By Jeff Foust on 2010 April 21 at 1:05 pm ET While officials from dozens of nations met in Washington last week for a summit on nuclear security, astronomers were also getting riled up about nuclear issues, albeit of a very different kind. The American Astronomical Society (AAS) sent out an “Action Alert” to its members last Monday, asking them to contract Congress about restarting production of plutonium-238. This isotope of plutonium is used in radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) in deep-space missions, but the domestic supply of the isotope has been exhausted and access to Russian supplies of Pu-238 has become problematic. The 2011 budget proposals include $15 million each for NASA and the Department of Energy to restart Pu-238 production in the US; however, a similar effort last year in DoE was not funded by Congress.
The action alert includes a sample letter members can use to send to their members of Congress asking them to support the requested funding. The letter discusses the importance of Pu-238 for certain space missions, and that the isotope is not used for weapons. It concludes: “The future of American space exploration is at stake!”
By Jeff Foust on 2010 April 21 at 12:52 pm ET On Tuesday the administration took another step forward in efforts to reform export control policy in the US, a source of considerable distress for many in the space industry. The goal of the new plan, as laid out in a speech by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in a speech, is to simplify the current system to make it more effective. “The United States is thought to have one of the most stringent export regimes in the world, but stringent is not the same as effective,” Gates notes.
The new plan, as described in a fact sheet issued by the White House, is called by one DoD official the “four singles”: a single control list, a single enforcement agency, a single IT system, and a single licensing agency. That would a major change from the current system, where there’s the more stringent US Munitions List and less stringent Commerce Control List, overseen by different agencies with different systems. Satellites and related components, for example, were once on the CCL but moved to the USML in the late 1990s; there’s legislation in Congress right now that would allow the president to remove them from the USML (presumably back onto the CCL) if he so chooses.
Left unstated is how this three-phase plan (starting with “significant and immediate improvements to the existing system” while laying the foundation for the more significant changes that will require Congressional action) will take, or how space-related items will fare under the new plan. Gates, according to a press account of his speech, talked about a “tiered approach to export control that he said would allow the United States to build higher walls around truly crucial technologies while lowering walls around others”; how high the walls will be around space technologies remains to be seen.
By Jeff Foust on 2010 April 18 at 5:52 pm ET The proposed changes to NASA’s exploration plans have, in the last few months, generated a lot of discussion and debate (if not necessarily as much insight) among those who, by profession and/or interest, consider themselves part of the space community. But what about the general public? A new poll indicates that they haven’t been paying much attention.
The poll, released Saturday by The Everett Group, surveyed 1,200 people in the US between March 27 and April 12, three days before the president’s speech. When asked how familiar people were with the proposed changes announced by the FY11 budget proposal released at the beginning of February, only 10% said they were very familiar, with an additional 24% saying they were somewhat familiar. By contrast, 42% said they were “not at all familiar” with the proposed changes. Yet, 70% said they were somewhat or very interested in the US space program! Adding to that lack of knowledge, 35% said they believed there were private companies in the US today launching humans into Earth orbit. (One could argue that Space Adventures is such a company, but it would be something of a stretch as they’re more a broker for the Russian flight that an actual launch services provider.)
Asked what they thought of the plan “based on what you know” (which wasn’t much, apparently), 42% had “mixed feelings” about it, compared to 24% who supported it to some degree and 32% who opposed it to some degree. How much those people oppose the plan because of its change in direction, versus general opposition to human spaceflight, isn’t clear from the poll results. However, there is a nearly equal split in another question about the government’s priorities: 45% say the bigger priority should be in cutting spending on space to reduce the deficit, while 47% say it should be to increase space program spending to maintain US leadership.
Another recent poll by Rasmussen Reports found the situation even worse for space advocates: 49% said that, given the state of the economy, the US should “cut back on space exploration”, versus 34% who said no. That poll found a split on the question of whether the space program should be funded by the government or the private sector : 38% say the private sector and 36% the government.
By Jeff Foust on 2010 April 18 at 11:49 am ET With all the attention that Florida has gotten in recent days with President Obama’s visit to the Kennedy Space Center, as well as the promise of $40 million to support workforce transition efforts there, the folks in Texas are feeling a little left out. On Friday several Houston-area congressmen, along with Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), criticized the president for his plan as well as leaving out Texas in that workforce plan, the Houston Chronicle reported. Rep. Pete Olson (R-TX), whose district includes the Johnson Space Center, invited the president to visit it “to understand the potential losses to U.S. spaceflight capabilities.”
Their criticism is modest, though, compared to comments made by Texas Gov. Rick Perry Saturday in a press conference Saturday in Fort Worth. Perry, a Republican running for reelection this year, said it was “very disconcerting” for him to have the president talking about supporting jobs at KSC while saying nothing about JSC. “The message there was: ‘You’re from Texas. We don’t care about you,'” he said, as quoted by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “I tell people this president has put a target on Texas’ back.”
Perry’s Democratic opponent in the general election, former Houston mayor Bill White, also wants more details about the revised plan, but without the same rhetorical zeal as Gov. Perry. “To properly plan and continue to be a leader in NASA’s new future, the Johnson Space Center community needs more details as soon as possible,” White said in a statement a day before the president’s speech, after the fact sheet about the revised plan. “I’ll encourage more cooperation and open communication between NASA, our congressional delegation, and our JSC family.”
By Jeff Foust on 2010 April 16 at 5:54 pm ET While published Congressional responses tended to be more negative than positive, the opposite was true in responses from companies and other organizations, although not without some caveats. Not surprisingly, SpaceX founder Elon Musk—who got to give the president a brief tour of the company’s facilities at Cape Canaveral prior to the speech—was pleased with the plan. “Cancellation [of Constellation] was therefore simply a matter of time and thankfully we have a president with the political courage to do the right thing sooner rather than later,” Musk said in a statement released shortly before the speech, which he said could be as important as President Kennedy’s 1962 Rice University speech. “Thankfully, as a result of funds freed up by this cancellation, there is now hope for a bright future in space exploration.”
The Commercial Spaceflight Federation, an industry organization for the emerging commercial human spaceflight industry, praised the speech and the plan’s continued emphasis on commercial crew transportation in a statement that features quotes from people ranging from CSF chairman Mark Sirangelo to Bill Nye (of Science Guy fame). Said CSF president Brett Alexander: “The President’s message today was spot-on: the new plan means more jobs, more spacecraft, more new technologies, and more astronaut flights.” A similar group, the Next Step in Space Coalition, also endorsed the updated NASA exploration plan.
AIAA president David Thompson, who also is CEO of Orbital Sciences Corporation, called the speech “inspiring” in a statement released by AIAA. “As with President Kennedy’s speech in 1961,” Thompson said, “President Obama set out goals that will test our ability to advance technology, field revolutionary new systems, and sustain commitment over many years, ensuring the United States will maintain its leadership role in space in the 21st century as we were in the 20th.”
The National Space Society was “gratified” to see the president refine his space exploration policy, noting that it had “advocated for the inclusion of more detailed goals” when the FY11 budget proposal came out in February. The NSS planned to work with various players “to foster, achieve, and sustain the consensus needed to see it [the plan] come to fruition.”
The Coalition for Space Exploration, an industry organization, was more conditional in its support for the plan. In particular, the organization expressed concern that waiting until 2015 to make a decision on a heavy-lift vehicle design “threatens to sacrifice a generation of experience and expertise in our nation’s human space flight workforce.” The organization also worried about relying solely on commercial providers for human access to LEO. “In the final analysis, the U.S. human spaceflight program is a national imperative, not only a commercial interest.”
Boeing also raised the issue of delaying a heavy-lift design decision to 2015 as well as the uncertainty about what kind of crewed spacecraft would be used for missions beyond LEO. “[W]e believe the United States should be on a clear path to accelerate the development and production of this critical system, along with a deep-space capsule,” according to a company statement. “We have the technology and the people to commence development of these vehicles now.” However, the company endorsed other aspects of the plan, including the extension of ISS operations.
Aerospace Industries Association president Marion Blakey, who called for clear goals and a national space strategy in a speech earlier this week, was “encouraged” by the updated plan, in particular the workforce transition plan the president discussed in Thursday’s speech. “Now we need the more immediate specifics and short-term milestones that will allow us to measure our progress toward America’s space program and achieving the brilliant future he envisions.”
By Jeff Foust on 2010 April 16 at 12:10 pm ET While the ultimate goal of President Obama’s speech yesterday was to secure support for his new space exploration plan, the short-term reaction from members of Congress is little different than it was prior to speech. Those who opposed the plan continue to oppose it, while those who supported it still do, perhaps with fewer reservations than before.
Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) said the revised plan addressed some of his concerns and that “the president is moving in the right direction.” However, he said “we’ll change some things” to what the president proposed, perhaps by accelerating a decision on a heavy-lift launcher. “We’re going to keep testing the monster rockets at Kennedy Space Center.”
Rep. Suzanne Kosmas (D-FL) also said the changes to the original plan “are steps in the right direction” but added that “there is still room for improvement.” Her released noted the House bill she co-sponsored that would permit an extension of the shuttle (something not mentioned in the president’s speech) and that she wanted “to make sure these ideas are fully explored.”
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), who has backed the plan in congressional hearings, reiterated his support in a release after the president’s speech. “President Obama reiterated the nation’s long-term space goal – America, and American astronauts, exploring the solar system. This remains the right goal,” said Rohrabacher, a long-time advocate for space commercialization. “Getting the private sector more involved in space efforts will free up NASA to explore the solar system and the universe beyond.”
Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, gave the revised plan a modest endorsement. “I commend President Obama for strengthening and clarifying his vision for NASA,” he said in a statement. “I am pleased the president’s plan retains its focus on innovation, research and technology development – the drivers of our economy.”s
Those who didn’t like the original plan aren’t fond of the revision. “He has not budged on his plan to retire the shuttle eight months from now and that is deeply disappointing to me but I will continue to press for Shuttle extension,” said Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL). He was skeptical of the jobs numbers touted in the speech. “I wouldn’t feel comfortable taking those job numbers to the bank.”
Rep. Pete Olson (R-TX), the ranking member of the space subcommittee of the House Science and Technology Committee, was also not impressed with the speech. “His announcement today does nothing to solidify that leadership over the long term and continues a flawed hope in what might be instead of what we already have,” he said. Plans to turn Orion into a CRV “downgraded” it, and a decision in 2015 on a heavy-lift vehicle design was too late: “Stating that you may select a heavy lift design in five years is not a bold commitment to exploration.” Olson also complained about the “the Administration’s blatant focus on Florida”, in particular the workforce initiative announced in the speech.
Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX), ranking member of the full science committee, was concerned about a loss of national prestige. “The President’s announcement today, unfortunately, still will do nothing to ensure America’s superiority in human space exploration or to decrease our reliance on Russia in the interim. America needs to have a bold presence in space and a proven plan for access to low Earth orbit and beyond. This is essential to our national security, and global predominance.”
Another Texas Republican, Rep. John Culberson, dismissed the president’s speech as “heavy on rhetoric but woefully light on substance”. His statement gave him the opportunity to use another analogy for commercialization of human spaceflight: “This would be akin to privatizing the Navy and simply renting out the U.S.S. Harry S. Truman any time we needed to defend ourselves.”
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee, reiterated her concerns about a long gap in human access to LEO. “There are alternatives and a bipartisan group of members of Congress ready to work with the President to preserve our place in space, but his current proposals remain well short of a space policy worthy of a great nation.”
Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) dismissed the plan as being built on a “quicksand foundation”. “As a result of the alternative offered by the President today, there is now no hope for a bright future in human space exploration. The President’s new plan continues the destruction of forty years of U.S. space supremacy by pinning our hopes for success on unproven commercial companies.” His colleague, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) said he was “encouraged” that the president felt the need to modify his original plans but that the new version “fails to preserve the United States’ role as the established international leader in space exploration.”
Sen. Bob Bennett (R-UT) said the president “is still missing the mark” with the revised plan because it fails to grasp the link Bennett sees between Constellation and missile systems. “Eliminating the Constellation program, and especially the Ares I rocket, will decimate an industrial base that is not only key to maintaining our supremacy in space exploration, but also crucial to maintaining and strengthening our national security efforts.” Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) called the revised plan “misguided”. “This is getting silly. The President’s plan wastes billions of dollars and years of valuable time,†said Hatch. “I would say the administration’s plan is laughable, but I can’t find much humor in it when the consequences to space exploration and American workers during tough economic times are so dire.â€
In the midst of all this rhetoric, what’s more interesting is who didn’t say anything about the speech, including Rep. Bart Gordon (D-TN), chair of the House Science Committee; Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), chair of the science committee’s space subcommittee; and Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), chair of the appropriations subcommittee whose jurisdiction includes NASA. In the last case we’ll know soon enough: her subcommittee is holding a hearing on the NASA budget proposal on Thursday the 22nd, a hearing rescheduled from last month.
By Jeff Foust on 2010 April 15 at 4:41 pm ET While a few hundred people got to see President Obama speak in person about NASA and his new plan for the agency at the Kennedy Space Center, I sat in a far larger audience at the National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs to watch a video of the speech. Some highlights:
- For those who wanted destinations and deadlines, you got ‘em. Obama called for a human mission to an asteroid by 2025 and a mission to Mars orbit by the mid-2030s, and “a landing on Mars will follow”.
- The Moon, on the other hand, is old news to the president. “But the simple fact is, we have been there before. There is a lot more space to explore, and a lot more to learn when we do.”
- In addition to the Orion CRV and HLV design announcements, Obama announced a $40-million initiative led by the White House and NASA, with other government agencies, “to develop a plan for regional economic growth and job creation” due by August 15. It wasn’t clear if this would be a job just for Florida or nationwide.
- In one sentence in the speech, Obama seemed to endorse the idea of space settlement: “Our goal is the capacity for people to work and learn, operate and live safely beyond the Earth for extended periods of time, ultimately in ways that are more sustainable and even indefinite.”
- Obama emphasized throughout his speech his support for NASA and human spaceflight, keeping US as a leader. “I am 100 percent committed to the mission of NASA and its future,” he said. Later, regarding canceling Constellation: “But we will actually reach space faster and more often under this new plan, in ways that will help us improve our technological capacity and lower our costs, which are both essential for the long-term sustainability of space flight.”
- Notably absent from the speech: any mention of a shuttle extension, even by a single flight.
Immediately (within a minute) after the end of the speech, the Space Foundation hosted an “instant analysis” panel featuring former congressman Bob Walker and Lon Levin, best known as a cofounder of XM Satellite Radio. A few highlights there:
- Both Walker and Levin appeared to like the plan. Walker said the speech will cause the political establishment to “take a deep breath” and reexamine their interest in or opposition to the plan, while Levin called it a good speech that recognized the need to match goals and resources.
- Walker noted a problem with the original rollout of the plan in February was that it was done as a budget proposal. Members of Congress scrutinize them to see what they would lose, rather than what we can gain.
- Moving forward in Congress, Walker said that while the most logical path for building support would be in the space subcommittee of the House Science Committee, that committee has a number of members with NASA centers in their districts and thus may not be as receptive. A better alternative may be the Senate Appropriations Committee, through Sen. Mikulski (and her subcommittee is holding a hearing on the NASA budget next week.)
- One concern Walker had is that he believes NASA will operate under a continuing resolution for several months because the appropriations bill would not be done in time. (He also seemed to indicate the possibility of a year-long CR.) Such a move would restrict NASA’s ability to start new programs or wind down Constellation.
- Asked at the end if the speech “changed hearts and minds”, Levin said he thought so, because the president did a good job delivering the speech, including discussing why we do space exploration. Walker said it will take some time to see how the public reacts. If the public believes that this enhances our leadership position in space, he said, they will support it.
By Jeff Foust on 2010 April 15 at 8:40 am ET Although the president won’t be speaking about space policy until this afternoon, several members of Congress are getting in the two cents in advance of the speech, based in part on the details of the slightly-revised plan released late Tuesday by the White House.
In an op-ed in the Orlando Sentinel today, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison makes the case for extending the shuttle and developing “a NASA-owned shuttle replacement”, with commercial systems as only a “supplement” to NASA capabilities. The decision to end the shuttle in 2010 was based on also ending the station in 2015, thus an extension of the ISS’s lifetime means that “flying the remaining shuttles scheduled for this year before completing an analysis of the station’s needs based on the new service date is a mistake.” Hutchison also made similar comments in a speech on the Senate floor on Monday.
In the Houston Chronicle, Reps. Gene Green (D-TX) and John Culberson (R-TX) argue that US human spaceflight “lies in deep peril” and that if Congress goes along with plans to cancel Constellation it will be “effectively ending the era of American leadership in space.” “The arguments for maintaining the Constellation program are simple”, they claim, noting the shutdown costs if Constellation is canceled and the costs and risks of paying the Russians to fly astronauts on Soyuz spacecraft. (They state that “there will be nothing to stop the Russians from raising our costs” once they have a monopoly on crew access, but when NASA extended its existing contract with Russia earlier this month the cost increase was rather modest, and attributed to inflation.) “Constellation is our only hope to close the current five-year gap in U.S. access to space,” they add, a conclusion that would appear to be in conflict with the final report of the Augustine Committee.
Sen. Bob Bennett (R-UT) issued a press release yesterday calling for the president to “fully revive” all of Constellation, including the Ares launch vehicles. “The president is wasting billions of taxpayer dollars to simply reinvent the wheel and develop another rocket after canceling the safe, cost-efficient and tested Ares rocket booster,” he said, referring to plans to select a design for a new heavy-lift vehicle by 2015.
And as you might expect, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) isn’t particularly keen on the tweaked NASA plan. “While the Administration may have finally realized that its initial budget request was a complete disaster, the new plan, from the same team, still ends human space flight,” he stated. “It is clear that the Administration does not believe that American leadership in human space flight is a priority worth fighting for.” Ironically, he issued a press release the same day titled “Time to Bury ‘Too Big to Fail'”, about government bailouts of financial firms and automakers. That sentiment does not appear to extend to human spaceflight.
By Jeff Foust on 2010 April 15 at 8:09 am ET
An oft-cited rationale for having NASA focus on returning astronauts to the Moon is that China is ramping up its efforts to do so and could beat us back there, with a concomitant loss of prestige for the US. There’s just one problem with this: the Chinese don’t appear to be a in particular hurry to go there, based on comments Wednesday by one senior Chinese official.
Wang Wenbao, director of the China Manned Space Engineering Office (CMSEO)—a position described as roughly equivalent to NASA associate administrator for space operations Bill Gerstenmaier—talked about China’s human spaceflight plans in a talk at the National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs on Wednesday. He outlined a series of missions to demonstrate docking and rendezvous technologies, first unmanned and then manned, as well as rudimentary human-tended space labs. The long-term goal, he said, was a modular space station, whose elements would be launched from a new spaceport on Hainan by its Long March 5 rocket under development. That facility, to be assembled between 2016 and 2022, would be able to support three people for long-duration stays (of unspecified periods), supported by Shenzhou spacecraft.
What was notable, though, was what he did not say. Not once during his presentation did he make any discussion of human mission to the Moon; his long-term plans stopped with the completion of their three-person space station in the early 2020s. That doesn’t mean that they’re not interested in doing so at some later date, but the fact that a leading official did not mention it at all in a major speech suggests that they’re in no rush go there, contrary to some claims in the US.
By Jeff Foust on 2010 April 15 at 7:39 am ET While what Neil Armstrong and two other astronauts wrote in a letter this week about NASA’s new exploration plan—concerns about loss of prestige have been raised in many quarters—that fact that the publicity-shy moonwalker put his name to it got enough attention that it came up during Wednesday’s White House press briefing. Press secretary Robert Gibbs dealt with several questions about NASA, a rarity in White House press conferences.
“The President will outline a renewed strategy tomorrow in Florida that will provide more jobs for the area, greater investment in innovation, more astronaut time in space, more rockets launching sooner, and a more ambitious and sustainable space program for America’s future,” Gibbs said, noting that the Augustine Committee found that Constellation was “un-executable” under existing timelines and budgets. “The program that had been in place,” he said, “was not going to — just simply not going to happen.”
There was some back-and-forth with reports on whether the administration was claiming that the new plan would eliminate the job losses in Florida. “The plan that the President will outline actually would result in more jobs for the area [Florida] than would have been had the plans simply been carried out,” Gibbs said, adding that the job losses from the shuttle program stem from a decision made in 2004 by the Bush Administration to retire the shuttle.
Gibbs added that while astronauts like Armstrong have been critical of the plan, others have supported it. “That’s why, again, there have been many, including Buzz Aldrin, who believe that what the President will outline represents our best opportunity and our best effort to get this agency and program back on pace to put astronauts and rockets into space, as the President so strongly desires.” To back up the point, the White House released a statement by Armstrong’s fellow Apollo 11 moonwalker, Buzz Aldrin, in support of the plan. “What this nation needs in order to maintain its position as the 21st century leader in space exploration is a near-term focus on lowering the cost of access to space and on developing key, cutting-edge technologies that will take us further and faster – while expanding our opportunities for exploration along the way,” Aldrin stated. “The President’s program will help us be in this endeavor for the long haul and will allow us to again push our boundaries to achieve new and challenging things beyond Earth. I believe that this is the right program at the right time, and I hope that NASA and our dedicated space community will embrace this new direction as much as I do.”
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