By Jeff Foust on 2010 April 7 at 1:03 pm ET Space advocates on Florida’s Space Coast are gearing up for Sunday’s “Save Space” rally in Cocoa, Rep. Suzanne Kosmas (D-FL) the latest politician to agree to participate in the event. Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL), Sen. George LeMieux (R-FL), and Lt. Governor Jeff Kottkamp, along with other state and local politicians, are participating in the event. Organizers are hoping to attract 5,000 for the late afternoon event.
It’s not the only effort art rallying and lobbying in the region, though. On Sunday a group of Embry-Riddle students organized their own “Roadside Awareness Rally” about the new plan, holding signs along a Daytona Beach road with slogans like “Let Us Go To The Moon” and, bizarrely, “Constellation will REVIVE our WORLD’S ECONOMY!” (um, points for enthusiasm, at least.) The students are affiliated with a group at ERAU called Save NASA”, which appears to be separate from the “#saveNASA” meme that swept through Twitter in November but has since appeared to die out.
Meanwhile, about two dozen Space Coast residents have signed up to participate in the annual lobbying effort by Citizens for Space Exploration in May in Washington. They’ll be going, according to the Florida Today article, “to plead with lawmakers to support the space industry before it evaporates.” Interestingly, if you go to the Citizens for Space Exploration web site, you’ll see a large illustration of an Ares 1 launching with the words, “Our mission is to promote awareness of and support for NASA and the US Space Exploration Policy”. Somehow, though, it sounds like they won’t be in total lockstep with the new policy, as illustrated in the FY2011 NASA budget proposal.
Not everyone, though, is rallying against the agency’s new direction. The Orlando Sentinel reports that Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne will no longer support lobbying efforts for Constellation. “Instead,” the Sentinel reports, “sources say that the company really wants Obama’s proposed 2011 budget to include a new rocket development program, a clear destination and a development time-line which are currently conspicuous by their absence from the White House’s financial plan that still has to be approved by Congress.” The report adds, anecdotally, that Boeing is also preparing for a future without Constellation: it omitted a section about the program in the latest version of its shuttle “Reporters Notebooks” handed out at the STS-131 launch earlier this week.
By Jeff Foust on 2010 April 6 at 6:29 am ET With still few details publicly announced about next Thursday’s presidential space conference at the Kennedy Space Center, there’s no shortage of speculation and predictions about what may be announced there. On SpaceRef Keith Cowing sees signs of a compromise that would preserve Orion in a scaled-down “Orion Lite” version, along with a shuttle sidemount HLV concept. Ares 1 and 5 would remain dead, and the shuttle program would be stretched out at a low flight rate to close the gap. The Orion Lite capsule would launch on EELVs as a government alternative to commercial vehicles, whose development would continue under the revised plan.
The Mars Society has its own, somewhat different, insights into what may come on April 15. “Information received by the Mars Society indicates that there is a real chance that on April 15, President Barack Obama will announce a bold new space policy that breaks substantially from the disastrous ‘flexible path to nowhere’ policy floated by administration spokesmen before Congress on February 2,” they claim. (It’s not clear what this February 2 event was, as there was no Congressional hearing or other public event on the Hill that day, one day after the budget was released.) The organization suggests there is a camp within the administration advocating for a different approach, one that would also involve the development of an Orion Lite as well as an HLV and some kind of hab module, but with an emphasis on a human mission to a near Earth asteroid (NEA) on an aggressive timetable: by 2016.
“There is REAL SUPPORT for an NEA plan such as that indicated above, but the outcome is by no means certain,” the Mars Society argues (emphasis in original.) “If on April 15, Obama commits to a piloted NEA mission by 2016, we will be well on our way to the Red Planet.” The question is whether there is a real argument within the administration for mounting such a mission, or if this is little more than a case of wishful thinking by Mars advocates.
By Jeff Foust on 2010 April 3 at 12:45 pm ET There are no prawns or other extraterrestrials (that we know about) in Florida’s 19th congressional district, but it’s still of interest to the space community as it will host a special election this month to fill the House seat vacated by Robert Wexler earlier this year. The Palm Beach Post posed questions to the two major candidates, Democrat Ted Deutsch and Republican Edward Lynch, and threw in one question about space policy: “Was President Obama right to cancel the shuttle replacement and privatize the space program?”
Deutsch appeared to support the FY 2011 budget proposal in his response, but noted his concerns about the impact of the shuttle’s retirement on employment in the region. “While I welcome the private sector’s involvement, we need to strike a balance and protect the 9,000 workers who might lose their jobs – especially during this time of high unemployment.” Lynch, though, made it clear he was opposed to the new plan: “Farming out large portions of the manned space program to private firms is a mistake simply because we can’t guarantee that private firms will have enough capital to fund programs that by their very nature are risky, unpredictable, and subject to huge cost overruns. There is simply no good reason for putting our manned space exploration efforts on hold for the foreseeable future while our strategic competitors continue their space exploration efforts.”
The district, it should be noted, is strongly Democratic, and Wexler, who has endorsed Deutsch, handily defeated Lynch in the 2008 general election.
By Jeff Foust on 2010 April 2 at 8:48 am ET Former NASA administrator Mike Griffin sat down for an interview with the web site Ars Technica and reiterated his belief that the change in direction for NASA’s human spaceflight program is a bad decision. “I can’t imagine anyone is wondering what I think, because I’ve been quoted often on that,” he said. “The administration’s new budget offers a plan to dismantle an ongoing program, but offers no coherent replacement.”
During the interview Griffin made the case for having a government-run human spaceflight program rather than outsourcing it entirely to the private sector, which the current proposal will do in the case of Earth-to-LEO transportation. “[I]s there a value for a government-led human space flight program? See, what’s being missed here is that NASA is being taken out of the business of conducting human space flight, and I think that’s wrong,” he said, noting that question has been lost in the debate over various options for launch vehicles and spacecraft. “We need to focus on the larger issues: should NASA… should the US government be leading the human space flight program or not, and what are the goals? I am unsatisfied with the President’s answers to those questions.”
Griffin said he believes that, eventually, commercial providers will be able to perform human spaceflight, but that doesn’t mean the government shouldn’t also have that capability, noting that government-owned ships and planes operate alongside commercial ones. “So, I find it bad policy to put the US government in a position where it is hostage to the services of commercial contractors, with no government alternative,” he said. He’s also skeptical of handing over government money to “so-called commercial firms” who want to develop vehicles with it, but without the same level of oversight as a government-led program. “As a taxpayer, I would ask: in what sense is it appropriate for taxpayer funds to be provided to commercial industry without government oversight? That’s the crux of the issue here.”
He also stated that the Moon should remain the next destination for human space exploration, and only after that should there be missions to near Earth asteroids or other destinations, including Mars. “We need a robust program of exploration; the president’s plan does not offer that.”
By Jeff Foust on 2010 April 2 at 7:53 am ET With just under two weeks before the president’s big space conference at the Kennedy Space Center, people are still wondering about the details of the event, including just who will get to participate. Of course, when many people ask who will get to go, they’re really asking, “Will I be able to attend?” Congressman Bill Posey (R-FL) is just a little more direct than those folks. In a letter to President Obama earlier this week, released by his office yesterday, he was clear in his request, in the letter’s first paragraph: “I write to inform you that I would very much appreciate the opportunity to participate in the event with you.”
The rest of the letter was devoted to his argument to extend the space shuttle in order to prevent job losses on the Space Coast and maintain US leadership in human spaceflight. If the administration continues current plans to retire the shuttle without an identified successor vehicle, Posey argues, “we will fall permanently behind competing nations, such as China and Russia, which will press forward with manned missions to the moon and eventually to Mars. Such a scenario is not in our nation’s security and economic interest.”
Incidentally, Obama’s visit to Florida on the 15th won’t be exclusively for the KSC space conference. He will also attend a Democratic National Committee fundraiser hosted by singer Gloria Estefan and her husband, Emilio, in Miami, the Miami Herald reports. Getting into that event appears, for now, to be a little more straightforward than attending the KSC event: just $30,400 a couple will get you into the Estefans’ home and presumably some face time with the president. Or, you can spend $250 to $1,250 to attend a separate fundraiser in Miami with the president, also on the 15th, although presumably in a less intimate setting. Those additional events suggest the president at least won’t be spending the full day at KSC on the 15th.
By Jeff Foust on 2010 April 1 at 6:06 am ET Two months ago today the White House released its FY11 budget proposal that contained sweeping changes for NASA, initiating a cycle of commentary and criticism of the planned change in direction for the agency’s exploration plans that has not ceased. As the Orlando Sentinel notes, many people are anxiously awaiting additional details about the plan, which may be forthcoming on April 15 when President Obama visits the Kennedy Space Center. “Administration sources said Obama is expected to defend his NASA vision when he comes to Florida,” the Sentinel reports, “starting with an effort to channel John F. Kennedy’s famous ‘we choose to go to the moon’ speech in 1962.” Locals are also hoping for more details about plans to fund modernization of the launch infrastructure at the Kennedy Space Center, fearing that effort could be politically vulnerable if not better explained.
Criticism of the plan has also fallen into a rut, with the usual concerns about the loss of national prestige and reliance on untested commercial providers. In an op-ed in Wednesday’s issue of POLITICO, Reps. Pete Olson (R-TX) and Ed Perlmutter (D-CO) attack plans to cancel the Constellation program and turn over human access to low Earth orbit to the private sector. “Our dominance in human space coincided with our status as a superpower,” they state (evidently the US was not a superpower before the 1960s.) “Ending human space flight would be a major setback for our country. It could set us back 50 years and force us to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to get Americans into space,” they claim. Turning human spaceflight over “to unproved commercial entities to reinvent what we have already achieved”, they argue, “is a wasteful redirection of taxpayer funds.”
There may be a secret ingredient for winning over recalcitrant members of Congress, though: teachers. Bob Werb, chairman of the board of the Space Frontier Foundation, described a “remarkable experience” he had recently in Washington, holding meetings in Congressional offices with teachers selected for its “Teachers in Space” program. Those meetings, he said, went much better than he expected, even with offices that gave him a less-than-warm reception earlier in the month during ProSpace’s March Storm lobbying blitz. “While I certainly don’t expect politicians under pressure to bring home the bacon to come around to active support of the proposed NASA budget, there is hope that their opposition can be moderated into grudging acceptance of the inevitable,” he writes. “Doing so in the context of also supporting an educational agenda for space may be just the honey we need to get some key players to swallow what they see as the bitter medicine of reform.”
By Jeff Foust on 2010 March 31 at 12:52 pm ET
It should not be that much of a surprise, but Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) announced today that she will remain in the Senate for the remainder of her current term, backing off from an earlier plan to resign at some point this year. Hutchison, who lost the Republican primary for Texas governor earlier this month, had previously indicated that she would step down after the primary regardless of how it turned out; she said last year that she would resign during the primary campaign itself to devote her full attention to it, but decided to remain in the Senate. Her term runs through 2012.
“For family reasons, I had planned to begin making a transition home to Texas this spring,†Hutchison said in a statement. “But it is clear to me that the stakes in our nation’s capitol have never been higher. President Obama’s victory on health care legislation has emboldened those who want an even bigger and more intrusive federal government.â€
Her decision is not that surprising because the day after losing the gubernatorial primary she formally introduced legislation that could extend the life of the shuttle and take other steps to preserve US access to the ISS, suggesting that she planned to remain in Congress at least long enough to try and shepherd her legislation through the Senate. She is also the ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee, which will take up her bill as well as other NASA-related legislation.
By Jeff Foust on 2010 March 31 at 6:49 am ET In the eyes of many the new NASA exploration plan announced in the FY2011 budget proposal is a massive change, one that abandons the previous goal in the Vision for Space Exploration of returning humans to the Moon by 2020 and, some fear, human space exploration altogether. However, one NASA official said yesterday that the new plan doesn’t change the underlying goal for human space exploration.
The new plan represents “a change in approach and philosophy, but not a change in goal,” said Laurie Leshin, NASA deputy administrator for exploration, in a speech yesterday at a Marshall Institute event on space exploration policy in Washington. “The goal remains the same: to see human explorers out in the solar system.” The new focus on “sustainable and affordable” human space exploration isn’t that new, she said, noting that it was emphasized back in 2004 by the Aldridge Commission that evaluated the Vision for Space Exploration (a committee she served on when she was a professor at Arizona State University.) “We’ve come back to needing to have new and enabling approaches in order to make this a sustainable program for the future.”
To emphasize the need for technology development—one of the cornerstones of the new plan—to enable sustainable human space exploration, she put up a chart showing the mass needed to carry out the latest version of NASA’s Design Reference Mission for human Mars exploration. “If today, with today’s technology, decided we wanted to go to Mars, our mission would have a mass about 12 times of the space station,” she said. “It’s just impossible.” Various technologies, from reducing cryogenic boiloff to in situ resource utilization, can get it down to a more manageable level, she said. “It’s not that these technologies are nice to have, they’re absolutely required if we’re going to have a sustainable path out into the solar system.”
“This is obviously a very different approach to enabling future human spaceflight than we’ve been on,” she said, but added that so far NASA hasn’t been doing as good a job as it should in communicating the benefits of this approach. “I think the challenge before us now is to paint the picture better, frankly, than we have on how these actually feed into future human flights. And I will tell you, that this is the thing that we are working on today.” She said that “very shortly” NASA will be providing some opportunities for the space community to interact with the agency, in the form of requests for information and industry days. “It’s been a little bit frustrating so far, to me and I’m sure to you all as well, that we’ve had to be sort of hunkered down, and we’re coming out of our shell in the next couple of months.”
By Jeff Foust on 2010 March 29 at 7:19 pm ET While her subcommittee’s hearing on the NASA budget last week as postponed, Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) did get an opportunity to speak briefly about the agency’s new direction at the end of an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” program yesterday. Asked by host Candy Crowley about the president’s decision “to end all funding for manned missions to the moon”, Mikulski reiterated previous statements that her top concern was astronaut safety. She also said that “we need a lot more fact finding” about the plan, including the apparent lack of a destination for space exploration.
The relevant excerpt of the interview is below:
CROWLEY: Senator Mikulski, I want — because we are so running out of time here, and I wanted to get to a question that’s specific to a responsibility that you have in the U.S. Senate. And that is, the president’s decision to stop funding, to end all funding for manned missions to the moon. Do you support that?
MIKULSKI: Well, I support astronaut safety. The No. 1 concern I have is wherever we go, whatever means is astronaut safety.
The other is, I think it is very confusing now, because we don’t know what our space destination is, and, therefore, our space mission. I think we need a lot more fact finding. We need to know a lot more from the administration. But one thing we know, we will always do everything to keep our astronauts safe, whatever is the mode of transportation.
By Jeff Foust on 2010 March 27 at 2:04 pm ET If there was a key takeaway from Friday’s Space Transportation Association luncheon speech by Gary Payton, the deputy under secretary of the Air Force for space programs, it’s that there’s no room for error when launching key military spacecraft. “We’re at the point now where our programs are so critical to the warfighter that we cannot afford a launch failure,” he said. Payton noted in particular four “first of their kind” spacecraft are scheduled for launch this year: the first GPS Block 2F satellite, the first Space Based Surveillance System (SBSS) satellite, the first Advanced EHF communications satellite, and ORS-1, the first Operationally Responsive Space (ORS) operational satellite. “So I need four good launch vehicles,” he said.
That means no cutting corners on launch costs. “I am paying extra for mission assurance on all of our launch vehicles, but to me that’s great,” he said. “I would love to save $10 million on a launch, but if it costs me—if that launch vehicle fails and I splash a $2-billion satellite—then I’ve been pushing on the wrong end of the lever.” He continued: “Launch reliability is my top priority. Our constellations for any of our missions cannot tolerate a launch failure.”
However, he said he’s still concerned about launch costs and looking for ways to reduce them without affecting reliability. NASA’s plans are having a ripple effect, he said, but it’s not all due to NASA’s current plans to cancel Constellation. He said he started to see price increases for engines last summer as production of the Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME) wound down with the impending retirement of the shuttle. “We’ve known that for many, many months and we’ve been working with independent cost estimators and ULA, United Launch Alliance, to mitigate those predicted cost increases.” One possibility would be to do a bulk buy of vehicles, something he said that would require the ability to do a multi-year procurement.
He also discussed the impact to the solid rocket motor industrial base caused by the shuttle’s retirement and plans to cancel Ares. The bigger impact of that, he said, is on the Minuteman and Trident ballistic missiles, and not the strap-on motors used by EELVs. Still, he said, “we very intelligently have to walk down the path of the potential reduction in the solid rocket motor industrial base.” He said he had met just earlier in the week with NASA administrator Charles Bolden to discuss “how the Air Force, NRO, and NASA will work together as the future unfolds” with respect to the industrial base and other issues.
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