By Jeff Foust on 2010 August 27 at 9:27 am ET On Thursday the Pentagon released a memo from Secretary the Air Force Michael Donley discussing changes to the Air Force’s space management and organization. The changes were designed to address what a review said some considered a “confusing” structure for the service’s space organization, particularly after changes such as ending the “dual-hatting” of the Under Secretary of the Air Force as Director of the NRO in 2005. As DOD Buzz notes, perhaps the biggest changes are making the Under Secretary of the Air Force “the focal point for space” at Air Force headquarters and giving the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition the responsibility for space acquisition.
Another aspect of the memo and review is the uncertain, but not particularly promising, future of the National Security Space Office (NSSO), originally a joint office between the Defense Department and NRO but now solely staffed by the DOD. While Air Force staff currently assigned to NSSO will now fall under the Deputy Under Secretary of the Air Force for Space, Donley’s memo states that decisions about NSSO staff associated with the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) will be deferred “until ongoing discussions about the role of the EA [Executive Agent] for Space and roles and reporting relationships for any successor organization to the NSSO are complete and agreement has been reached for the roles and responsibilities of the successor organization(s).” The memo adds that discussions with OSD on the future of functions assigned to NSSO are ongoing, with Donley stating he is “very encouraged by the collaborative approach demonstrated during these meetings.”
By Jeff Foust on 2010 August 27 at 8:39 am ET When speaking with the Huntsville Times last week, NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver mentioned NASA’s interest in heavy-lift development. That was the main focus of that report, but in her speech that weekend at the US Space and Rocket Center Hall of Fame dinner, she also brought up another aspect of the administration’s plans for NASA, its support for commercial crew development. She made the case in her prepared remarks that it is “not as radical as it seems” and even potentially beneficial to Alabama:
We are (we hope) on the cusp of achieving big things. A few companies (established and emerging) already have systems for transportation, many whose heritage is right here in Alabama. We will oversee these rockets to ensure that the highest possible safety standards are met. The U.S. has lost a large share of the commercial market. There is a growing market for launch services internationally, and by other U.S. government agencies and the private sector, both traditional markets and new ones. There is huge untapped potential for expanded markets, businesses, and jobs connected to launching cargo and eventually crew to orbit.
We believe it is time for the government to help to create a whole new sector of the economy that will produce jobs and innovation for years to come. This is precisely what has driven economic growth in this country for our entire history— government playing its critical role by investing in technology and industry doing what it does best—allowing us to spend less on operations and explore further into the universe. We’re continuing this quest that began here in Huntsville 50 years ago.
A bit later in the speech, she noted that the debate was not about whether the US should be doing space exploration, but how:
As I said the good news is that we’re debating how to do this, not whether or not we should, and that is progress. The shift is that the government may not need to be the operator of rocket systems whose sole purpose is to reach low Earth orbit anymore. We can facilitate other people who will do that for us. Meanwhile, we’ll be focused on sending missions farther into the solar system and achieving other astounding new things that will, in turn, inspire future generations. Things like humans visiting an asteroid, or robots sending pictures back from a destination we’ve never been such as the moons of Mars, and ultimately, the dusty soil of Mars itself.
And a final reminder to those not satisfied with the current situation: “If you don’t like how the politics are playing out, you have the opportunity to get involved to make them better. That’s my view.”
By Jeff Foust on 2010 August 25 at 1:10 pm ET Earlier this year there was some concern in Alabama that former Congressman Bud Cramer, picked by local leaders to head Huntsville’s “Second to None” lobbying effort to preserve Constellation, might have a conflict of interest: he works for Wexler & Walker Public Policy Associates, a lobbying firm retained by, among other companies, SpaceX, a leading advocate of the administration’s plan to rely more on the commercial sector. At the time Cramer said would not support anything “that is contrary to what is in Marshall’s best interest”, a reference to the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville.
On Tuesday Cramer reiterated that stance to the Birmingham News and added something else: he is not working for SpaceX at all and is not registered to lobby on its behalf. “I knew that my firm was registering to lobby for SpaceX and I’m a partner there, and there might appear to be a conflict,” he said. “I think they removed my name from there to be clear about it,” referring to lobbying registration filings by Wexler and Walker.
According to Senate lobbying records, Cramer’s name was listed on a lobbying registration form filed by Wexler and Walker on March 1 that indicated that the firm was working for SpaceX. Cramer’s name was listed with another former congressman, Bob Walker, and Dale Snape. Three weeks later, the lobbying firm filed an amended registration that replaced Cramer with Patric Link. The amended filing gives no reason for the change. According to filings, Wexler and Walker performed $30,000 of lobbying for SpaceX in the first quarter of this year and $60,000 in the second quarter, all on the topic of “NASA Funding”.
By Jeff Foust on 2010 August 25 at 7:26 am ET In a hotly-contested Republican primary for the 24th Congressional District in Florida, state representative Sandy Adams declared victory late last night, just 560 votes ahead of the second-place finisher. Adams will face Suzanne Kosmas, who easily won the Democratic primary in her bid for reelection to the district that includes NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. In a statement provided to Florida Today earlier this month, Adams expressed general support for the agency, calling the space program “both an economic and homeland security issue” but offering few specifics other than an apparent rejection of the administration’s human space exploration plans (“It is not reasonable to believe we will maintain our leadership, brain trust, equipment and expertise until 2025, when this administration decides to return to manned space flight.” Evidently sending crews to and from the ISS doesn’t count as “manned space flight”.) In a statement on her web site, though, she said she would work to keep the shuttle program “solvent” until a replacement is ready and “be a strong, vocal advocate for the increased Research & Development funding” needed for the “next generation of ‘miracle’ products” spun off from NASA technology development.
While Adams is quiet on the issue of commercial spaceflight, Sen. Sam Brownback, a Republican now running for governor of Kansas, is not. Speaking in Wichita yesterday, Brownback in effect put out the welcome mat for space companies that might be thinking of establishing operations there. “We will pursue partnering opportunities with our existing companies and private space companies on the design and manufacture of commercial space vehicles, as well as encourage them to locate some of their facilities here,” he said, the AP reported. Brownback also introduced Alan Weston of NASA’s Ames Research Center, who spoke at the Wichita Aero Club and had a similar message of support for commercial space. “We at Ames, and many people at NASA, believe that commercial space can cut these [spaceflight] costs dramatically,” he said, as reported by the Wichita Business Journal. “I believe, and Pete Worden (director of NASA Ames) believes, that the industry here — the aviation industry — can lead this revolution.”
By Jeff Foust on 2010 August 22 at 1:15 pm ET “Can We Turn Over America’s Space Program to a ‘Space Cadet’?” is the lurid headline late Friday in the normally-staid The Hill. The post, part of the Capitol Hill publication’s “Pundits Blog”, is by Peter Fenn, head of a PR firm and someone who has worked extensively with Democratic candidates. The “space cadet” in question is Elon Musk: Fenn is worried that by turning over access to LEO to SpaceX in particular that “we taxpayers may be paying for it and sacrificing solid, important research and development in the process” (he doesn’t specify exactly what “solid, important research and development” would be sacrificed.) He is particularly at odds, though, with Musk’s unusual direct PR approach: “Somehow this does not seem like the right style for a company and a CEO that we should entrust with our space program and the effort to build the electric car.” (The post is as much about Tesla as it is about SpaceX, with Fenn claiming incorrectly that Musk started SpaceX because he “must be somewhat bored with electric cars”; SpaceX predates Tesla.)
In an op-ed in Sunday’s Houston Chronicle, Scott Spencer and Chris Kraft make a last-ditch bid to extend the space shuttle program as a cornerstone for a “robust manned space program”. The op-ed takes a curiouser turn later on, though, as the two advocate development of a “modular, reusable Planetary Transport Vehicle (PTV) System” for human missions beyond LEO—modules that, of course, would be sized to fit in the shuttle’s payload bay, but with crews ferried to them in LEO by commercial vehicles. It’s worth nothing that the two sent a joint letter to President Obama in April asking him to extend the shuttle program (but without the discussion of the PTV system) when Spencer made a short-lived attempt to run for the House from Delaware.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the topic of an editorial in the Orlando Sentinel on Saturday, which expresses concerns about cost overruns and delays in the program. “Such cost overruns and delays are unacceptable,” the editorial states, but expresses support for the program’s scientific potential. “Making the Webb telescope a success deserves to be a national priority. Its promise is almost unfathomable.”
Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) is optimistic about the commercial prospects of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) at Wallops Island in Virginia, she tells the local newspaper, the Daily News. The spaceport will start hosting launches next summer of Orbital Sciences’ Taurus 2 rocket, carrying cargo spacecraft to the ISS. Wallops, she said, “will be like the Southwest Airlines of space. It’s an upstart, lower cost, cheaper and safer way because it doesn’t require human flight.” The metaphor seems a little tangled: Orbital, it seems, would be in line to be Southwest while Wallops would be like Dallas’s Love Field, or, closer to home, BWI Airport, both major hubs for Southwest.
By Jeff Foust on 2010 August 20 at 8:26 pm ET When the administration released its FY2011 budget proposal in February, development of a heavy-lift launch vehicle was not a high priority: the proposal deferred a decision on an HLV design to as late as 2015, a plan reiterated by President Obama in his speech at the Kennedy Space Center on April 15. Instead, the proposal called for technology development for an HLV, including a new hydrocarbon rocket engine. That hasn’t set well in Congress, and the Senate’s NASA authorization bill calls for development of a HLV starting in FY11. NASA, it seems, is now willing to support that approach.
“NASA wants to start heavy-lift work in 2011 ‘in a very robust way,'” the Huntsville Times reported today, quoting deputy administrator Lori Garver, who is in town. And what about the need to study various HLV designs? “We don’t need to study it anymore,” said Marshall director Robert Lightfoot, whose center would lead any HLV program.
Garver attempted to sound a conciliatory note in her comments, as least as reported by the Times: she said there’s no longer a “stalemate” between the White House and Congress on NASA, with both sides now talking to each other. (She added, though, that it would be up to Congress to reconcile the differences between the Senate and House versions of NASA authorization legislation.) She said that NASA and the administration got off to a poor start selling the new plan: “We had not well explained the issues with Constellation.” And, she complemented Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), one of the most vociferous critics of the administration’s NASA policies: “One of the reasons we are as far as we are (in space) is because of Sen. Shelby.”
By Jeff Foust on 2010 August 19 at 8:10 pm ET In a letter today to the chairs and ranking members of key House and Senate appropriations and authorization subcommittees, the leadership of The Planetary said it was “concerned about omissions and a lack of coherence” in the NASA-related legislation they have marked up in recent weeks. “[W]e are concerned that the path on which the legislative process is proceeding will lead to an incomplete plan, which would be worse than no plan at all,” states the letter, signed by the organization’s president and vice president as well as the retiring and incoming executive directors.
The letter cites several concerns. One is the lack of “a plan to restore U.S. technical capability to launch astronauts to space once the shuttle is retired”; the society supports commercial crew development, but worries that plans to develop government systems for such access could extend the post-shuttle gap. They also note the lack of specific exploration goals in the legislation and cuts in exploration and technology programs. Also, while supporting the eventual development of a heavy-lift vehicle, they don’t support the Senate’s plan to begin development of such a system immediately, because “premature development through political legislation rather than technological studies could result in huge waste and eventual delays.”
“We ask for your help and leadership, and that of your colleagues on the full Committees” to avoid the incomplete plan they fear, the letter concludes. “This may require stepping back from each of the Congressional bills now passed by Committees and refocusing on the whole. Congress’ interests and the Administration’s interests are more alike than different. We urge your support for a new NASA plan.”
By Jeff Foust on 2010 August 18 at 1:12 pm ET Conventional wisdom has it that Democrats are pro-big government and Republicans are pro-big business; oversimplistic, perhaps, but illustrative nonetheless of one of the major differences between the country’s two major political parties. Two Congressional races in Florida are providing additional proof that, when it comes to space policy, those philosophies are reversed.
In Florida’s 15th Congressional District, immediately south of the Kennedy Space Center, Rep. Bill Posey (R) is running for reelection and making space—and jobs—a major issue in his campaign, according to Sunshine State News. The thousands of jobs that will be lost when the shuttle is retired will come “at a worse economic time” than the end of the Apollo era (when Posey himself was laid off from McDonnell Douglas). As for creating jobs from commercial space ventures, he sounds skeptical: “(The Obama administration) keeps talking about this great commercial space market, but… there are no specific plans for exploration.” By contrast, his likely Democratic challenger, Shannon Roberts, is more positive about the prospects for commercial human spaceflight. “(Private companies) are really ready to take this on. I think it’s very timely,” she said.
In the neighboring 24th Congressional District, which does include KSC, incumbent Rep. Suzanne Kosmas (D) supports something like the compromise NASA authorization bill the Senate passed earlier this month, providing some funding for commercial crew development while pushing NASA to start immediate development of a hevy-lift vehicle, she tells Florida Today. Most of the Republicans who are vying to run against her in the general election, though, are either quiet on the subject of commercial spaceflight or opposed to it. In the words of one candidate, Tom Garcia: “I don’t think you can just turn it into a commercial industry. It needs to stay under government control.” An exception is Deon Long, who said he supports “privatizing low-orbit missions”.
By Jeff Foust on 2010 August 17 at 7:31 am ET Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) is expected to announced today legislation that would provide tax brakes for the commercial space industry. The Commercial Space Jobs and Investment Act would establish up to five enterprise zones around the country where businesses involved in the commercial space industry could get a variety of tax breaks or credits; the legislation would also provide tax credits for investment in such companies (the credits would be valued at 20 percent of their investment, which would have to remain in place for five years, according to the AP.)
The legislation faces two major challenges. One is that there’s no offset for the cost of the legislation, which would depend on just how many companies and investors take advantage of the bill. The second is that Nelson is introducing the bill very late in the current Congress: given the limited time left this year, even with a lame-duck session after November’s elections, it seems at first glance unlikely that the bill would make it through unless attached to other legislation.
In addition to Nelson’s legislation, details are emerging about the plan to provide $40 million in support to the Space Coast to help offset job losses and other economic impacts from the retirement of the shuttle. President Obama, who announced the funding in his April 15th speech at the Kennedy Space Center, asked for a plan by August 15th. Most of that money, $35 million, will go for grants to support businesses in several markets, including aviation, clean energy, homeland security, information technology and life sciences. The other $5 million would be for a proposed FAA commercial space center at Cape Canaveral, few details of which were disclosed. More details about the plan are due out today.
By Jeff Foust on 2010 August 15 at 10:58 am ET While the Senate version of the NASA authorization bill, S. 3729, made it clear that the heavy-lift launch vehicle it calls for, the Space Launch System, should be developed by “extend[ing] or modify[ing] existing vehicle development and associated contracts”, it wasn’t specific beyond that in terms of vehicle design. However, as Space News reported Friday, the report accompanying the bill goes into additional detail about their desired vehicle design. From section 302 of the report:
The Committee anticipates that in order to meet the specified vehicle capabilities and requirements, the most cost-effective and `evolvable’ design concept is likely to follow what is known as an `in-line’ vehicle design, with a large center tank structure with attached multiple liquid propulsion engines and, at a minimum, two solid rocket motors composed of at least four segments being attached to the tank structure to form the core, initial stage of the propulsion vehicle. The Committee will closely monitor NASA’s early planning and design efforts to ensure compliance with the intent of this section.
While Space News concludes that this means the new heavy-lifter would look a lot like Ares 5, it’s possible that variants of the Jupiter vehicle proposed by the DIRECT team may also qualify. The use of “in-line” in the report language would seem to indicate they are not interested in any sidemount vehicle concepts under study recently, however.
There’s a bigger question, though, addressed in the article: should Congress be in the business of mandating a specific vehicle design? Doug Cooke, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems, told Space News that he would like to “broaden the trade space” for any HLV mandated by Congress “to make sure we don’t preclude possible answers that might be the optimum overall”. Even beyond the vehicle design question, though, are other issues, such as whether the vehicle can be developed by the end of 2016 (as mandated in the legislation) with the authorized funding, and also what exactly the vehicle would be launching in 2017 and following years, given the lack of existing or planned payloads that require a vehicle capable of placing at least 70 tons in LEO. It could be used to launch Orion, of course, but it would be overkill (and potentially costly), and the 70-100 tons could be too small for some proposed exploration architectures, as former NASA administrator Mike Griffin noted earlier this month.
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