By Jeff Foust on 2008 April 24 at 6:47 am ET “Although the MSM [mainstream media] has largely ignored Barack Obama’s plans for NASA, the issue is likely to bubble up during the general election campaign, if he’s the Democratic nominee,” claims Lee Cary in an essay in American Thinker, a right-leaning online publication. Cary never really explains why he believes this will happen: after all, while space got more attention that some might have expected during the primary season, it never became a major topic (outside of, say, Brevard County in Florida). In a general election between Obama and John McCain, it’s hard to see space getting much attention, particularly given the increasing concern about the economy (in particular food and fuel prices), the ever-present debate about Iraq, and so on.
Cary largely rehashes what’s been previously said about Obama, including his pledge to delay Constellation for five years to help pay for his education programs. Cary then cites the campaign’s quasi-official space policy where Obama pledges to “support the development of this vital new platform [the Orion CEV] to ensure that the United States’ reliance on foreign space capabilities is limited to the minimum possible time period.” “Now is that in human or dog years?” is Cary’s rejoinder, one of a number of parenthetical, italicized comments littered throughout the document in an apparent effort to be witty. Cary doesn’t note, though, that this “reliance on foreign space capabilities” (aka “the gap”) is going to be an issue for whomever is elected president.
A more balanced analysis comes from Rand Simberg in a PopularMechanics.com article. He examines what the three campaigns (Obama, McCain, and Hillary Clinton) have said to date on space, and how the facts back up (or don’t) their rhetoric. No clear winner emerges. “For voters already behind NASA’s targeted human spaceflight, don’t get your hopes up—none of the three major candidates are likely to fund the current plan, because they’ll all face the budgetary pressures implied by an aging population and a burgeoning federal deficit,” he writes. “So perhaps the real question to ask McCain, Clinton and Obama is not what they’re going to do for NASA, but whether they’re going to come up with a more innovative federal space policy overall.”
By Jeff Foust on 2008 April 24 at 6:07 am ET As noted here earlier, the space subcommittee of the House Science and Technology Committee is holding a hearing on the ISS this morning. While it’s not specifically mentioned in the hearing charter, one would expect that committee members would ask NASA’s Bill Gerstenmaier some questions about the Soyuz reentry Saturday that experienced what may be significant problems, especially since NASA is now asking Congress to extend its authority to purchase Soyuz flights beyond 2011.
The Orlando Sentinel reported yesterday that at least one member of Congress is seriously concerned about the Soyuz problem. “I don’t know how to reliably interpret everything they [NASA] are telling me about things like this,” Rep. Dave Weldon (R-FL) told the paper. Weldon, of course, is pushing a bill to keep the shuttle flying after 2010.
The Sentinel article also notes that county commissioners in Brevard County, Florida (home to Cape Canaveral and KSC) “passed a resolution saying ‘resources to be spent on procuring Russian Soyuz#8230; would best be devoted to the development and procurement of domestic crew and cargo logistic capabilities.'” (The county board’s minutes aren’t available this morning.) Not that the Brevard County board has much influence on affairs in Washington…
By Jeff Foust on 2008 April 22 at 11:12 pm ET The Las Cruces (NM) Sun-News reports that voters in Sierra County, New Mexico approved a spaceport sales tax by roughly a two-to-one margin, much larger than the margin of victory last year in neighboring Doña Ana County. The quarter-cent increase will provide a modest amount of funding for New Mexico’s Spaceport America but also allow the formation of a “tax district” with Doña Ana County so that the tax revenue can actually be spent.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 April 22 at 7:14 am ET While most people will be focusing their attention today on the Democratic presidential primary in Pennsylvania, the space industry, in particular the entrepreneurial NewSpace sector, will instead be paying attention a special election today in Sierra County, New Mexico. At stake: a quarter-cent increase in the sales tax in the county, with the proceeds going towards the development of Spaceport America, the commercial spaceport planned for southern New Mexico that will be used by Virgin Galactic, among others.
The tax itself will contribute only a tiny fraction of the project’s $198-million cost: about $2.3 million. Yet the election is considered key to the spaceport’s development. A similar tax was narrowly approved a year ago in neighboring, more populous Doña Ana County, which includes the city of Las Cruces. However, because of a provision of state law, the money that the tax would have collected there could not be spent until a spaceport “tax district” is created, and that can’t be done until another county or locality approves the tax. That puts pressure on Sierra County to approve the tax, or else the spaceport will face a funding shortfall of over $50 million. (Officials in a third county, Otero, have stated that they plan their own tax referendum later this year—but only if the tax passes in Sierra County.) “At this point there is not a back-up plan” if the tax fails in Sierra, Steve Landeene, executive director of the New Mexico Spaceport Authority, told the Las Cruces Sun News.
It’s not surprising, then, that spaceport advocates have been putting on a full-court press in the last couple of weeks. Spaceport officials have announced a number of agreements with potential spaceport users, from sounding rocket developer UP Aerospace to aerospace giant Lockheed Martin. New Mexico’s lieutenant governor, Diane Denish, also stumped for the tax in the county last week. The biggest incentive, though, might come from Virgin Galactic, which is offering to take one local resident to space for free each year once they begin operations at the spaceport.
Far and away the largest city in Sierra County is Truth or Consequences. For spaceport advocates, that’s a pretty apt description of what this election represents for them.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 April 21 at 8:54 pm ET Dr. George Nield, who had been the acting associate administrator for commercial space transportation at the FAA since Patti Grace Smith retired in early February, can take “acting” off his job title. Nield was formally named as associate administrator today by (ironically) acting FAA administrator Robert Sturgell. Here’s a quote from Nield in the FAA release:
“This is a very exciting time for those of us working in commercial space transportation,” said Nield. “With the pending retirement of the Space Shuttle, NASA has pledged to use commercial space vehicles to service the International Space Station, and the FAA will license those launches. We are also looking forward to the debut of commercial human spaceflight, with hundreds of flights per year carrying paying passengers to the edge of space. Each of these endeavors will require us to think about new ways of doing business, while continuing to keep public safety as our top priority.”
[Standard disclaimers and disclosures apply. While my employer does work for FAA/AST, I actually first heard about this appointment earlier today from someone outside of that office who found out about it through his grapevine.]
By Jeff Foust on 2008 April 20 at 1:46 pm ET The space subcommittee of the House Science and Technology Committee is holding a hearing this Thursday morning on “NASA’s International Space Station Program: Status and Issues”. The rather crowded list of witnesses:
- Mr. William Gerstenmaier, Associate Administrator, Space Operations Mission Directorate, National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- Ms. Cristina T. Chaplain, Director, Acquisition and Sourcing Management, Government Accountability Office
- Dr. Edward P. Knipling, Administrator, Agricultural Research Service, Department of Agriculture
- Dr. Cheryl Nickerson, Associate Professor of Life Sciences, Arizona State University
- Mr. Thomas Pickens, III, President and CEO, Spacehab, Inc.
- Dr. Louis Stodieck, Director, BioServe Space Technologies and Aerospace Engineering Science, University of Colorado at Boulder
- Dr. Jeffrey Sutton, Director, National Space Biomedical Research Institute
By Jeff Foust on 2008 April 20 at 1:37 pm ET Just as NASA is asking Congress to extend its authority to purchase Soyuz spacecraft after 2011, Russian officials are making statements that may raise a few eyebrows in the US. The Associated Press published Saturday comments made by Roskosmos head Anatoly Perminov after the Soyuz TMA-11 spacecraft made a ballistic reentry and landing several hundred kilometers off-course:
Later, Perminov referred to a naval superstition that having women aboard a ship was bad luck when asked about the presence of two women on the Soyuz.
“You know in Russia, there are certain bad omens about this sort of thing, but thank God that everything worked out successfully,” he said. “Of course in the future, we will work somehow to ensure that the number of women will not surpass” the number of men.
Challenged by a reporter, Perminov responded: “This isn’t discrimination. I’m just saying that when a majority (of the crew) is female, sometimes certain kinds of unsanctioned behavior or something else occurs, that’s what I’m talking about.” He did not elaborate.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 April 18 at 7:46 am ET While NASA is not focusing on crew transfer services as part of the COTS program right now, it is pretty much going all-in on cargo resupply with COTS. Aerospace Daily reported Thursday that NASA is not asking for an Congressional extension of its authority to purchase Progress missions after the current authority to purchase Progress and Soyuz missions, granted in the Iran Nonproliferation Amendments Act of 2005, expires at the end of 2011. NASA has formally requested to Congress that it be able to purchase Soyuz flights for crew transfers after 2011, but instead plans on relying on one more commercial providers to transport cargo to the station. (The NASA proposal would end authorization for Soyuz purchases once Orion or a commercial crew transportation provider enters service.)
And what if SpaceX, Orbital, or anyone else isn’t ready by the end of 2011? NASA associate administrator Bill Gerstenmaier told Aerospace Daily that NASA would “live off the spares” that the final shuttle flights will bring to the station. (Presumably there will be enough consumables brought on Progress, ATV, and/or HTV missions for this strategy to work.) It does suggest that NASA feels confident enough that someone will be ready to start carrying cargo to the station by the beginning of 2012, but that confidence doesn’t extend to crew transportation.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 April 18 at 7:24 am ET As the previous post noted, space exploration isn’t a high priority among the British public. Yet, they certainly like to talk about space policy. The BBC reported this week that the British government is planning a “major revamp” of its space policy, including reorganizing and relocating its space office. The British National Space Centre (BNSC) is being moved from London to Swindon, which is also home to the Science and Technology Facilities Council, which funds space sciences research in the UK. Some of the BNSC’s responsibilities will also be transferred to another office, the Technology Strategy Board, according to the BBC report. This comes after earlier complaints that the BNSC is, in general, not effective, and should be replaced with a full-fledged space agency like NASA.
One of those who called last year for a UK space agency was Lord Martin Rees, the president of the Royal Society. Lord Rees was in the news this week when he said that Europe should abandon human spaceflight and instead endeavor to get the “world lead” in robotic spaceflight. “We can be more effective in space if we focus all our budget on miniaturisation, robotics, and fabricators and avoid manned spaceflight,” he told the BBC. He added: “If I was an American, I would be opposed to a return to the Moon and going to Mars.” Rees’s arguments aren’t new: back in 2003, before President Bush announced the Vision for Space Exploration, Rees was skeptical about the future of government-run human spaceflight, saying only the private sector was able to accept the risks inherent with such exploration. “I think the future of manned spaceflight will only brighten if it’s done by people prepared to cut costs and take risks in a fashion that’s seemingly unacceptable to the U.S. public in a NASA project,” he told SPACE.com in December 2003.
Update: Flightglobal.com reports that Rees’s comments have caused a “backlash” in the UK space science community, at least among those who have advocated that the UK participate in European human spaceflight activities. One Royal Astronomical Society official, Ian Crawford, said that Rees’s comments suggested that he “ought to be more familiar with the scientific benefits” of human spaceflight in areas such as planetary geology and life sciences. And retired BBC spaceflight commentator Reg Turnill had this to say: “Rees’ attitude to human spaceflight is at least a century out of date, but does have the huge merit of getting the subject discussed. He can also be assured that future generations will remember him for all the wrong reasons.”
By Jeff Foust on 2008 April 18 at 7:01 am ET This blog has noted on a number of occasions, to the consternation of hardcore space advocates, that space ranks pretty low on the list of priorities of the general public (and, thus, fairly high on the list of government programs they would be willing to cut). Another reminder of this came out earlier this month, when the Fairfax County (Virginia) Economic Development Authority released a poll ranking the top priorities for “technological breakthroughs” as perceived by the American public. “Fuel efficiency and alternative fuels” and “Medical” ranked at the top of the list, with two-thirds of the respondents selecting one or the other as their highest priority. “Space exploration” made the list, but only barely: just three percent ranked it as their highest technological priority, ahead of only “Telecommunications and media” and “Don’t know/not sure”.
The same poll was also performed in the UK at the same time, with similar results. While medical and fuel efficiency/alternative fuels flipped-flopped at the top, space exploration remained near the bottom, getting selected by only one percent of the public, tied for last with telecommunications and media.
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