By Jeff Foust on 2008 September 15 at 1:03 pm ET Earlier this year Science Debate 2008, a group trying to put together a debate among presidential candidates devoted exclusively to science policy, issued a set of 14 questions to the campaigns of John McCain and Barack Obama that they hoped to get answered in lieu of an actual debate. One of those 14 dealt with space:
11. Space. The study of Earth from space can yield important information about climate change; focus on the cosmos can advance our understanding of the universe; and manned space travel can help us inspire new generations of youth to go into science. Can we afford all of them? How would you prioritize space in your administration?
Both campaigns have now answered those questions, but on the topic of space don’t really offer any new insights. The Obama campaign, which responded a couple weeks ago, said he “will establish a robust and balanced civilian space program” that includes both human and robotic space exploration as well as Earth sciences and aeronautics; the response also discusses his plan to reestablish the National Aeronautics and Space Council as a way to prioritize space. The McCain campaign, which just responded over the weekend, provided a response almost word-for-word identical to the campaign’s existing space policy document. The one difference is the lead paragraph:
The real question is whether we can afford not to. We must ensure that we have a balanced approach to our space investments along with proper management controls. Today, we rely more upon our space based assets than at any other time in history. We need the technological advances of these systems to effectively address tremendous challenges such as climate change. Failure to properly address these problems will have devastating effects on the future of the planet.
Speaking of presidential politics and space policy, in this week’s issue of The Space Review Adrian Brown offers some suggestions to a prospective Obama Administration on space issues. Among his suggestions: transfer some funding from defense to the “space-industrial complex”, using that extra funding to accelerate the exploration program with the goal of returning humans to the Moon by 2016, and creating a new NASA center (preferably in the southwestern US) focused on promoting the commercialization of space. On the last point, though, one response I saw this morning was to the effect that current growth in the NewSpace industry is taking place because NASA is not playing a major role, not in spite of it.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 September 14 at 10:54 am ET Sunday’s Washington Post reports on additional evidence of “raw relations” between NASA and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Those tensions were illuminated last week when the Orlando Sentinel reported on the leaked email from NASA administrator Mike Griffin where Griffin complained of a “jihad” for retiring the shuttle by OMB and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).
The Post reported that OMB deleted some passages in a statement prepared by Griffin in March in response to a request for additional information after a House Science and Technology Committee hearing. The OMB deleted this comment by Griffin: “A Chinese landing on the moon prior to our own return will create a stark perception that the U.S. lags behind not only Russia, but also China, in space,” as well as another, “The bare fact of this accomplishment [a Chinese manned lunar landing] will have an enormous, and not fully predictable, effect on global perceptions of U.S. leadership in the world.”
Those edits, one NASA official who asked not to be identified told the Post, are additional evidence that OMB and NASA re not on the best of terms. “Whether this is cost-cutting across the board or if some people in OMB just don’t like NASA, we don’t know,” the official said. “But the result is that our budget always seems to be less than it’s supposed to be.” That is the key issue: how worse is this situation now compared to earlier in this administration, or in previous administrations? Are these just natural tensions between an agency that wants more money and an office trying to balance competing priorities, or is there something more serious going on?
By Jeff Foust on 2008 September 14 at 10:28 am ET While one member of Florida’s congressional delegation, Sen. Bill Nelson, vowed several days ago to make “a full, true-blue push” to get legislation extending NASA’s INSKNA waiver through the Senate, another member has vowed to do everything in his power to stop it. In a statement released Friday, Rep. Dave Weldon (R-FL) “denounced” efforts by Nelson and others to extend the waiver, adding that discussion to extend the shuttle while also supporting the waiver extension amounted to “doublespeak”. “This is all very disturbing to me and NASA is acting very schizophrenic on this matter,” Weldon said in the statement.
While Weldon spent much of the statement criticizing Nelson’s seemingly contradictory statements about extending the shuttle while also buying Soyuz (which aren’t as “schizophrenic” as Weldon claims, since the shuttle, unlike Soyuz, cannot remain at the station for extended periods as a lifeboat for the station’s crew), he also took aim at the Bush administration for its perceived lack of support for NASA. “During its tenure, this administration has allowed community development spending to increase 91%, education to increase 57%, Medicare 51% and so on. NASA and the shuttle just wasn’t a priority for them and now we are seeing the consequences.”
In a follow-up article with the Orlando Sentinel, Weldon said he was “going to pull every lever I have” in his final months in office (he is not running for reelection) to try and block the extension. He added that Weldon plans to lobby Sen. John McCain to try and help: since Nelson is pushing to get the extension through the Senate by unanimous consent, it would take only one senator to block it.
The article adds, “McCain also opposes dealing with the Russians,” but to the best of my knowledge McCain, in his capacity as either senator or presidential candidate, has taken any position on this issue beyond the letter he and two other senators sent to the president last month calling for a halt on any plans to take steps that would prevent continued operation of the shuttle beyond 2010. In that letter McCain and Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison and David Vitter state, “The Russian incursion into Georgia has raised new questions about the wisdom of providing that extension,” but they do not formally oppose the extension in the letter.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 September 12 at 7:22 am ET Most people here, one would suspect, are in favor of promoting democracy and human rights throughout the world, and taking steps to shore them up in countries where they are struggling to thrive, especially when those efforts cost a relatively modest amount of money. But, why should NASA pick up the tab?
Earlier this week Sen. Russell Feingold (D-WI) introduced S.3457, the “Support for Democracy and Human Rights in Ethiopia Act of 2008″. The legislation outlines some of the challenges democracy and human rights are facing in Ethiopia, despite some recent positive progress, and asks the president to “support the implementation of democracy and governance institutions and organizations in Ethiopia” through a number of measures, ranging from unspecified programs to protect human rights to Voice of America programming. The legislation authorizes $20 million to carry out these activities by this means: “Of the amounts available to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for fiscal year 2009, $20,000,000 shall be available to carry out the provisions of this Act.”
In a statement introducing the legislation, Feingold said he made the decision to fund the bill through an offset because of fiscal responsibility:
I make it a practice to pay for all bills I introduce, and the authorization in this bill is offset by a transfer of funds from NASA. Some may disagree with me on the need for an offset, but recent Office of Management and Budget projections confirm that we now have the biggest budget deficit in the history of our country.
We cannot afford to be fiscally irresponsible so we must make choices to ensure that our children and grandchildren do not bear the burden of our reckless spending. Instead of cutting specific programs, which are likely to have begun and thus would cost more to close, transferring $20 million from the general budget would allow appropriators to evaluate, at their discretion, how best to make this transfer.
What he doesn’t explain, though, is why he (and co-sponsor Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-VT) chose NASA as the source of the offset, as opposed to another government agency. Like, say, the State Department?
By Jeff Foust on 2008 September 12 at 7:06 am ET Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) told Florida Today that he intends to make “a full, true-blue push” to get NASA’s INKSNA waiver extended in the Senate in the coming weeks. INKSNA is the Iran, North Korea, and Syria Nonproliferation Act, which includes a waiver allowing NASA to continue to purchase services from Russia through the end of 2011. NASA has warned, however, that the waiver needs to be extended this year or else NASA will no longer to be able to procure Soyuz spacecraft and, as a result, could be forced to abandon the station by 2011.
Getting that waiver extended has looked doubtful in recent weeks, in large part because of Russia’s invasion of Georgia last month. Nelson, who serves on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, said he would push a bill extending the waiver, S.3103, through the committee and on to the full Senate. There, he hopes to get the bill passed by unanimous consent, which would be a relatively speedy process (important since Congress plans to recess in a few weeks for the upcoming election) but one that could be derailed by any single senator. The legislation would still have to get through the House as well, although the article notes that the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA), also supports the waiver extension.
Meanwhile, the Orlando Sentinel reports on something that most people here already known: extending the life of the space shuttle is not a complete alternative to Soyuz for maintaining a US presence on the ISS. The article cites a “congressional briefing paper” NASA produced that “Continuing to fly the space shuttle past 2010 is not the answer to this situation.” While the shuttle can ferry crews to and from the station, it cannot remain their for extended periods as a lifeboat. The article adds that NASA administrator Mike Griffin “has personally visited senior members of Congress this week” trying to convince them to support the INKSNA waiver extension.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 September 10 at 12:50 pm ET A key Air Force space official thinks that what the US needs is an “official national space strategy”, Aerospace Daily reported Wednesday. And what exactly is a national space strategy? It is “a document that would communicate the value of space, inspire the public and generate increased interest and attention from Congress”, according to Lt. Gen. John Sheridan, head of the Space and Missile Systems Center in Los Angeles. Sheridan, speaking at the Space 2008 conference in San Diego, said that such a strategy would rectify the problem, in his view, that space is “invisible”, at least compared to aviation.
How such a strategy would differ from the national space policy isn’t clear. According to the article, Sheridan sees such a strategy including “continued pre-eminence in space, renewed exploration goals, increased protection for existing and future assets and increased funding for education and aerospace work force development.” Yet most, if not all, of these issues are addressed in the current national space policy in one form or another. Evidently, though, a strategy is more “dramatic”, in his words, than a policy. “Few people remember policies. But everybody remembers [the] Apollo [program].”
By Jeff Foust on 2008 September 9 at 7:41 pm ET When it comes to space policy in Congress, you rarely hear the name of Senator Chris Dodd. However, when a business in his home state is involved, the Connecticut Democrat spring into action. Dodd’s office issued a press release calling for “fairness” in the upcoming recompete of a spacesuit contract that involved Connecticut company Hamilton Sundstrand. In June NASA awarded a contract for the Constellation Space Suit System to Oceaneering International, beating out a rival bid from Exploration Systems and Technology, a joint venture between Hamilton Sundstrand and ILC Dover, who had been making spacesuits for NASA for decades. The losers filed a protest with the GAO, but before that protest review was completed NASA terminated the Oceaneering contract, citing only “a compliance issue”.
Dodd’s release included the full text of a letter he sent to NASA administration Mike Griffin, outlining his concerns with the original procurement, including a potential conflict of interest involving one member of the review board for the contract. In the press release portion of the statement, Dodd states that he is “convinced that Hamilton Sundstrand can win this competition fair and square and will continue manufacturing the suits that protect America’s astronauts for years to come.”
Ironically, while Hamilton Sundstrand is based in Connecticut, so is one of the subcontractors to Oceaneering: Air-Lock, Inc., in Milton, CT.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 September 7 at 11:48 am ET The Orlando Sentinel reports today about an internal NASA email by Mike Griffin that expresses frustration and criticism with the current state and future direction of the agency, particularly in regards to the shuttle, access to ISS, and the future of Constellation. The email, available here, has a tone that “depicts a man watching as his finely crafted plans for a revitalized space-faring NASA appear to be melting before his eyes,” in the words of the Sentinel’s Robert Block.
“Exactly as I predicted, events have unfolded in a way that makes it clear how unwise it was for the US to adopt a policy of deliberate dependance upon another power for access to ISS,” he writes in the August 18th message. In a “rational world”, he writes, the shuttle retirement would have been better timed with the availability of Ares 1 and Orion and NASA would have been given the “necessary budget” to make that happen.
Griffin blames the lack of that rational approach on the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). “[F]or OSTP and OMB, retiring the Shuttle is a jihad rather than an engineering and program management decision,” he wrote. “Further, the actively do not want the ISS to be sustained, and have done everything possible to ensure that it would not be.”
He later writes that he believes the next administration, be it McCain or Obama, will change course. “This Administration will not yield with regard to continuing Shuttle operations past 2010, but the next Administration will have no investment in that decision. They will tell us to extend Shuttle,” he wrote, adding that while it may appear “irrational” but that it will be the only “politically tenable course” when faced with otherwise abandoning the ISS at least temporarily. “Extending Shuttle creates no damage that they will care about, other than to delay the lunar program. They will not count that as a cost. They will not see what that does for U.S. leadership in space in the long term.”
NASA confirmed the authenticity of the email, but when the Sentinel approached the White House for comment, they got something of a retraction a few hours later from Griffin himself. “The leaked internal e-mail fails to provide the contextual framework for my remarks, and my support for the administration’s policies,” he wrote.
The timing of the email struck me, since it was dated just a few hours after he gave a speech at the DC-X Reunion conference in Alamogordo, New Mexico. There’s little in the text of the speech relevant to this topic, unless you want to try and read through the lines about the comment on page 5 that “NASA, as the implementing agency simply carries out policy within the resources provided. We don’t make it.” That comment was made regarding the decision in the early 1970s to abandon the infrastructure created during the Apollo program, which Griffin said “was a mistake of strategic proportions.”
During the Q&A session after the speech, Griffin was asked about the effect the Russian incursion into Georgia would have on INKSNA and access to the ISS, and whether it might generate any “political pressure” to change the status quo in terms of policy and budgets. “Well, I might hope that it would, but I don’t know that it will,” Griffin said. He reiterated that it was “unseemly” to have to rely on another country for access to space, regardless of whether that country was friendly to the United States or not, putting the blame for this situation on “decisions made, frankly, before my tenure and decisions to which I have objected.” The space station, he said, “is not a bug in US space policy at this point, it is a feature” having been sustained over the years by various administrations and Congresses, and thus having it dependent on a single system is both politically and technically risky.
“The issues surrounding the Russian invasion of Georgia just go to illustrate exactly my point,” he said. “It’s not that I foresaw that coming, it’s just that I foresaw something happening. The world doesn’t go so smoothly that those kinds of things don’t happen.”
Griffin was also asked in Alamogordo whether he saw anything in the policies of the two presidential candidates that would “fundamentally change policy direction” for the agency, but the administrator declined to answer. “I don’t express political preferences because I think it’s bad for NASA,” he said. “NASA is, and should be, a non-political executing agent of US policy, and US policy is decided by those who get elected. So I just want to stay well away from anything that could be construed wrongly.”
Update: NASA issued a statement Sunday afternoon from Griffin regarding that email message:
The leaked internal email fails to provide the contextual framework for my remarks, and my support for the administration’s policies. Administration policy is to retire the shuttle in 2010 and purchase crew transport from Russia until Ares and Orion are available. The administration continues to support our request for an INKSNA exemption. Administration policy continues to be that we will take no action to preclude continued operation of the International Space Station past 2016. I strongly support these administration policies, as do OSTP and OMB.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 September 7 at 10:02 am ET Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) will meet with NASA administrator Mike Griffin on Tuesday to discuss the prospects for extending the life of the shuttle beyond 2010, Florida Today reported Saturday. Also likely to be discussed are the prospects for passing an extension to NASA’s existing waiver to the Iran, North Korea, and Syria Nonproliferation Act (INKSNA), which currently appear doubtful because of Russia’s invasion of Georgia last month.
On INKSNA, Nelson said he would continue to push for an extension but was not optimistic it would make it through the Senate. “I think we can get it out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but I’m not sure we can pass it,” he told Florida Today. That role is different from what Griffin told CBS News a few days ago, when he said “people who were already suspicious, like Sen. (Bill) Nelson, changed from being suspicious to being downright against” extending the waiver.
While extending the shuttle to compensate for the lack of Soyuz access might sound good for people on the Space Coast, worried about the job losses that will come when the shuttle is retired, Florida Today published an editorial Sunday endorsing efforts to extend the INKSNA waiver instead of trying to keep the shuttle alive until Constellation is ready. The Orlando Sentinel published a similar editorial last week; both cited cost and safety issues with extending the shuttle beyond 2010.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 September 5 at 5:56 am ET While Americans have been fixated on political conventions the last two weeks, there have been some space policy developments in Canada. On Tuesday Industry Minister Jim Prentice named astronaut Steve MacLean as the new president of the Canadian Space Agency. And Prentice gave MacLean his marching orders in a speech announcing the appointment: develop a new long-term strategy for the space agency:
I have given Steve a mandate to make sweeping changes at the CSA. As we stand at this crossroads, he will revitalize the Agency. He will restore its ability to punch above its weight in an international quest. He will develop Canada’s capacity for a new era of prestige and achievement.
And to that end, as one of Steve MacLean’s first acts as new President, the CSA will begin consultations with stakeholders that will lead to a new Long-Term Space Plan. I expect this plan – the fourth in the series – to be as influential for our generation of exploration and development as any plan that Canada has produced for charting our future in space. That’s a tall order. I know that Steve is capable of bringing together the stakeholders. Time is of the essence, and I look forward to the plan in the coming months.
That plan is scheduled to be completed by November, but there is one complicating factor: a federal election expected to be called on Sunday that would take place on October 14. MacLean told reporters at his first press conference this week that he’s “politically aware” and ready to adjust if the ruling Conservative party loses power, although he said he’s not “a political person at all”.
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