed launched. That restriction expires eight years after the CSLAA’s enactment, or December 23rd of this year. The House version of the FAA reauthorization would amend the CSLAA by keeping the restriction in place until eight years after the first licensed flight of a spaceflight participant, while the Senate version had no language about the CSLAA.
The conference report version of the FAA reauthorization bill gives the industry a partial victory. Section 827 of the bill (on page 318), tucked away in the “Miscellaneous” section of the bill between sections on air passenger screening privacy and air transportation of lithium batteries, extends the current restriction on safety regulations, but only to October 1, 2015. The joint statement of managers of the conference report provides a few more details, on page 152 of the PDF document: “Nothing in this provision is intended to prohibit the FAA and industry stakeholders from entering into discussions intended to prepare the FAA for its role in appropriately regulating the commercial space flight industry when this provision expires.”
Update: Congressman Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), whose previously spoke out in favor of an extension of that CSLAA provision, issued a press release today taking credit for getting at least a limited extension into the final bill. The release quotes from several industry officials as well—Eric Anderson of Space Adventures and the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, Jeff Greason of XCOR Aerospace, Mirk Sirangelo of Sierra Nevada Corp., and George Whitesides of Virgin Galactic—praising the extension. McCarthy, the House majority whip, serves a district that includes the Mojave Air and Space Port, a hub of entrepreneurial space activity.
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 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 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 10, 2012 at 11:26 am · Filed under Congress, NASA, Other
Pushing the boundaries of scientific knowledge has become increasingly expensive. In astronomy, that has meant larger telescopes, both on the ground and in space (in addition to increasingly complex planetary probes). In particle physics, it involves a series of larger and more powerful accelerators. However, one Nobel laureate fears that governments’ willingness to fund such ventures may have reached its limit.
Speaking on the topic of “Big Science in Crisis” at the American Astronomical Society conference Monday night in Austin, Texas, Steven Weinberg said he was pessimistic that governments would fund the next step in particle accelerators beyond Europe’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), regardless of the scientific case for it. “It’s going to be a very hard sell, and it may be impossible to get the next accelerator built,” he said.
That pessimism, he said, stems from his experience two decades ago with the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), a large particle accelerator that was already under construction near Dallas when Congress canceled it in 1993. The project, he said, got an “undeserved reputation” for cost overruns and, with a limited constituency for the program within Congress, was vulnerable to being cut.
“Whatever else it is, a large scientific lab is a public works project,” Weinberg said. “It, therefore, will always get enthusiastic support from local politicians, as it [the SSC] did in Texas, and hostility, or at best apathy, form other legislators from other parts of the country.” Weinberg admitted later in his talk that the project compounded its problems by initially relying too much on a single political patron, then Speaker of the House Jim Wright (D-TX), who was forced to resign in 1989 because of a scandal, as well as not doing enough outreach to other members of the House (which led the later effort to cancel the SSC.)
Those issues, along with competition for funding elsewhere in science (another issue that hurt the SSC), remain today. “All of these problems are going to come up again when we go to our governments for the next big accelerator,” he said.
Weinberg says there are similar problems with the future of astronomy, in particular with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). “Its history is somewhat reminiscent of the SSC,” he said. “It’s facing accusations of overspending, but the problem again is that at the funding levels being requested, it’s being stretched out to the point where it’s getting more and more expensive.” Like the SSC, the JWST has a strong Congressional patron, in this case in the form of Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), “but you can’t really rely on it too much.”
Weinberg, who has long been a strident critic of human spaceflight, also brought that up in his talk. “All of the great discoveries that have made such great progress in cosmology in particular have been from unmanned observatories,” he said. “The International Space Station was sold as a scientific laboratory, but nothing interesting has come from it.” He did say the ISS now has “one real science experiment” on the ISS, in the form of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, but that experiment largely runs autonomously from the activities of the station’s crew. He also blamed the ISS in part for the SSC’s demise, as the Clinton Administration elected to advocate for the station’s continuation in Congress, but not the SSC, when both were threatened with cancellation in 1993.
Although Weinberg didn’t menton it, his description of scientific labs as public works projects could also apply to human spaceflight activities: they too have largely local support, with a few key patrons in Congress primarily from districts and states with NASA facilities, while the rest of Congress tends to be apathetic, at best. Interestingly, after his talk Weinberg could be seen chatting with NASA’s new associate administrator for science, John Grunsfeld, a former astronaut best known for his work on several Hubble Space Telescope servicing missions; perhaps he sought to remind him that human spaceflight and astronomy can coexist and even work together.
Weinberg didn’t offer specific solutions to the problems facing big astronomy and physics projects beyond an overall increase in government spending that would provide more funds for those projects without putting them into competition with infrastructure, education, and other priorities. “We mustn’t get into a conflict between science and these many needs of our society. For one thing, we’ll lose,” he said.
Without some kind of change that makes governments more willing to fund big science projects, he concluded, “we may see in the next decade or so an end to the search for the laws of nature which will not be resumed again in our own lifetimes.”
January 6, 2012 at 6:10 am · Filed under Other
Last week the Chinese government issued a white paper titled “China’s Space Activities in 2011″ that outlined the country’s recent activities in space as well as, more importantly, its plans for the next five years. Most of what that white paper included had been previously announced by Chinese officials, including robotic lunar landers, continued progress on its long-term space station plans, and development of new launch vehicles. However, the compilation of those plans into a single document have triggered a wide range of reactions in the West.
Syndicated columnist Cal Thomas sees China as “attempt[ing] to fill” a vacuum created by the US decision to cancel the Constellation program in 2010. He believes that China’s space efforts, including long-term plans for human lunar missions, have a military motivation. “Who doubts that China will use trips to the moon to build a permanent colony and will operate that colony, at least in part, to further its military goals?” he asks, without describing exactly what military purposes a lunar base would support. He also suggests that China’s satellite navigation system, which currently only serves China and surrounding regions but will be expanded globally by the end of the decade, can “jam or make mischief with America’s global positioning system network,” again without further explanation.
Thomas blames the Obama Administration for its decision in 2010 “to cut NASA’s budget” although, in fact, the administration’s FY2011 budget request, released in February 2010, called for a modest overall increase in the agency’s budget. (NASA ended up getting less money than either in that request or what it received in FY10, but that came after protracted deliberations in Congress that were not wrapped up until more than halfway into the fiscal year.) “The next president should declare a rebirth of the U.S. space program, with clear goals, such as a U.S. moon colony and a trip to Mars,” Thomas concludes. “A reduction in unnecessary government spending will help pay for it.”
Apollo 11 Buzz Aldrin also sees China’s space plans as a cause of concern in an op-ed published in The Huffington Post. “The Chinese challenge comes at a time of a dangerous convergence, the international debt crisis and a contentious, highly consequential presidential election,” he writes. “In short, 2012 is an inflection year — the year we will and must decide whether the U.S. has the will and ability to lead the world in human space exploration.”
Yet Aldrin’s prescription is very different from what Thomas argues. Aldrin makes no call for a lunar base. Instead, he supports development of commercial crew transportation systems, with NASA’s own Orion MPCV evolving “to become a dedicated exploration system” (which, arguably, is the agency’s plan today, with an ISS crew transportation role for the MPCV as a belated backup for commercial crew at best.) Much of Aldrin’s piece describes his concept for Earth-Mars “cycler” spacecraft that would reduce the launch mass required for human expeditions to the Red Planet.
“In a nutshell, the advantages — not least for the U.S. economy and permanent leadership in space — are almost incalculable if we begin from this first step,” Aldrin concludes. “On the other hand, if we wander aimlessly, pick our way from one short-term goal to another, lose vision, ambition or commitment, we will find ourselves spending the next fifty years the way we have spent the last — without significant outward movement.” That conclusion would also fit well into Thomas’s column. However, the fact that the two disagree about what direction those initial steps should take us suggests that making progress may be easier said than done.
December 30, 2011 at 12:07 pm · Filed under Other
Last week some people noted that we are now less than a year away from a prophesied end of the world, which, according to some (mis)interpretations of the Mayan calendar, will be on December 21, 2012. Fortunately this is little more than the inspiration for a bad Roland Emmerich movie, but last week also marked the T-1 year milestone for a far more real—albeit far less apocalyptic—event.
On December 23, 2004, President George W. Bush signed into law the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act (CSLAA) (PL 108-492). That bill includes a provision that restricts the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST) 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. According to the law, that restriction expires eight years after the law’s enactment, or December 23, 2012, just under one year from now.
The restriction was intended to allow the industry to build up experience upon which future safety regulations could be based. However, the industry was developed far more slowly than anticipated in late 2004, after the prize-winning flights of SpaceShipOne. There has, in fact, been no crewed commercial suborbital flights since the final SpaceShipOne flight on October 4, 2004, although developments by Virgin Galactic, XCOR Aerospace, and others suggest that such flights could resume in the coming year. This has led to calls from some in the industry for some kind of extension to the current restriction before it expires next December.
There is, in fact, legislative language to provide an extension: the House version of the FAA reauthorization bill (HR 658) includes a provision changing that moratorium from eight years from enactment to eight years from the first licensed flight of a spaceflight participant—effectively resetting the clock and then some, since it appears unlikely such an event will take place before the end of 2012. The House passed that bill at the beginning of April, but it has been stuck in limbo ever since, awaiting a conference with the Senate version (S. 223), which does not include such a provision. That stalemate has been linked primarily to debates about language regarding labor unions in the bills. However, the Wall Street Journal reported last week that there are signs of a compromise in the works that could allow for passage of the reauthorization bill by the spring.
What will happen in conference to the House provision extending the regulation moratorium is uncertain. However, it’s worth noting that the FAA itself has previously expressed opposition to any extension. “We are not in favor of an extension of the moratorium,” said FAA/AST senior attorney Laura Montgomery during a session of the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in October. Letting the moratorium expire would give the office the flexibility to act if the need arose, something that she said is missing now. “Right now, our hands are tied. Even if there was something that was obviously foreseeable that we would want to do something about to protect a participant, we can’t.”
At the same event, Courtney Graham of NASA’s Office of General Counsel said that NASA didn’t have a position on a potential extension. However, she suggested that, at least for commercial orbital spaceflight, where NASA is likely to be a major customer, the industry might prefer that the moratorium expire. Otherwise, she cautioned, NASA will be the only government agency setting regulations for crewed vehicles. “The NASA requirements are going to be the default for the industry for the foreseeable future” in such a scenario, she said. “It’s really hard to say where the flexibility in [vehicle] design is going to be if you don’t know what the FAA is going to end up with” for its regulations.
December 20, 2011 at 10:22 am · Filed under Congress, NASA, Other
Earlier this month NASA administrator Charles Bolden expressed optimism that “sequestration”, the term given to the across-the-bord budget cuts currently in place for fiscal year 2013 after the failure of the supercommittee to come up with a long-term deficit reduction plan, could be avoided by Congressional action in the coming year. “I don’t think it’s going to happen,” he told an audience in early December, saying the agency was not making any special preparations for it as part of its FY13 budget planning.
A former occupant of Bolden’s current office is similarly optimistic that sequestration will be avoided. “There is no question that this atmosphere is very, very tough. The budget environment is going to be challenging,” said Sean O’Keefe at a Washington Space Business Roundtable luncheon last week. Despite that environment, he said that the automatic across-the-board cuts required by the sequestration process is enough to get Congress and the administration to act to craft an alternative that will prioritize cuts. “The spectre of sequestration is so onerous that the notion behind it is that it will force everybody to act to avoid something mindless, driven by a computer formula,” he said.
He said that he was not surprised that the supercommittee failed to come up with its own plan, calling that diverse collection of members the “let’s give peace a chance” move that predictably failed. He expects that in the coming year both Congress and the Administration will work to find an alternative, not wanting to appear to have failed in cutting spending during an election year as well as risk more downgrades from ratings agencies. “The chances of coming to an alternative to sequestration, I think, is high.”
O’Keefe, who served as NASA administrator from the end of 2001 to early 2005 and is now CEO of EADS North America, touched upon a wide range of topics, many not related to NASA or space policy, in his talk. In one passage, he endorsed the idea of turning over routine transportation to low Earth orbit of cargo and crews to the private sector. “The logic behind all this that I found compelling,” he said, “is that NASA is an extraordinary place… that is designed for the purpose of doing things that haven’t been done before.” Repetitive flight activities is something that may be better suited to the private sector, he suggested.
That activity, designed to support continued operations of the ISS, is important because the station is “exactly one invention, discovery, something away from being the next wonder of the world,” he said. “When that happens, it will be exactly like Hubble,” he said, referring to the space telescope that became beloved by the public after corrected optics allowed it to return stunning images and perform cutting-edge science. “Just one breakthrough, and we’re going to see this station in a completely different way,” rather than questioning the expense of building and maintaining it.
November 16, 2011 at 6:34 am · Filed under Congress, Other
At 11 am EST today, Congress will host a ceremony awarding Congressional Gold Medals to Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins, as well as John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth. The ceremony, in the Capitol rotunda, will be webcast by the Senate Commerce Committee; C-SPAN will be carrying it as well.
The medals were authorized in legislation passed by Congress back in 2009. As the Orlando Sentinel noted last month, it’s not clear why it took Congress two years to get around to actually awarding the medals.
November 15, 2011 at 6:48 am · Filed under Congress, NASA, Other
The House Appropriations Committee announced Monday night that House and Senate negotiators had reached agreement on a conference report on the so-called “minibus” appropriations bill that combines three separate bills, including the Commerce, Justice, and Science (CJS) bill. The full conference report has not be published yet, but the committee did provide a “detailed summary” of the report.
For NASA, conferees agreed to a $17.8 billion budget for NASA, down from the $18.7 requested by the administration from 2012 and the $18.5 billion provided in 2011. That amount, though, is much closer to the Senate version, which provided $17.9 billion, compared to the House version’s $16.8 billion. Highlights from the conference report summary:
- $3.8 billion for Space Exploration, which is $30 million below last year. This includes funding above the request for NASA to meet Congressionally mandated program deadlines for the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle and Space Launch System.
- $4.2 billion for Space Operations, which is $1.3 billion below last year’s level. The agreement continues the closeout of the Space Shuttle program for a savings of more than $1 billion.
- $5.1 billion for NASA Science programs, which is $155 million above last year’s level. The agreement accommodates cost growth in the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) by making commensurate reductions in other programs, and institutes several new oversight measures for JWST’s continuing development.
- Language prohibiting NASA or the Office of Science and Technology Policy from engaging in bilateral activities with China unless authorized by Congress.
The summary doesn’t specify how much funding JWST gets, but any funding would be a victory over the House version, which provided no money for the space telescope program that has experienced serious cost overruns and schedule delays. The document is also silent on commercial crew (the Senate offered $500 million and the House $312 million, both below the administration’s request of $850 million) and space technology (both the Senate and House significantly cut the requested $1.02 billion).
(Update: according to one source, the House and Senate split the difference on commercial crew, giving it $406 million. If true, this could have implications for the future of the program, since NASA officials had warned that not fully funding the program would lead to delays and possibly revisiting their procurement plans for the next phase of the program.)
Separately, the conference report provides $924 million for NOAA’s Joint Polar Satellite System, the weather satellite program that is the successor to the cancelled NPOESS. The administration had requested $1.07 billion for the program and warned last month that without “sufficient” funding the nation “faces a significant risk of a gap in satellite coverage that will result in degraded weather forecasts”.
The conference report also includes funding for the FAA, but the summary does not discuss funding for the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation. Both the House and Senate had significantly cut the administration’s request of $25 million for the office in FY12.
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