Space Politics
Because sometimes the most important orbit is the Beltway…
Archive for Uncategorized
July 17, 2008 at 6:36 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Last night several organizations co-hosted a “Teachers in Space” roundtable at George Washington University. The idea behind Teachers in Space, unlike NASA’s Teacher in Space program in the 1980s and the current group of educator astronauts, is to fly current teachers on suborbital spaceflights using any number of commercial vehicles currently under development, then get the teachers back in the classroom so they can share their experience—and, presumably, enthusiasm—with their students. Most of the panel discussion focused on the benefits of the program as well as the history of NASA’s past teacher-in-space efforts.
The roundtable came after three days of Congressional staff briefings by several people affiliated with Teachers in Space. Project manager Ed Wright said that they held several dozen briefings and were pleased with the results; he cited one hour-long briefing earlier in the day with a Congressional fellow who was particularly excited about the concept.
Right now, though, Teachers in Space isn’t seeking any specific legislation or federal funding. Wright said that they did get some commitments of support, up to offers to introduce legislation on the issue if needed, and also got feedback on how to win federal funding to help support this project. (Teachers in Space has several flights donated to it by several vehicle providers, and has also arranged a purchase of flights from XCOR Aerospace.) One earlier proposal called for funding flights of 500 teachers a year: one from each Congressional district plus several dozen others.
Charles Miller, president of Space Policy Consulting, said that it might still be too soon to pursue specific initiatives like that. “If you started a Teachers in Space program right now, 500 teachers per year, it would change how the Hill perceives risk,” he said. “They would probably try to put more burdensome regulations on the emerging industry, which is not ready for it, because you’re protecting the teachers.” He expected that in the next few years, once suborbital vehicles begin flying, and flying safely, that teachers, perhaps supported by funding from Congress, will soon follow. “It may not be the right idea right now, but within the next five years, they [Congress] could see it being the right idea,” Miller said.
July 15, 2008 at 7:14 am · Filed under Uncategorized
That’s the topic of an article in this week’s issue of The Space Review that I wrote about the potential risk to civil space programs posed by growing concerns about energy and desires for crash programs to develop alternative energy sources. Both major presidential candidates have appropriated arguably the biggest accomplishment of the Space Age to date—the Apollo lunar landings—as a way to describe the level of commitment (and size of funding) needed to gain “strategic independence” in energy (in John McCain’s words) or otherwise develop alternative energies.
That level of effort will require a lot of money: Barack Obama’s energy policy calls for $150 billion over 10 years for alternative energy research. Coupled with desires to reduce deficit spending, as well as growing pressure on the budget from mandatory spending, will space feel the squeeze in the next administration? As I conclude the article:
…but new energy policies will add to the existing fiscal pressures on NASA and space exploration in the next administration and beyond. That makes it all the more imperative for NASA and its supporters to craft approaches that are cost effective and also exciting and inspiring, to help win public support and thus funding. Otherwise, the Vision for Space Exploration and efforts like it might run out of gas.
In a related article, Greg Anderson examines what it takes to build long-term support for government initiatives of any kind, from Social Security to the Cold War, and how that can be used to build support in future administrations for space exploration. His conclusion: “Space expansion, therefore, must be presented to voters as being good for society as a whole. If the enemy in the Cold War was Communism, the alternatives to expanding the human economy beyond Earth are poverty, stagnation, and smaller, perhaps shorter lives for coming generations.”
July 10, 2008 at 6:43 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Is there anything that the House didn’t honor yesterday? The House took up no fewer than four resolutions recognizing people, agencies, organizations, and even years with space-related links:
- H.Res, 1315, commemorating the 50th anniversary of NASA;
- H.Res. 1313, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the shuttle flight of Sally Ride, the first American woman in space;
- H.Res. 1312, commemorating the 2th anniversary of the Space Foundation; and
- H.Con.Res. 375, honoring the International Year of Astronomy in 2009.
None of these, of course, are terribly controversial. The latter two passed on voice votes Tuesday, while the first two still require the formality of a roll call vote.
November 15, 2007 at 7:55 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Right now a number of companies are busy working on their proposals for funded Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) agreements as part of the new round (officially designated JSC-COTS-2) that opened up when NASA terminated its existing funded Space Act agreement with Rocketplane Kistler (RpK) last month. While NASA is proceeding with the competition, with proposals due Wednesday the 21st, there are still some factors involving RpK that could throw a wrench in NASA’s plans.
As Space News reported in its print edition this week, RpK filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office (GAO) about the new competition on October 30. The protest is not about their original agreement, because that was performed under a Space Act agreement that, unlike conventional procurements, is not subject to GAO protests. “RpK did not protest our decision to terminate,” Neil Woodward of NASA’s Exploration Systems Mission Directorate said Monday at the Reach to Space conference at George Washington University. RpK followed an appeal process internal to NASA that has since concluded, he said.
The RpK GAO protest, instead, is on how the new competition should be structured. “They did file a GAO protest on the second announcement,” Woodward said. “What they’re protesting is whether it should be done as a Space Act agreement or under federal procurement regulations; that is, whether it should be a FAR [Federal Acquisition Regulation] procurement, or whether it could be an agreement, which is what we have been doing.” While the protest proceeds, NASA is continuing with the current competition, with plans to make one or more awards early next year. Left unsaid is why RpK would seek to change the procurement process.
One of RpK’s major complaints about its original COTS award was that NASA was sending mixed messages about the level of support it was giving to the program, either though comments by NASA officials or its contract with Roskosmos for additional Progress and Soyuz flights to the ISS, making it difficult for RpK to demonstrate to potential investors that there was a viable market for commercial ISS resupply. Woodward disagreed that NASA, unintentionally or otherwise, gave out conflicting messages. “Our messages have actually been consistent” from the original COTS announcement to the request for information the agency issues earlier this year for COTS phase 2.
May 26, 2007 at 8:05 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Congressman Nick Lampson (D-TX), whose district includes NASA JSC but is perhaps better known as the person who won Tom DeLay’s former seat, spoke late Friday morning at the International Space Development Conference in Dallas. Lampson’s talk was something of a pep talk, encouraging attendees to lobby Congress for an increased NASA budget (the NSS is already planning such an effort with its “Moon-Mars Blitz” next month; Lampson said he has offered to help the NSS with its effort.) “There has been an unfortunate disconnect between all the rhetoric about the need to undertake a ‘once-in-a-generation change in the nation’s human space transportation system’ and the amount of money actually being budgeted for it,” he said, laying blame with both the White House and the Congress. “Instead, we’re seeing a business-as-usual approach that is not going to deliver the robust and broad-based exploration program laid out in the Vision for Space Exploration.”
He also mentioned a little-known (outside of Capitol Hill) internal lobbying effort in support of NASA called the House Action Team, or HAT. This is a bipartisan group led by Reps. Ken Calvert (R-CA) and Bud Cramer (D-AL). “Its purpose is to do much of what your Blitz is intended to do: to lobby other members of Congress, explain to them why it’s important to support space, and to put the money necessary into all of our space activities.” The HAT has about 20-25 members, Lampson said after his speech, and has been around for a few years, although “there is a greater effort to grow it” this year. When I asked him how the membership of the HAT was split between Democrats and Republicans, he said, “You know, I don’t know the answer to that, so that means it must be fairly close.”
He has fairly ambitious goals for increasing NASA’s budget. While the proposed FY08 NASA budget of $17.3 billion falls about $1.3 billion short of the authorized level approved by Congress in 2005, Lampson said he is looking to raise the agency’s budget by $1.5 billion. He said he wasn’t sure he would be able to get the full increase, “but we’re going to fight like heck to get as big a portion of it as we can.” I asked him if he thought if the controversies surrounding the NASA IG and, now, the destroyed recordings, would serve as distractions to those efforts. Lampson didn’t think it was that big an issue. “Everything’s a distraction,” he said.
April 17, 2007 at 6:37 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Going through my notes from last week’s address at the National Space Symposium by Rep. Ken Calvert, I picked up a theme that relates to some recent discussions in the comments of previous posts, where some were trying to hang blame on one party or another for NASA’s FY07 funding woes. Calvert noted that one of the House members who voted against the 2005 NASA authorization bill is the current appropriations chairman, David Obey (although Calvert didn’t mention him by name, only by title). “This is a problem as NASA finds itself in a precarious time, trying to ramp up spending to move America beyond low Earth orbit while also meeting the demands of the agency’s diverse portfolio of missions.”
Was Calvert making an attack against the Democratic leadership in the House? No. “There is a dangerous trend of bipartisan nonsupport in funding NASA in Congress,” he said. He mentioned two amendments to the original FY07 appropriations bill on the House floor last summer that would have either prevented NASA from spending any money on Mars exploration efforts, and another that would have transferred NASA funds to other programs. While both amendments were defeated (a moot point, as it turned out, since that appropriations bill was never enacted and replaced with a continuing resolution), “The reality is that members of both parties supported these amendments, and by a large margin.”
That doesn’t bode well for NASA during the FY2008 budget process. “You can bet that NASA will be the target again this year unless we prepare to defend NASA funding against grabs from other areas.”
December 12, 2006 at 1:24 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Just before Congress adjourned last week, both houses passed a stopgap funding bill to keep most federal agencies, including NASA, funded at 2006 levels through February 15, leaving it to the next Congress to pass the pile of appropriations bills that the 109th Congress did not complete. Now the incoming chairmen of the House and Senate appropriations committees, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) and Rep. David Obey (D-WI), have decided how they will, as they put it, “clean up the mess left behind” in January: by passing a continuing resolution that would last through the end of the fiscal year. This allows Congress to “clear the decks quickly”, as Byrd and Obey put it, so they can focus on the FY2008 budget, the Administration’s proposals for which will be released in early February.
What this means for NASA is that its programs will continue to be funded at FY06 levels: good news for some science and aeronautics programs that were facing cuts in the 2007 budget, perhaps, but not so good for the exploration program, as a Space News article [subscription required] notes. The agency overall was expecting a minor budget increase, but exploration in particular was planning on a $900-million bump over 2006 to fund work on Ares 1 and Orion. (However, NASA may get some additional flexibility on how it distributes funding within the agency.)
One bright note: the continuing resolution will be earmarks-free, according to the Byrd-Obey statement. The statement adds, “We will do our best to make whatever limited adjustments are possible within the confines of the Republican budget to address the nation’s most important policy concerns.” NASA, though, probably is not among the nation’s most important policy concerns at this time.
December 6, 2006 at 8:00 am · Filed under Uncategorized
It’s been almost exactly two months since the Bush Administration released the new national space policy, and people are still commenting on it. Yesterday the Council on Foreign Relations published a short synopsis on the idea of American “space supremacy” many see at the core of the new policy. The piece is primarily a review of a number of essays and position papers written on the policy from various points of view (including a couple of articles from The Space Review). One point where this analysis stumbles, though, is that it appears to link an incident earlier this year where a Chinese groundbased laser “dazzled” (or simply “illuminated”, depending on who you talked to) an American military satellite to the release of the policy itself: “The Pentagon has avoided specifics about the report, but soon afterward the Bush administration released an unclassified version of its new U.S. National Space Policy, which goes far beyond previous policies in asserting America’s right to respond forcefully to such threats.” Reading this, one might conclude that the new policy and its language is a reaction to that incident, when in fact the policy had been in the works for a long, long time.
Meanwhile, over at The Huffington Post, blogger RJ Esker is taking the credit—or the blame—for trumpeting the perceived militaristic slant of the policy in advance of the mainstream media. He takes issue with a James Oberg piece on MSNBC.com that claims that the media overhyped that slant: he is “sticking with my original interpretation on this one. The Administration has taken a dangerously aggressive stance regarding the militarization of space.”
October 25, 2006 at 5:58 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Last Thursday in Las Cruces, New Mexico the X Prize Foundation held an invitation-only “executive summit” to discuss issues associated with the emerging space tourism industry. The luncheon speaker was a very high-profile individual and a bit of an unusual choice: former vice president Al Gore. The entire event was supposed to be off the record and closed to the media, but the Gore speech (as well as one earlier in the day by NASA administrator Mike Griffin) was on the record, and the organizers allowed a few reporters to attend and report on those talks. (I wasn’t one of them; while Gore talked at lunch I was checking out the X Prize Cup preparations at the Las Cruces airport.)
Most of the limited media attention about Gore’s speech has focused on his comments regarding the national space policy released by the Bush Administration earlier this month, which didn’t get much attention in the broader media until a Washington Post article on it a week ago. Gore was critical of the policy, drawing some parallels to Iraq. Popular Science has a video excerpt of his talk, where he warns that the policy “has the potential, down the road, to create the kind of fuzzy thinking and chaos in our efforts to exploit the space resource as the fuzzy thinking and chaos the Iraq policy has created in Iraq. It is a very serious mistake, in my opinion.” Leonard David, of SPACE.com, also touches on Gore’s space policy comments in a blog post.
(There is some question of whether Gore’s comments were, in fact, supposed to be on the record: Alan Boyle of MSNBC, also in attendance, asked Gore if his comments were on the record and was told no; he also declined to make an officially-on-the-record statement. That distinction loses some of its broader significance with the broader coverage, including PopSci’s video excerpts. Gore does note in the video that he may make a separate, more official pronouncement about the policy at a later date.)
One thing most of the coverage missed, though, was that Gore talked about issues other than the new space policy, including some more positive comments about space commercialization. Several people I talked with in the days following Gore’s speech said that he discussed the importance of encouraging increased commercial use of space. As Charles Miller of CSI said in an email message to me yesterday, a key part of the speech was “Gore’s statement that space right now is in the exact same position that the Internet was in the 1970s… and that space needs to be commercialized in order to achieve its full potential… just like the Internet only achieved its full potential by being commercialized.” (It appears that Alan Boyle got a similar email.) Miller said that this is “a critically important statement”, particularly given the chances that Democrats will take over one or both houses of Congress next month.
October 12, 2006 at 6:56 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Gérard Brachet, the new chairman of the UN’s Committee for the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS), will speak about the organization and its aims to support international cooperation in space, this Monday at CSIS headquarters in Washington. COPUOS has kept a fairly low profile in recent years, although there are signs Brachet would like to have the organization do more, although exactly what it can, or should, do remains to be seen. That challenge can be seen in a speech given by NASA administrator Michael Griffin at the IAF Congress in Spain last week, where he made it clear that national security and technology transfer concerns have a higher priority over international cooperation in space:
The United States is firmly committed to ensuring that certain key technologies, which we possess and some others do not, not be used against us or our allies. That priority is higher for us than partnership in various space endeavors, and this fact must be understood and carefully considered by the parties involved in any putative collaboration. I recognize the bluntness of this assertion, but I believe that each of us, as spacefaring nations, must respect each other’s national priorities, and must speak openly and honestly with each other if there are differences which hamper our ability to collaborate.
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