By Jeff Foust on 2008 May 24 at 12:56 pm ET Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) was the scheduled speaker at a Washington Space Business Roundtable luncheon on Thursday, but with votes taking place on the Senate floor that morning, it wasn’t clear that he was going to make it—so much so that the luncheon organizers drafted a last-minute replacement, NASA administrator Mike Griffin. However, Nelson was able to get away and make it to the luncheon (after Griffin had started speaking) and he brought good news: the Senate had voted 75-22 to pass its version of a supplemental appropriations bill that, while primarily intended to fund military activities in Iraq and Afghanistan, includes $200 million for NASA.
While this is a step forward for getting more money for NASA, it’s hardly a done deal, because the House version of the bill has no additional money for NASA, and the legislation in general faces a veto threat from the president. Nelson tried to remain optimistic about it as he laid out the plan for beyond this supplemental bill. “If we can hold that [extra money] in the negotiations with the House, and then, if we can avoid a presidential veto,” he said, adding that the bill passed in the Senate with a veto-proof majority, “if all those ‘ifs’ take place, then what we do is we go to the NASA appropriations bill for fiscal year 2009, which starts this October the 1st, and we try to get at least another $800 million, so that the total funding in this year would be a billion dollars extra.”
That billion, plus an additional $1 billion for NASA in FY2010, “does a number of things for us” beyond simply shortening the Shuttle-Constellation gap, ranging from reducing the amount of money that would have to go to Russia for ISS transport services to mitigating the effects of layoffs at the Kennedy Space Center. “In other words, we don’t have to lay off Americans at the Kennedy Space Center in order to hire Russians in Moscow,” he said.
But that near-term obstacle remains convincing the House to go along with any extra money for NASA, be it $2 billion or $200 million. He recounted a meeting he and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison had last year with House colleagues and OMB director Jim Nussle. He described “some of the most eloquent statements that I’ve heard made” in support of additional NASA funding, then pointed at the wall behind him. “But it was like talking to that wall.” Although the Senate approved the extra $1 billion last year, the measure didn’t have the support of the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, David Obey, and “without White House support, the deal collapsed,” Nelson said.
Nelson said they would try again this year, “and you’re looking at the guy who is the most visibly exercised in the Congress about this because of the potential devastation to our folks at the Kennedy Space Center.” However, he didn’t indicate any new change in tactics or support that would lead to a different, more positive outcome this time around.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 May 23 at 12:54 pm ET A few minor items related to space policy and the presidential campaign:
- The Orlando Sentinel has a more complete transcript of Barack Obama’s comments about space policy he made in Florida on Wednesday. One statement that didn’t make it into the Florida Today video: “Now I know we’re transitioning from the shuttle to the Orion program and I am fully committed to making sure that is funded.” Also: “It is very important, though, because other countries — the Europeans, China — they are all in a position where they could potentially leapfrog us.”
- Meanwhile, Obama space supporters are planning a meeting on Saturday, May 31, during the International Space Development Conference in Washington DC. The purpose of the meeting, according to organizer Andrew Hoppin, is to make plans for “outreach to the aerospace community” as well as discuss Obama’s space policy platform. (One suggestion: how to reconcile statements like the above where Obama says he is committed to supporting Orion while also saying he wants to delay Constellation by five years.)
- In an editorial Friday, Florida Today asks both Obama and John McCain to provide more details about their space policies. Obama, the paper argues, should “flesh-out his position in far more detail” while McCain, who has proposed freezing non-defense discretionary spending for a year, should “spell out precisely what he does support.”
By Jeff Foust on 2008 May 22 at 6:15 am ET Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama made his first trip to Florida in a year on Wednesday, including a stop in the central Florida community of Kissimmee. Obama, like other Democratic candidates, had steered clear of Florida after national party officials put the state in the penalty box for moving up its primary to late January. Visiting central Florida makes it more likely that Obama will get questions on space policy topics, and sure enough, the topic came up, Florida Today reports:
“I want us to understand what it is we want to accomplish, so we can continue to build this program,” the Democratic presidential candidate said, as he spoke during a “town hall-style” meeting Wednesday in Kissimmee. “Other countries are in position to leapfrog us if we don’t continue to make this investment.”
[…]
Obama said he would fund a strengthened space program, including the Orion program, which is designed to return Americans to the moon and later get them to Mars.
Obama said he wanted to revive the energy the country had for the space program during the Mercury and Apollo programs. The Mercury program launched the first Americans into space, and the Apollo program landed Americans on the moon.
“Now, even though lots of good work is being done with the shuttle program, I don’t think people have as deep of a commitment to the space program,” he said.
There’s not a lot of new concrete policy insights there, and it does continue the theme he laid out in earlier speeches that NASA is no longer inspirational and there is a need to figure out what NASA should be doing. But, in the words of aerospace engineer Angel Andujar, who asked Obama the question about NASA, “At least he’s looking into it.”
Update: as noted in the comments, the video accompanying the story has more direct statements from Obama regarding his approach to space policy:
One of the things I want to do is review, with NASA, what are we doing in terms of manned flights to the Moon or to Mars, versus are we better off using, for example, things like Hubble, that gives us, yields us, more information and a better bang for the buck. I am absolutely committed to making sure that we’ve got a space program that is second to none in the world. That is my absolute commitment. But, what I want to do is I want to sit down with NASA and figure out what’s our focus and make sure that that focus is clear and that it is yielding the kinds of benefits over time…
[The video cuts transitions at the end to a concluding statement form Obama, so we don’t know exactly the kinds of benefits over time he was referring to.]
By Jeff Foust on 2008 May 21 at 7:23 am ET The Japanese parliament has approved legislation that would allow the country to make enhanced military use of space. The upper house of the Diet overwhelmingly approved the bill Tuesday; the lower house previously passed the bill. The bill is described as “lifting a 1969 ban on military use of outer space”, although that prohibition has not prevented Japan from launching several “Information Gathering Satellites” over the last five years. Besides the military provision, the bill encourages the Japanese government to spend more on space programs in general and make the country’s space industry more competitive.
J. Thomas Schieffer, the US ambassador to Japan, gave a speech Tuesday on US-Japan military relations and was asked about the new legislation. “I don’t specifically have a thought on how it will change things,” he said, “but I think that the law is a recognition of modern reality, that with missile defense and all that it entails, you have to have the ability to hit an adversary wherever that adversary might be trying to hit you.”
By Jeff Foust on 2008 May 20 at 6:59 am ET With the House Science and Technology Committee’s space subcommittee scheduled to markup HR 6063, the NASA authorization bill for FY 2009, later today, it’s worth looking at some of the other provisions of the bill not covered in previous discussions:
- The bill would reauthorize the Glory mission, which ran into the NASA equivalent of the Nunn-McCurdy cost controls: when a program exceeds its baseline budget by 30 percent, NASA must notify Congress and cannot spend any more money on the mission 18 months after notification unless the program is reauthorized. Since Glory is planned for launch before that 18-month deadline, this provision is not unexpected.
- Tangentially related to the above: the bill would require NASA to contract for an independent assessment of “to identify the primary causes of cost growth in the large, medium-sized, and small space and Earth science spacecraft mission classes” and potential solutions.
- NASA would have to develop a plan for the Deep Space Climate Observatory, or DSCOVR (née Triana), which could range from cannibalizing its instruments for use on other missions to transferring the spacecraft to another agency. (Odd discovery: according to this NASA web page, DSCOVR was launched on December 7, 2001, and has carried out its mission. In an alternate universe, maybe. In this universe, it’s sitting in storage.)
- The bill would require NASA to ensure that any future human lunar outpost would only need to be “human-tended”, that is, would not require permanent habitation to remain viable. (Learning lessons from the ISS?) Also: “The United States portion of the first human-tended outpost established on the surface of the Moon shall be designated the ‘Neil A. Armstrong Lunar Outpost’.:
- There’s a provision in the bill that calls on NASA to “develop a technology plan to enable dissemination of information to the public to allow the public to experience missions to the Moon, Mars, or other bodies within our solar system by leveraging advanced exploration technologies”, something that falls under the term “participatory exploration” and is something NASA is already starting to dabble with.
- While NASA is forbidden under the 2008 appropriations bill to spend any money on work exclusively linked to human Mars exploration, the bill does include language endorsing work that leads up to such expeditions: “Congress reaffirms its support for a systematic, integrated program of exploration of the Martian surface to examine the planet whose surface is most like Earth’s, to search for evidence of past or present life, and to examine Mars for future habitability and as a long-term goal for future human exploration.”
- The bill would require the Office of Science and Technology Policy to develop a plan to restart the production of plutonium for use in RTGs. Current stocks of plutonium-238 are running out, which is affecting planning for future missions.
- In addition to adding a shuttle flight for the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, the legislation would make two of the last shuttle flights, STS-131 and -133, “part of the Space Shuttle baseline flight manifest”. These are currently designated “contingency” shuttle flights, but even Mike Griffin has admitted that these flights are essential for stocking up the station with spare parts and other supplies before the shuttle is retired.
- While the bill would require NASA to enter into funded Space Act Agreements with two or more companies for Capability D of COTS (crew transfer), the funding the bill authorizes for that “shall not come at the expense of full funding for Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle development, Ares I Crew Launch Vehicle development, or International Space Station cargo delivery.” Also, there’s bill language requiring NASA to come up with contingency plans for cargo delivery to the station should commercial providers not be available “during any extended period” after the shuttle is retired.
- In a bid to perhaps study the problem to death, the bill requires OSTP to perform a study of “the impact of current export control policies and implementation directives on the United States aerospace industry and its competitiveness in global markets,” including its effect on international cooperation on science and exploration missions. It’s not clear what difference this study would make over the others commissioned in the last few years, though.
- The bill supports continued use of prizes, including for NEO searches and space solar power for lunar applications, and increases the threshold for Congressional notification of prizes from $10 million to $50 million (a moot point for now given the lack of funding for such prizes.)
Update: The subcommittee approved the bill unanimously during a brief (less than 10 minutes) session Tuesday morning, without any changes.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 May 17 at 9:31 am ET Saturday’s Orlando Sentinel has an article about HR 6063, the recently-introduced NASA authorization bill for FY 2009. The reporters play up the international cooperation language in the bill—perhaps too far:
President Bush had a simple plan for NASA in 2004. Stick another American flag on the moon and launch a new American-led space age.
Four years later, Democrats in Congress have unveiled another idea. Going it alone is expensive; let’s invite the world.
The plan is part of a new congressional blueprint for the space agency. If successful, it could significantly shift the direction of NASA and change its next big project from a purely American push for the stars to a global science project.
Under the bill, released late Thursday by a bipartisan band of House members, building a successor to the space shuttle would become a group effort similar to building the international space station.
The article continues down along that line: that the bill would somehow push NASA to make the development of Ares 1 and/or Orion an international effort in some way. However, the text of the bill itself doesn’t contain any such provision. The closest I could find was section 401, a “Sense of Congress” passage:
It is the sense of Congress that the President of the United States should invite America’s friends and allies to participate in a long-term international initiative under the leadership of the United States to expand human and robotic presence into the solar system, including the exploration and utilization of the Moon, near Earth asteroids, Lagrangian points, and eventually Mars and its moons, among other exploration and utilization goals.
The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Mark Udall, said the following in his statement Thursday introducing the bill:
[T]he NASA Authorization Act of 2008 makes clear that any human exploration initiative to return to the Moon and venture to other destinations in the solar system should be undertaken as a cooperative international undertaking under U.S. leadership—and that such a cooperative approach will have the best chance of being successfully sustained if the President is personally involved in inviting our friends and allies to participate in such a venture.
However, the Sentinel article presses on, getting a quote from a spokesman for Sen. Bill Nelson indicating that the senator is “not convinced it is a good idea because of safety concerns”, although not elaborating about what those concerns are (and being vague about what exactly is not “a good idea”.) The article adds that NASA “is unlikely to embrace the idea of outsiders working on its Constellation program”.
The article is also off-course when it claims that the bill would “change its next big project from a purely American push for the stars to a global science project.” In his January 2004 speech introducing the Vision for Space Exploration, President Bush said:
We’ll invite other nations to share the challenges and opportunities of this new era of discovery. The vision I outline today is a journey, not a race, and I call on other nations to join us on this journey, in a spirit of cooperation and friendship.
NASA has made clear since then that they’re open to international cooperation in a wide variety of areas, but also they want to keep the core transportation infrastructure a US-only effort. The authorization bill, while perhaps putting a stronger emphasis on international cooperation in the overall exploration effort, would not appear to force NASA to change that approach.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 May 16 at 12:30 pm ET The full text of HR 6063, the NASA Authorization Act of 2008, is now available on Thomas. I have not had time to review it yet, but wanted to be sure people were aware it’s available and open up any discussion about its provisions (some of which has already started in the earlier post about the legislation.)
By Jeff Foust on 2008 May 16 at 6:10 am ET Now that two counties in souther New Mexico have passed a sales tax increase to help fund development of a commercial spaceport, attention now turns to the third and final county in the region, Otero, which includes the city of Alamogordo. So how you convince citizens to vote for a tax increase, even a relatively small one, during an economic slowdown, if not outright recession?
Apparently, it’s all about the children. The Alamogordo Daily News reports on a presentation about Spaceport America and the proposed tax increase given yesterday by Steve Landeene, executive director of the New Mexico Spaceport Authority. With few high-tech job opportunities in the state, many young people leave the state looking for such work elsewhere, a trend Landeene and other supporters hope to reverse in part with the spaceport. He recounted his first meeting with governor Bill Richardson, who told Landeene that the state’s greatest export is “our kids”. “He was making a real profound statement and making sure that I got it,” Landeene said.
There’s some skepticism in the area about the economic benefits the county will realize from the spaceport, since it’s on the other side of a mountain range from the spaceport site. Also, the financial contribution that the Otero tax would provide is small: about $6.6 million of the nearly $200 million planned for the facility. Landeene warned that without that money, there could be “significant ramifications on infrastructure” at the spaceport. He added that without Otero participation in the spaceport tax, the county might not reap the benefits even if the spaceport gets built. “Yeah, Otero can hide on the sidelines, but then does anything happen over here? Maybe not.”
By Jeff Foust on 2008 May 15 at 9:12 pm ET The leaders of the House Science and Technology Committee formally introduced new authorization bill for NASA on Thursday, in advance of next week’s markup session on the legislation. The text of the bill, HR 6063, isn’t available yet (it should be in the next day or so), but the statement about the bill by Rep. Mark Udall (D-CO), chair of the space subcommittee, included in the full committee’s release did offer a few clues about its content and nature:
- It is apparently a one-year authorization, covering FY 2009 only; the previous authorization bill covered fiscal years 2006 through 2008.
- The bill is co-sponsored by the chair and ranking member of both the full committee and the space subcommittee, which Udall said “demonstrates the bipartisan nature of the support for NASA in this Congress”.
- The bill would put the agency’s authorized budget “on the same doubling path” as other science agencies, which under the America COMPETES Act enacted last year has their authorized budgets increased at a rate that would double them in seven to ten years.
- Calling for a “results-oriented human space flight program that serves the nation’s geopolitical goals in addition to advancing America’s exploration of outer space,” Udall said the bill “includes provisions to ensure that the International Space Station… will be utilized in as productive manner as possible.”
- In a similar vein, the bill includes language that “makes clear that any human exploration initiative to return to the Moon and venture to other destinations in the solar system should be undertaken as a cooperative international undertaking under U.S. leadership.” (Yes, is really says that the exploration should be undertaken as an undertaking—apparently he likes that word.)
- In earth sciences, the bill would put NASA in a leading role in “a cooperative international effort on Earth observations research and applications, especially with respect to climate change.”
- For aeronautics, the bill includes several relevant provisions, including enhanced funding that takes NASA research “to a sufficiently mature state so that the results of that research can be transitioned to the commercial sector as well as to key public sector users.”
By Jeff Foust on 2008 May 15 at 6:20 am ET An article in the Houston Chronicle yesterday said that members of Congress who represent the Houston area had declared Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison their “last best hope” for increasing NASA’s budget. The focus here is on the FY2008 supplemental appropriations bill working its way through Congress, which has an extra $200 million for NASA in the Senate version (to be marked up by the Senate Appropriations Committee today), but none in the House version. “Our best shot is for Kay Bailey Hutchison to insert the spending on the Senate side,” claimed Rep. John Culberson (R-TX), although exactly what Hutchison would introduce that is different from what Mikulski has already put into the Senate bill is unclear. The article said that “House members” believed that getting extra funding for NASA into the Senate version “wold strengthen their negotiating hand” when a conference committee meets as early as next week to reconcile differences between the two versions of the bill.
The problem with that strategy, though, is that it has failed in the past, such as last fall when the Senate added an extra billion dollars to its FY08 appropriations bill and the House did not; the money did not make it into the final omnibus appropriations bill. There’s also some opposition to including such additional funding in legislation designed primarily to fund military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. A Washington Post editorial earlier this week decried the Senate’s addition of “pet projects” to the supplemental, citing specifically “such goodies as $200 million for the space shuttle” in the Senate version, while praising the House for keeping such provisions out of its version. “If this counts as emergency spending,” the editorial concluded, “it’s hard to imagine what budget-busting expenditures would not qualify.”
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