With that good news, though, comes with a little bit of bad news: this blog will be going on indefinite hiatus. I won’t be posting new pieces here, as much of the content will be appearing on SpaceNews. The site will remain up, although comments will be turned off as primarily an anti-spam measure. I hope you’ll come over to SpaceNews, if you’re not already reading the site, for the latest coverage of the industry. Thanks!

The campaign of Mark Treadwell, the state’s current lieutenant governor, announced Monday that it had won the endorsement of Buzz Aldrin. “I have known and worked with Mead for close to thirty years, dating back to his first time advising NASA, on improving our nation’s space program,” Aldrin wrote in his letter of endorsement, referring to Treadwell’s participation in NASA’s Lunar Base Working Group in the 1980s.

Aldrin’s letter mentions Treadwell’s support for a number of issues of interest to Alaskans, including “Arctic exploration” for oil and gas, as well as the state’s role in missile defense. There’s a space angle, too, as Aldrin mentions Treadwell’s role as chairman of the Aerospace States Association (an organization traditionally chaired by a state lieutenant governor) and his support for the state’s launch site at Kodiak. “I admire his work to help build and build business for the Kodiak Launch Site,” Aldrin wrote. “Most importantly, I support what he’s done to make sure that the Last Frontier contributes to the next frontier in further space exploration.”

“For his part, Aldrin said that he does not generally make endorsements,” the Treadwell campaign notes in its statement about the endorsement. However, it’s not unprecedented. In 2008, he endorsed a candidate in a Democratic primary for Florida’s 15th congressional district, although that candidate lost in the primary, who in turn lost to Bill Posey in the general election. In 2006, Aldrin campaigned for Nick Lampson in his race for the House seat formerly held by Tom DeLay; Lampson won, but lost a reelection bid two years later. Aldrin also appeared at a campaign rally for President George W. Bush late in Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign.

Treadwell is one of three major Republican candidates for the Senate nomination. Most polls showed him trailing Dan Sullivan, although the race appeared to be tightening in recent weeks.

Update 8/20 9 am: Aldrin’s endorsement didn’t help Treadwell: he finished third in the three-person race for the Republican nomination.

One criticism of SpaceX, though, may have gone too far. On Friday, Loren Thompson, chief operating officer of the Lexington Institute and a regular contributor on defense issues for Forbes.com, published an op-ed on Forbes titled “When SpaceX Falters, Washington Looks The Other Way”. As the title suggests, he claimed that some in Washington, including NASA and the White House, were playing down those anomalies as SpaceX “struggled” to meet its commitments.

By Friday night, though, that link above went to an error message. The op-ed was no longer available on the site, although it is preserved in places like Google’s cache. Neither Thompson nor Forbes have commented on the piece’s disappearance from the website: Forbes did not respond to multiple requests for comment between Saturday and Monday through its “press inquiries” section. Dr. Thompson is still a Forbes contributor: according to his profile page he published another essay (on defense strategy, not space) on Monday.

With neither Thompson nor Forbes publicly commenting, it’s not clear what happened to the essay. However, it did make claims that are difficult to verify, or may simply be incorrect. Thompson’s piece started with a “story making the rounds in Washington’s space community” that the White House pressured the National Reconnaissance Office (the “spy agency responsible for operating reconnaissance satellites”, as Thompson described it without naming it) to move ahead with certifying SpaceX for launching its payloads. “The story goes on that SpaceX was then assigned three secret payloads on a sole-source (uncompeted) basis.”

Of course, the NRO is not leading the launch certification process, which is instead being handled by the Air Force. (The new head of the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center, Lt. Gen. Sam Greaves, met with SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell earlier this month to discuss that effort, the Air Force reported yesterday.) There’s no evidence that SpaceX won, via sole source contracts, launches of three “secret payloads.” While some might argue those contracts were also assigned in secret, the Air Force is openly competing the launch of another NRO mission, NROL-79.

As to whether that “story making the rounds” is true, Thompson shrugs. “Is the story true? I don’t know — I lack the necessary clearances to find out,” he wrote in the story’s next paragraph. “But accurate or apocryphal, the story captures a little-noticed feature of how SpaceX has fared in Washington.”

Much of the rest of Thompson’s piece is less controversial, covering familiar topics: delays in SpaceX’s fulfillment of its Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract with NASA and the previously-mentioned “anomalies” on Falcon 9 and Dragon missions. Even here, though, some of the details are questionable: he says SpaceX delayed a NASA CRS mission to launch two commercial satellites “for a Chinese state-controlled enterprise.” AsiaSat, the enterprise in question, is publicly-traded on the Hong Kong stock exchange and, while partially owned by a Chinese state-owned investment fund, is also partially owned by American conglomerate GE.

This is not the first time that Thompson has criticized SpaceX: in June he sought to tell the “other side of the story” of SpaceX’s dispute with the Air Force, citing a “raft of problems” with SpaceX’s launch vehicles and their limited performance. Thompson’s own critics, though, note that he is not an unbiased observer: before it was deleted, Thompson’s latest piece included the disclaimer that “Several of SpaceX’s competitors contribute to my think tank; two of them — Lockheed Martin Lockheed Martin and Sierra Nevada — are consulting clients.” (Lockheed Martin has been included in disclaimers in prior pieces, like the June essay, but SNC is a new one.)

Those arguments were front in center last week at a meeting of the Small Bodies Assessment Group (SBAG), a NASA-chartered advisory group, in Washington. The middle day of the three-day meeting, Wednesday, was devoted to discussion about ARM, with NASA officials and other scientists among those speaking. And it featured some of the strongest criticism yet of the ARM by the scientific community.

“I think ARM is a stunt,” said Richard Binzel, a professor of planetary sciences at MIT, in a presentation at the SBAG meeting devoted to criticism of the proposed mission. “A stunt kind of gets handed to you at the top, and there’s nothing underneath to support it.” That’s in contrast, he argued, to the process for selecting science missions, which are supported by rigorous science and compelling questions that only a space mission can answer.

Binzel urged scientists to “just say no” to ARM. “I think that ARM is a one-and-done stunt, and if we get behind this in any way, it’s going to irreparably damage small body exploration.”

While he was opposed to ARM, Binzel was not opposed to human exploration of NEAs. Instead, he advocated human missions to NEAs in “native” (that is, not redirected) orbits. That means building up capabilities in cislunar space while performing surveys to identify NEA targets that would be not much more difficult to reach for later human missions than an asteroid captured into lunar orbit. Such a mission, he said, “is on the true path to Mars.”

Binzel brought up his criticism of ARM at the SBAG meeting because the group may be asked to officially weigh in on the proposed mission. The NASA authorization bill passed by the House in June, HR 4412, includes a provision requiring a “complete assessment” by SBAG “of how the proposed mission is in the strategic interests of the United States in space exploration.” The Senate, which has not been nearly as critical of ARM as the House, has yet to introduce its version of an authorization bill.

Other attendees of the meeting also expressed reservations about ARM and the agency’s overall Asteroid Initiative during presentations by NASA officials earlier in the day. “It just seems like this logical disconnect to me,” said SBAG chair Nancy Chabot of the Applied Physics Lab, trying to reconcile NASA’s stated interest in searching for hazardous NEAs with the relatively limited funding it’s allocating for such searches as part of the initiative. “I guess there’s just a lot of us in the community who are confused by the overall strategy of the agency.”

Some at the meeting worried that a potential cancellation of ARM by a future administration could adversely affect asteroid science in general. “There are groups of people who believe that ARM is associated with the current White House” and could be cancelled by the next, said Tom Statler of the University of Maryland and Ohio University. “If it so happens that ARM gets pushed aside because it was the product of the previous administration, there is a risk that the rest of asteroid science could be collateral damage simply because, in the minds of most people, ARM equals asteroid stuff.”

Others struggled to see the connection between ARM and human exploration of Mars. “What the agency has not articulated is how we’re magically go from cislunar space missions of about a month in duration to anything greater,” said Brent Barbee of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “If this is all you’re going to do in the mid-2020s,” he said of ARM, “then it’s not very credible to talk about humans on Mars in the early to mid 2030s.”

“If we were to start this from a clean sheet and do it in a logical manner, I think every one involved with this would do it differently than how it’s being done right now,” acknowledged NASA’s Lindley Johnson. ARM, he said, did allow NASA to double funding for NASA’s Near Earth Object search program, from $20 to $40 million. “We do the best we can with what we’ve got.”

The SBAG meeting ended without any formal findings or questions about ARM, although Chabot said those are being developed by the group’s steering committee. Some worried that a lack of consensus could result in findings that could make SBAG appear neutral on the issue, which Chabot, as chair of SBAG, acknowledged as the meeting drew to a close on Thursday. “A lot of people do not feel neutral about this,” she said.

The criticism of ARM by SBAG meeting attendees, as well as comments made at a separate meeting of the NASA Advisory Council (NAC) held at the same time, as reported by SpacePolicyOnline.com, caught the attention of the chairman of the House Science Committee, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX). “The NASA Advisory Council warns that NASA ‘runs the risk of squandering precious national resources’ if they move forward with ARM,” Smith said in a statement released by the committee on Friday. “For months, the Obama administration has downplayed such criticism. I appreciate the good work of NASA’s technical advisors and encourage the Obama administration to take their recommendations seriously.”

ULA’s arguments for dismissal mirror those in the Air Force’s motion filed with the court early last week. SpaceX, ULA claims, lacks standing since it is not an “interested party” in the case since it is not yet certified by the Air Force to perform launches and thus isn’t an “actual or prospective bidder” for the EELV contract. ULA also argues that SpaceX was nearly two years later in filing its protest and thus “has plainly waived any right to protest the Air Force’s acquisition strategy and terms of the sole-source requirements contract.”

“To allow this untimely bid protest to continue any further would broadly and improperly expand this Court’s jurisdiction to parties who are not capable of performing the work until several years after an RFP has [been] issued and contract work long begun, and who had never even submitted a proposal or filed a formal protest prior to the proposal submission deadline,” ULA argues. “The Court should reject SpaceX’s attempt to rewrite the Court’s well-settled decisions regarding interested party status and timeliness of protests.”

“Spacecraft specially designed for human space flight that have integrated propulsion present another security concern, for such capabilities may be used for the purposes of weapons targeting from space,” the State Department noted in its final ruling. “So, although these technologies and capabilities are used in commercial endeavors, they continue to merit control on the USML.”

While the State Department appears to have no immediate plans to revisit this decision, the organization representing many developers of such spacecraft is keeping the agency aware of the issue. “As commercial space companies continue to test and develop their vehicles, it is vital to have an export control regime that will not illegitimately inhibit the potential of this growing industry,” wrote the Commercial Spaceflight Federation (CSF) in a June 27 letter, signed by CSF president Michael Lopez-Alegria, to the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls in the State Department. “Steps should be taken to further investigate how to modernize the USML to appropriately move these vehicles to the Commerce Control List (CCL).”

The CSF notes in the letter that the State Department had not formally requested comment on its decision to retain human spaceflight vehicles on the USML, it says it plans to “submit further detailed comments to the State Department along with our submission to the Department of Commerce in response to their request for comments on the continued application of USML controls to commercial space launch vehicles and human spaceflight.”

The letter comes during a time of transition for the CSF. As Space News reported last week, executive director Alex Saltman stepped down last week, a move planned long ago as he is heading to California with his family; he will stay on with the CSF in the role of senior advisor. Lopez-Alegria is also planning to leave the CSF by the end of the year.