By Jeff Foust on 2009 November 17 at 6:36 am ET Space advocates have talked for a long time about winning a substantial budget increase for NASA. That talk has been emboldened in the last few months by the Augustine committee, whose report found that an increase of up to $3 billion a year was “more appropriate” to support human space exploration beyond LEO. Even people who disagree with some of the options and other findings in the report have seized upon this as something of a necessity for NASA.
There’s just one problem: NASA’s budget—as well as other domestic spending—might get slashed in the FY2011 budget request. The AP reported late last week that the White House was weighing a spending freeze or cuts of up five percent for non-military agencies, as part of an effort to decrease the budget deficit. An Orlando Sentinel article suggests it might even be worse: NASA has been told to prepare for as much as a ten-percent cut.
Keep in mind, though, that while agencies have been told to plan for cuts of up to five or ten percent, that doesn’t mean that all agencies will be subject to the same cuts. “When the president makes a decision on human spaceflight, he can ignore that,” an unidentified “senior administration official” told the Sentinel. The question will be how much of a priority human space exploration will be for the White House when it decides how much to cut—or increase—NASA’s budget.
By Jeff Foust on 2009 November 16 at 8:34 pm ET On Thursday Time magazine released its annual “best inventions” list. Topping the list as the best invention of the year, in the minds of the magazine’s staff, were NASA’s Ares rocket, dubbing the Ares 1 “a machine that can launch human beings to cosmic destinations we’d never considered before”. Nitpickers would note that the Ares 1 could not qualify as the “smartest and coolest thing built in 2009″ since the full-fledged Ares 1 is still in the design stage: only a suborbital prototype, the Ares 1-X, was built and flown this year.
That did not stop the chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee, Bart Gordon, and the chair of the space subcommittee, Gabrielle Giffords, from praising Time’s selection in a press release today. “This recognition by TIME is further proof that in spite of a challenging budgetary environment, NASA continues to demonstrate technological leadership,” Gordon said in the statement. “I’d like to congratulate NASA and all of the people who have worked on the development of the Ares rockets.”
Coming from the opposite direction, though, was the Space Frontier Foundation, who sharply criticized the selection in its own press release today. Foundation co-founder Rick Tumlinson called the award a “publicity hoax”, saying, “There was no boy in the balloon and there most definitely was no Ares rocket launched in Florida last month.”
While Time might have considered Ares the invention of the year, it’s not a sentiment shared by its readers, who have the option online of rating the importance of each of the 50 inventions profiled on a 1-to-100 scale. Ares comes in tied for 13th place (as of early Monday evening), with an average rating of 72. That puts it well behind the frontrunner, an electronic eye to allow the blind to see, a low-power but bright lightbulb, and a roof shingle/solar panel. Ares, though, is doing much better than another top-50 invention, the no-punt offense, whose standing probably plummeted (in New England, at least) after Sunday night’s Pats-Colts game.
By Jeff Foust on 2009 November 14 at 10:01 am ET One of the more prominent space supporters in the Senate won’t be leaving as soon as previously planned. As both the Washington Post and The Hill report, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) plans to remain in the Senate at least through the Texas gubernatorial primary next March. Hutchison, who is running for governor against incumbent Rick Perry, had previously said she should resign in the fall to devote herself full-time to the campaign. Hutchison is the ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee, with oversight of NASA.
By Jeff Foust on 2009 November 13 at 1:10 pm ET After the Space Frontier Foundation announced yesterday that it planned to revive the citizen space lobbying effort March Storm in 2010, I was curious what the response of ProSpace, who had run the event for most of its history, might be. I got the following press release earlier today from ProSpace executive director Winn Phillips (who I see has also commented on the previous post on this topic):
After a premature announcement of his demise, Mark Twain famously observed that “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.â€
This past week, The Space Frontier Foundation committed a similar mistake, releasing a statement that erroneously contended our annual March Storm event was allowed to “fade awayâ€.
Nothing could be further from the truth. ProSpace is an organization that is moving forward with strength and vision. And our trademark event, March Storm, remains the single most respected space activist event in Washington.
ProSpace did make an operational decision not to hold the event in 2009. In consultation with members of the House and Senate, the Obama administration and our membership, we determined that the singular focus on the dire state of the economy would obscure our message. Other organizations made other determinations, but the leadership of ProSpace stands by our decision and knows it to be the right one.
The success of our fourteen previous March Storm events is evident and a source of pride for our members. The leading indicator of that success is the fact that a number of other organizations decided to follow our lead and hold similar events in the same time frame as ProSpace.
We have always encouraged those other space groups to come to Washington to advance their organizational agendas and likewise applaud the proposed efforts of the Space Frontier Foundation. Our singular requirement is that they create an original name and identity for their event that does not imply the endorsement of ProSpace.
March Storm will remain the trademark event for ProSpace. We will be announcing our plan for 2010 shortly. It is an exciting time and we promise an exciting March Storm. Join us!
By Jeff Foust on 2009 November 12 at 12:45 pm ET From 1995 through 2008 a group of space advocates (organized in most years by the grassroots lobbying group ProSpace) held an annual lobbying blitz on Capitol Hill called March Storm (so named for the month the event took place). ProSpace did not perform a March Storm in 2009, though, citing “resource and time limitations”. However, according to an email from the Space Frontier Foundation this morning, March Storm will return in 2010. The event is still in the “early planning process”, according to the message, and how it will be run isn’t clear: the email referred to “The Space Frontier Foundation’s March Storm 2010″, and not “ProSpace’s March Storm 2010″.
“I think that it’s critical that Congress hears a pro-space (as opposed to a pro-industry or pro-NASA) agenda often. We had many successes as a result of our past efforts,” said Mike Heney, the March Storm project manager. “Which is why I was saddened when March Storm was allowed to fade away – and why I’ve decided to join with a group of like-minded March Storm veterans to resurrect this valuable event.”
By Jeff Foust on 2009 November 12 at 12:36 pm ET The space subcommittee of the House Science and Technology Committee has announced a hearing next week titled “The Growth of Global Space Capabilities: What’s Happening and Why It Matters”. The hearing will be Thursday the 19th at 10 am; no list of witnesses or hearing charter is available yet.
By Jeff Foust on 2009 November 11 at 1:09 pm ET If you recall last week’s post about a bipartisan “Dear Colleagues” letter to drum up support for increasing NASA’s budget, there’s a minor update. According to an updated blog post on NSS.org, the deadline for obtaining additional signatures, which had been November 5th, has been pushed back to November 17th. There’s no reason for the change, although one wonders if members of Congress were a little too distracted last week with the health care bill debate to focus their attention on the space agency. The number of cosigners listed has gone up to 40, with roughly an even split between Republicans and Democrats.
By Jeff Foust on 2009 November 9 at 6:51 am ET Last Monday Sen. Bill Nelson claimed that the White House would make a decision about NASA’s future by around Thanksgiving, based on a recent visit he had with the president on the subject. However, in an interview with Florida Today, Nelson appears to be telling a different story. Asked about the timeline for a decision, Nelson said that “sooner is better than later” but added that “I simply do not know” when such decisions would be announced. One can rationalize the two statements by concluding that Nelson said that he thought a decision would be made by Thanksgiving, but not announced until some unspecified later date, or that he was misinterpreted in one interview (or both).
Nelson added that he was “absolutely” convined that he and other space supporters in Congress could win over members and convince them to appropriate up to an additional $3 billion a year for NASA. Why he felt this way, when previous efforts to increase NASA’s budget by smaller amounts have failed, wasn’t discussed.
By Jeff Foust on 2009 November 6 at 7:38 pm ET A couple of exploration policy items from Space News: NASA administrator Charles Bolden told the publication that the so-called “flexible path” option of the Augustine report is “attractive to everybody”. That option defers a human return to the lunar surface in favor of missions to lunar orbit, Lagrange points, and near Earth asteroids in the near term, gradually building up experience for eventual human missions to Mars. “If you were to follow a Flexible Path, it affords you the opportunity to do things in one- and two-year centers that would keep the American public interested and keep things inspired,” Bolden told Space News, although he stopped short of formally endorsing the option.
Meanwhile, in another article about the budget, sources “close to the administration” claim that a decision on choosing the flexible path or another option isn’t expected before Christmas. This would seem to contradict Sen. Bill Nelson, who claimed earlier this week that the president would make a decision around Thanksgiving. Waiting until Christmas would also seem to complicate the development of the proposed FY2011 budget, due out in early February—especially if that decision also includes how much additional money, if any, to include for NASA.
By Jeff Foust on 2009 November 6 at 7:29 pm ET Courtney Stadd won’t do any jail time after being convicted on ethics charges stemming from an incident in 2005 when he worked at NASA. Stadd, found guilty in August of helping steer $9.6 million in earmarked funds to Mississippi State University, a client of his private consulting practice, was sentenced to three years of probation as well as six months of electronic monitoring and fined $2,500. The government had asked for a one-year prison term, but that was rejected by the judge, who said that prison time “was not needed to protect the public”. As a Space News article notes, the courtroom was “packed with many of Stadd’s friends and aerospace industry colleagues”, and the judge said she had received “tons of letters” supporting Stadd.
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