By Jeff Foust on 2008 August 23 at 10:48 am ET Late Friday night the Obama campaign announced it had selected Joe Biden, a senator from Delaware and former presidential candidate himself, as Obama’s running mate. Naturally, the first question that comes to everyone’s minds is, “what does he think about space policy?” Well, maybe not, but if you’re still reading this, you’re curious.
However, not surprisingly, there’s not much to say about Biden and space policy. The Biden campaign was one of the campaigns I contacted for an article in The Space Review about candidates’s positions on space, but, like the others, didn’t get a response from. The journal Nature had a little more success in early January, reporting that he “wants to make China a full partner in space rather than a ‘frustrated new entrant’ that has to catch up with the United States.” And at a New Hampshire debate last fall, he told an attendee, “I like the robotic programs” and, about human spaceflight, “with clear leadership we could do anything, good luck.”
In the Senate he doesn’t serve on the Commerce or Appropriations committees, so he’s not on the front lines of either authorization or appropriations legislation that would affect NASA. However, he does chair the Foreign Relations Committee, which has a tangential but key role now: In June he and the ranking Republican on the committee, Richard Lugar, introduced S.3103, the “International Space Station Payments Act of 2008″. This bill would have extended the current waiver in the Iran, North Korea, and Syria Nonproliferation Act that allows NASA to purchase flight services from Russia. That waiver currently expires at the end of 2011, and NASA officials have said that they need the extension this year since it takes up to three years to build a Soyuz spacecraft (the extension does not include Progress spacecraft, since NASA is planning on commercial and/or international alternatives to Progress). However, enthusiasm for the waiver has dropped significantly in the wake of Russia’s incursion into Georgia this month, raising doubts it will be passed.
One other thing to keep in mind. Earlier this month Obama advocated re-establishing the National Space Council (also known as the National Aeronautics and Space Council), which traditionally has been chaired by the vice president. That means that, if Obama is elected in November and he carries through with his plans to recreate the council, Biden could be playing a much larger role in space policy in the next four years.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 August 20 at 7:42 am ET Central Florida News 13, a cable news channel serving Orlando and surrounding areas, took advantage of visits this week by presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama to speak at the VFW convention there to interview them, including asking them about space policy. (The McCain interview was even performed with a Mercury capsule replica in the background).
The McCain interview saves the space question for the very end, asking him for “your definite whatever people need to know” about where he stands on space:
I stand for not cutting any of the NASA budget, which Senator Obama proposed and then reversed himself, as he has on a number of things. I think we have to give a national priority to our efforts on the Moon, the International Space Shuttle [sic], and Mars. Americans are excited about these. We can excite them again. And it is a national security issue, when you look at the competition from both Russia and China. Space still is the last frontier. We have to continue to lead.
The Obama interview took up space earlier, and was apparently important enough to the station that they provided the transcript of that portion of the interview, discussing why he reversed his earlier decision to delay Constellation:
I’m not going to make a proposal unless I know how to pay for it, and in one of our earlier proposals, we had looked at extending the Constellation program longer, and stretching it out so that we could take some of that money to pay for education programs.
In consultation with space community here in Orlando and around the country, my conclusion is that we have to have that in place to have a transition from the space shuttle to the next generation of space exploration.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 August 20 at 12:35 am ET Secrecy News, a blog run by the Federation of American Scientists, reported Tuesday that the text of NSPD-31 has been released. What is NSPD-31? It’s National Security Presidential Directive 31, titled “U.S. Space Exploration Policy”, dated January 14, 2004, the day President Bush unveiled the Vision for Space Exploration. The document had not been publicly available until Wikileaks.org, a site that specializes in the publication of leaked documents, published the document earlier this month.
However, if you’re looking for any secret insights into the policy, you’ll be sorely disappointed. In fact, NSPD-31 is virtually word-for-word identical to “A Renewed Spirit of Discovery”, a document published on the White House web site that same day. One of the few differences: the section in the web document titled “Bringing the Vision to Reality” is, in NSPD-31, given the more prosaic title “Implementation Guidelines”.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 August 20 at 12:09 am ET (Sorry for the travel-induced delay)
On Monday Republican presidential candidate John McCain, as scheduled, spoke with a group of “government, business and space industry leaders” on the Space Coast about space issues, including the Shuttle-Constellation gap and its effects on the region. Those looking for a new policy pronouncement from the candidate were disappointed, as McCain said little, according to Florida Today, “but prodded people for specific ideas”. That included alternatives to shortening the gap than simply extending the shuttle (he asked how the shuttles could be certified to fly after 2010, per the CAIB’s recommendations). “He repeatedly told the group that he was becoming more focused with eliminating the U.S. reliance on the Russians for launching astronauts and supporting the space station,” the article concluded.
One tidbit: the article states that McCain, like Obama, supports adding one more shuttle flight to the manifest (presumably to fly AMS, as in the case of Obama.) It’s not clear if McCain said this at the Space Coast event or earlier; it’s not specified in his current space policy.
The Florida Democratic Party responded to the McCain visit with a press release criticizing McCain’s statements about and record on space policy. This includes both McCain’s alleged indifference to the consequences of the gap as well opposition to NASA funding. That last point includes this quizzical line: “McCain said he would veto ‘every bill with earmarks,’but earmarks were the source of funding for the Mars mission.” The Mars mission? The release cites two, very different, “Mars missions”, $19 million in 2003 to cover cost increases in robotic exploration, and $1.6 million in 2008 to study a “cost effective nuclear power system to support the long-range objectives of NASA for missions to the moon, to Mars and to deep space”. If they meant human exploration of Mars, the Florida Democrats may have forgotten that the FY08 appropriations bill includes a ban on funding any programs “related exclusively to the human exploration of Mars”.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 August 18 at 9:31 am ET In this week’s edition of The Space Review, I provide an overview of some of the space policy developments of the last week, including the McCain and Obama documents and the Garver-Cunningham debate. If you’ve been reading the posts here, there will not be much in the way of new information (other than some additional items from the debate and documents), but put together in an overarching theme that we’re learning more about the major candidates’ stances on space policy in this election than in any election in recent history.
There are also some developments that missed the article (even as I updated it late last night), notably, that Barack Obama endorsed a $2-billion increase in NASA’s budget that some in Congress have sought in the last couple of years. That additional money, according to one report, will come from “clawing back pork barrel earmarks” elsewhere in the budget, according to Sen. Bill Nelson, who endorsed the policy Sunday along with former Sen. John Glenn. (Interestingly, John McCain has expressed his opposition to “wasteful earmarks” in his own space policy.)
By Jeff Foust on 2008 August 17 at 7:00 pm ET Sorry to be a little late in the game on this (I’ve been traveling and dealing with flaky Internet access at a hotel) but the Obama campaign today formally released comprehensive space policy. By comprehensive: the document runs just over six full pages, and covers a wide range of issues. Some highlights:
- He formally signs off on one of the key milestones of the current Vision for Space Exploration: “He endorses the goal of sending human missions to the Moon by 2020, as a precursor in an orderly progression to missions to more distant destinations, including Mars.”
- Obama says he will “expedite the development of the Shuttle’s successor systems” for carrying people into space (although does not mention Orion and Ares by name). The policy adds: “This will be difficult; underfunding by the Bush administration has left NASA with limited flexibility to accelerate the development of the new systems.”
- As previous stated, he supports one additional shuttle flight “to fly a valuable mission and to keep the workforce engaged” (the “valuable mission” referred to here is apparently the AMS payload.) He adds that he would work to ensure there is “adequate” additional funding for that mission so that it doesn’t interfere with other programs.
- He includes support of commercial activities in several places, calling COTS a “good model”. Elsewhere: “We must unleash the genius of private enterprise to secure the United States’ leadership in space.”
- On a topic that’s important to a lot of people in the space industry, but obscure elsewhere, the policy states that Obama “will direct a review of the ITAR to reevaluate restrictions imposed on American companies, with a special focus on space hardware that is currently restricted from commercial export. He will also direct revisions to the licensing process to ensure that American suppliers are competitive in the international aerospace markets, without jeopardizing American national security.”
There’s a lot more in there (which I’ll leave to you to discuss in the comments), but one broader thing stands out: it’s remarkable that any candidate for president, regardless of political party, would develop and release a six-page space policy white paper. That’s pretty remarkable, and difficult to explain outside of an effort to try and secure some votes in one small part of a battleground state.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 August 16 at 9:36 am ET Republican presidential candidate John McCain is scheduled to speak in Florida’s Space Coast on Monday, with space policy likely to be among the topics he addresses. Among those looking forward to the speech are the editorial writers at Florida Today, who complain about “his deafening silence about the agency’s post-shuttle moon exploration plans” in an editorial Saturday. They note that McCain’s pledge to freeze non-defense discretionary spending “would slam NASA’s budget and cripple the Ares-Orion project to the point of possible death.” They conclude: “It’s time for McCain to dump his dead-end plan for NASA and go on the record supporting the next-generation of spaceflight.”
Those claims of “deafening silence” on space and not yet being on the record “supporting the next-generation of spaceflight” are puzzling, since just recently the campaign issued a more detailed space policy. Among the items the policy said McCain would do as president include ensuring that “space exploration is top priority” and “funding the NASA Constellation program to ensure it has the resources it needs to begin a new era of human space exploration.” Perhaps Florida Today’s editors weren’t aware of the policy?
There is, though, still a contradiction in McCain policy. In his space policy he talks about giving Constellation the resources its needs, as well as minimizing the Shuttle-Constellation. However, his economic policy still includes a pledge to “freeze non-defense, non-veterans discretionary spending for a year and use those savings for deficit reduction”. It’s a bit like, for example, saying you support development of Ares and Orion while campaign documents still claim you would postpone Constellation by five years. And, perhaps, like Barack Obama, McCain will reconcile those inconsistencies on the Space Coast Monday.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 August 15 at 3:02 am ET The transportation gods were smiling on me Thursday, and I was able to make it to Boulder just in time for Thursday evening’s space policy debate at the annual Mars Society Convention at the University of Colorado. The debate pitted Lori Garver, representing the campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, with Apollo 7 astronaut Walt Cunningham, representing Republican presidential candidate John McCain. The 90-minute debate didn’t produce a lot of new revelations, but did offer some insights into the campaign’s philosophies, particularly on the Obama side.
There was a sharp contrast between Garver and Cunningham. Garver has been working space policy issues for a long time, and recently has been working with the Obama campaign (she noted that she has had the opportunity to talk with Obama several times, including recently). Cunningham, on the other hand, does not appear to have an active role in the McCain campaign, at least on space issues; he mentioned that after he was invited to participate he had to read up on what both campaigns had said on the issue. Or, as he put it, “I don’t talk to the senator. He calls me.” This made it difficult at times to separate what Cunningham was saying on behalf of the campaign and what were his own opinions.
One of the better insights from the debate was when Garver was asked why Obama had changed his stance on funding Constellation. Obama and his staff early own, she explained, “did feel that Constellation was a Bush program and didn’t make a lot of sense.” That was reinforced by feedback from the scientific community, she added, that didn’t think human spaceflight was as valuable as robotic scientific work. However, after hearing from people in both the space and education communities, “they really thought it through, they recognized the importance of space.” Now, she said, “he recognizes that Constellation really is exploring with humans and robots beyond low Earth orbit” and that he truly supports it, rather than supporting it only as a tool to win votes in Florida.
Constellation is generally defined in the near term to be primarily the Ares 1 launch vehicle and Orion spacecraft, but she dropped a hint that a President Obama might be willing to reconsider that architecture. “Senator Obama has talked about Constellation and has not specified a specific architecture,” she said. “I think one of the reasons for that is that until you have the office, until you’re there and know what’s going on with these programs, you’re not going to make a commitment to it.” (The answer came in response to a question about the use of EELVs in the exploration program, not about alternatives like DIRECT.)
Cunningham, meanwhile, expressed support for keeping the shuttle flying past 2010 as the best way to deal with the gap. (Although it wasn’t clear if he was speaking for the campaign or simply expressing his opinion.) “It’s going to cost a couple of billion dollars a year to extend the life of the shuttle, if you can do it still,” he said. Trying to accelerate Constellation, by comparison, is “getting to be a much stickier wicket, in fact, that may not be possible.” However, he was not impressed with Obama’s pledge in his speech earlier this month to fly at least one additional shuttle mission. “Adding one more launch isn’t going to do diddly for either the workers or the space program or Florida, but it might buy a few votes from those people who are down there.”
On the commercial side, Garver said that an Obama administration would support “the COTS model” and would have an interest in prizes. Cunningham, on the other had, was more skeptical of COTS. “I don’t expect a whole lot to come to NASA out of COTS” other than some technology, he said. Companies like SpaceX, he noted, are learning how difficult it is to do things like human spaceflight. “There’s a reason why manned spaceflight is so expensive: it takes a whole lot more in terms of capability, redundancy, and things like that than any of the civilian rocket developers are doing today.”
Garver also hinted that more details about Obama’s space policy may be released in the weeks to come. The quasi-official plan released in January is being expanded upon and refined, she said, with input from campaign officials and people like her.
One final note: the video of the full debate will be on the Mars Society web site in the near future, perhaps as early as Friday, according to society officials. (Update: the video is now available.) I also shot a little bit of video of the opening statements of Cunningham and Garver (which will be undoubtedly of lower quality than the official video, since I was shooting it with a handheld video camera while trying to take notes) that I’ll see about posting here as time permits.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 August 14 at 5:31 pm ET A Congressionally-mandated commission studying US national security space policy is recommending significant changes to how military and intelligence space efforts are run, AviationWeek.com reported today. The Allard Commission, named after retiring Sen. Wayne Allard (R-CO), who pushed for the commission, is calling for a major reorganization that would result in the abolition of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the Air Force’s Space and Missiles Systems Center (SMC), and perhaps other organizations. In its place would be a new entity, the National Security Space Authority (NSSA) that would handle both open and classified programs. The commission also called for re-creating the National Security Space Office (NSSO), currently a relatively small organization with limited influence, into one that would take over managing programs currently handed by NRO, SMC, and the Air Force Research Lab’s Space Vehicles directorate.
The full report has not been published yet, but will be soon, according to the AviationWeek.com article. What’s uncertain is whether the Bush Administration, in its final months in office, will take any steps to try and implement the plan. What role Congress will play is also unknown. Certainly anything that takes away power (and money and jobs) from some of these organizations, particularly SMC in Los Angeles, will be opposed by the likes of Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), a key member of Congress on defense and intelligence issues who also has SMC in her district.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 August 14 at 9:59 am ET So who is responsible for the looming five-year (or more) gap in US government human space access between the retirement of the shuttle and the introduction of Constellation? President Bush, for introducing the Vision in 2004 that had, as an inherent part of it, the gap? NASA, for failing to be able to close the gap with the development of Ares 1 and Orion? Congress in general, for not providing the agency with sufficient funding to accelerate Constellation? If you’re the Florida Democratic Party, though, one person in particular comes to mind: Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain. And in a press release Wednesday, they don’t mince their words.
McCain’s NASA stance went from “downright schizophrenic” to outright delusional yesterday with his campaign boasting of his influence on space policy in his former role as Chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation – without mentioning that, under McCain’s watch, the impending five-year gap between the retirement of the Shuttle and the development of the next generation vehicle was created, putting thousands of Space Coast jobs at risk.
(The “downright schizophrenic” quote is from a Florida Today editorial in June that questioned McCain’s support for NASA while also calling for a discretionary budget freeze.)
The Florida Democrats accuse McCain of “ignoring” the gap problem as early as 2004, when the Commerce Committee held hearings on the Vision. While Sen. Bill Nelson (a Florida Democrat) asked questions of McCain (chairman of the committee at the time) about the gap, “McCain had no response.”
Meanwhile, the Orlando Sentinel reports that McCain himself plans to visit the Space Coast on Monday and address space issues while he’s there, including plans to “tweak Barack Obama” on the Democratic candidate’s recent statements on space policy.
Hmmm. Instead of calling policy stances “outright delusional” or planning to “tweak” their opponents, perhaps the campaigns can take some time to offer some substance on these issues, including how they plan to minimize the gap given the recent delay in the first crewed Constellation flight, as well as concerns about access to the ISS given the apparently dimming chances of getting an extension of NASA’s INKSNA waiver.
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