By Jeff Foust on 2008 April 2 at 7:37 am ET That’s “Save Our Shuttle [Jobs]”, of course. On Tuesday, NASA released a shuttle workforce transition report that includes preliminary estimates predicting up to 9,000 jobs, primarily among contractors, that will be cut over the next three years as the shuttle is retired. The vast majority of those cuts—up to 6,400—will be at KSC, as expected. Some of those cuts may be partially offset after 2011 as Constellation efforts ramp up—assuming Constellation continues in something like its current form in the next administration.
This has fired up the two members of the House whose districts include KSC employees. Rep. Dave Weldon used the report as an argument for his “SPACE Act” legislation (HR 4837) that would authorize funding to continue the space shuttle program after 2010 to eliminate any gap in US government human spaceflight capability, and turned up the rhetoric another notch or two. “This report only confirms what I have been saying for the last several years. The Bush Administration’s space plan is woefully inadequate and unacceptable. The Administration’s current plan is to cede the ‘ultimate high ground’ to hostile nations. The Chinese and Russians are celebrating today, while many on the Space Coast are only now realizing the magnitude of the absurdity of the current strategy imposed by the Administration.”
Rep. Tom Feeney also expressed his concerns about the situation, but while Feeney is a cosponsor of HR 4837, he focused more on other solutions. “After the Shuttle retires, KSC will host important engineering and assembly work supporting lunar exploration. So expanding human spaceflight to the Moon is critical to stabilizing the Kennedy Space Center’s workforce,” he said, adding that “We should devote the resources necessary to rapidly bring the Constellation program online after the Shuttle’s retirement so KSC isn’t as severely impacted as forecast in today’s report.” Feeney did fire a shot in the direction of the presidential candidates: “Any Presidential candidate intent on killing lunar exploration is condemning Florida’s Space Coast to the scenario found in NASA’s initial forecasts.”
In his press release, Weldon complained that “My colleagues in the Senate haven’t seemed to grasp the scope of this debacle and the urgency with which we must act.” Sen. Mel Martinez (R-FL) issued a brief statement that may not be sufficient to mollify Weldon. “There is no simple fix to this problem, but we know where to focus our efforts, We need to accelerate the Orion and Ares programs, we need to foster a competitive environment for commercial space operations, and we need to assist the individuals and businesses affected by the transition.”
By Jeff Foust on 2008 April 2 at 7:11 am ET In an op-ed published Tuesday in the Capitol Hill newspaper Politico, Scott “Doc” Horowitz, the former astronaut and former NASA associate administrator for exploration, called on both Republicans and Democrats to formally support space exploration in their party platforms. “Americans’ support for building on the ‘greatest generation’s’ achievements in space is so broad and deep that both political parties ought to include similar planks at their conventions this summer to commit the U.S. to continued and expanded space exploration,” he writes. Such a move, he adds, “would show Americans that their political leaders agree on a program that the overwhelming majority of voters vigorously support.”
The proof that Americans “vigorously support” space exploration comes from a series of polls, Horowitz writes: “In three polls taken from the middle of 2005 to the latter part of 2006, support for spending on space exploration at the current annual level of $58 dollars per U.S. citizen — or higher — fluctuated between slightly less than two-thirds and slightly more than three-fourths of the general population. But as noted here, there are mixed messages about just how strongly the public supports NASA, with some polls suggesting that space should be first on the chopping block, That’s a sign that while public interest in space (at least civil government spaceflight) is broad, it’s not necessarily deep.
Just in case readers aren’t vigorous supporters of NASA, though, Horowitz offers some reasons for continuing NASA’s exploration initiative. “Establishing a scientific outpost on the moon, for example, would substantially improve scientists’ understanding of Earth by providing a global view of our planet, showing how it is affected by the sun and the moon; such insight would increase our knowledge about changes in Earth’s climate,” he writes. More: “A lunar outpost would vastly increase our ability to monitor and respond swiftly to significant terrestrial volcanic activity.” That last option seems particularly odd (isn’t volcanic activity already well-monitored by terrestrial sensors and Earth-orbiting spacecraft?) but it turns out it is one of nearly 200 lunar exploration objectives NASA published in 2006 when it announced its long-term plans for a lunar base. Somehow, though, volcanic monitoring doesn’t seem likely to engender even more vigorous support for space exploration.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 March 29 at 12:02 pm ET At the Space Access ’08 conference in Phoenix on Friday, Charles Miller, a member of the board of directors of the Space Frontier Foundation, gave a presentation with a provocative title: “The Vision for Space Exploration (VSE) and the Retirement of the Baby Boomers: Is this the Beginning of the End? or The End of the Beginning?” Miller took aim at one of the core assumptions behind the planning for the VSE and its implementation, dating back to the budget projection “sand chart” from January 2004: that NASA’s budget would grow at roughly the rate of inflation for the foreseeable, if not indefinite, future. Current administrator Mike Griffin, for example, has said on a number of occasions that budget growth that keeps pace with inflation would be sufficient to allow humans to land on Mars by the mid-2030s, among other things.
The problem with that assumption, Miller said, is that the budget is facing a major crunch in the relatively near future, as the Baby Boomer generation retires and starts putting increasing fiscal strain on programs like Social Security and Medicare. “Mandatory” programs, like those, now account for 53% of the overall federal budget, compared to 26% in 1962, according to OMB data released last month with the President’s FY09 budget proposal. Discretionary spending, which includes NASA as well as the military and many other agencies, has seen its share of the budget pie shrink from 68% in 1962 to 38% now. Those discretionary programs will continue to be squeezed, Miller believes, particularly once Boomers start retiring en masse around 2010.
“There’s going to be blood on the floor for a wide variety of programs, and it’s going to include NASA,” Miller predicts. “A conservative projection for NASA’s real budget in the long term, for 50 years, needs to take this into account, and should consider significant reductions in the top-line NASA budget.”
In such a scenario, it seems unlikely that the Vision would continue in anything like its current ESAS implementation. That is likely to be true regardless of who becomes the next president, as he or she will have to grapple with the same fiscal realities. “I think it [ESAS] is going to probably die in the next administration,” Miller said. Which begs the question: what should replace it?
Miller said that the goal of going to the Moon, Mars, and beyond can be preserved if one of three conditions can be met: cheap, reliable access to space (CRATS) is achieved; we find an “economically-driven strategic reason” for investing in space; or we address high-priority national security objectives. All those things can be achieved, he said, if the US develops a “reusable space access industry” that includes not just launch vehicles but other infrastructure elements like propellant depots, orbital transfer vehicles, and the like. Such an industry could make civil, military, and commercial space affordable and sustainable even in a severely constrained budget environment.
Miller proposed at the end of the talk to start preparing for “the end of the beginning” with a “National Reusable Space Access Summit”. This event would bring together the major players to develop a “National Reusable Space Access Strategy”, and come out with a short consensus statement that would be the basis for future discussions with government leaders. “I’m throwing this out here to start a discussion,” he concluded.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 March 28 at 12:42 pm ET As a counterpoint to the recent Houston Chronicle op-ed about the need to “stay the course” on the exploration program or else lose out to the Chinese, among other recent statements that have suggested that the US is in danger of falling behind to the Chinese in human spaceflight, a reader passed along this China Daily article from earlier this month. In it, Hu Hao, the director of China’s “moon exploration center” said that China had no plans for a human lunar mission by 2020, as the country was only now making its initial steps in robotic lunar exploration. As Hu colorfully put it: “You can’t declare yourself the boss of a chicken farm when you’ve only got one egg now, can you?” That’s a message that hasn’t reached—or is being ignored by—some in the US, though.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 March 28 at 12:15 pm ET As Congress returns from recess next week, the House Science and Technology Committee has a couple of relevant hearings scheduled. On Wednesday morning, April 2, the research and education subcommittee is holding a hearing on “International Science and Technology Cooperation” with the following witnesses scheduled:
- Dr. John Marburger, Director, Office of Science and Technology Policy
- Dr. Arden Bement, Director, National Science Foundation (NSF)
- Dr. Nina Fedoroff, Science and Technology Advisor to the Secretary, U.S. Department of State
- Mr. Jeff Miotke, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Science, Space and Health, Bureau of Oceans and International and Environmental and Scientific Affairs, U.S. Department of State
- Mr. Michael O’Brien, Assistant Administrator for External Relations, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
On Thursday morning, April 3, the space subcommittee is holding a hearing titled “NASA’s Exploration Initiative: Status and Issues”, with the following witnesses:
- Dr. Richard Gilbrech, Associate Administrator, Exploration Systems Mission Directorate, NASA
- Ms. Cristina T. Chaplain, Director, Acquisition and Sourcing Management,
Government Accountability Office
- Dr. Noel Hinners, Independent Consultant
- Dr. Kathryn Thornton, Professor of Department of Science, Technology and Society & Associate Dean of the School of Engineering & Applied Science, University of Virginia
By Jeff Foust on 2008 March 27 at 6:02 pm ET While it’s been mentioned in the comments in the earlier post on the subject, it’s worth a post itself. Space News scored the first interview with Ed Weiler, the director of the Goddard Space Flight Center and the interim replacement for Alan Stern as head of the Science Mission Directorate. The interview makes it clear that Weiler, who previously served in a similar position at NASA headquarters, is still getting up to speed on the issues. He also declined to comment on the circumstances of Stern’s resignation.
The interview does raise the question of the future of some of the programs that Stern promoted while on the job, including planning for a Mars sample return mission near the end of the next decade and a reinvigorated suborbital program. On the last point, Weiler was asked about the request for information that NASA issued recently for suborbital flight services; Weiler responded, “I know nothing about this,” although he was supportive in general of the efforts Stern made on suborbital programs. (That last comment, though, may be causing some concern among companies in the entrepreneurial suborbital industry, based on some conversations I had with people at the Space Access ’08 conference going on now in Phoenix.)
Scientific American, meanwhile, has an article with comments from the space science community about Stern’s resignation, as they speculate why he resigned, and what impact it will have on the agency’s science programs. “It means potentially a black day for science at NASA,” said Mark Sykes of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson. “It’s clear that [Stern] was pushing very hard on the system,” James Bell, a Mars scientist at Cornell, said. “He may have thought he had more latitude with Mike Griffin than he did.”
By Jeff Foust on 2008 March 26 at 1:06 pm ET NASA officially announced this morning that Alan Stern, the associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, was resigning. He will be replaced on an intermin basis, at least, by Ed Weiler, the director of NASA Goddard. Stern will leave in “a few weeks”, Stern announced in an email memo cited by Space News/SPACE.com.
“While I deeply regret his decision to leave NASA, I understand his reasons for doing so,” administrator Mike Griffin said in the official statement. However, the statement doesn’t explain what those reasons are. There has been speculation (based on some emails and phone calls I received this morning) that this is linked to the recent kerfuffle over a plan, since overruled, to cut the Mars Exploration Rovers program budget. The timing, at the very least, is suspect, but it could also be a coincidence.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 March 26 at 6:25 am ET The Planetary Society announced this week that it is holding the first in a series of “town hall” meetings on space policy this Saturday in Brookline, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. The society is billing this event as the “public follow-up” to the Stanford University exploration workshop last month, which endorsed human exploration with the goal of “Mars and beyond”. “We need to examine the current Vision for Space Exploration to see what it will take to gather greater political support and public interest to carry out the Vision,” Lou Friedman said in the statement. The society hasn’t released a schedule of future such events.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 March 24 at 8:56 pm ET In last week’s issue of The Space Review, I reported on some Mars scientists were concerned about the long-term future of the exploration of the Red Planet, given shifting NASA priorities and funding. While the near-term picture looks promising, with the arrival of the Phoenix lander in two months and the planned 2009 launch of the Mars Science Laboratory, the picture beyond 2009 looks rather fuzzy. NASA officials, including Mike Griffin, have defended the cuts in the five-year budget plans for NASA by saying that Mars exploration is being rebalanced to help support other science programs, like outer solar system exploration, that have not fared as well as recent years.
Now it appears NASA’s Mars programs are facing some short-term pain as well. SPACE.com and the AP report that NASA has asked the Mars Exploration Rover program to cut $4 million from its budget for the remainder of FY2008. That likely means that the Spirit rover will remain in an extended hibernation period after the winter ends, instead of resuming scientific work. That cut could be extended into FY2009. SPACE.com added that the Mars Odyssey orbiter, launched in 2001, is “on the cost-cutting table” as well.
Some will argue that the rovers, on the surface for over four years each, have long exceeded the planned 90-day missions, and that Spirit in particular is not in the best of shape, suffering from a stuck wheel that impairs the rover’s mobility, so these cuts are not catastrophic. However, don’t be surprised if there’s some vocal opposition—among scientists, advocates, and supporters on Capitol Hill—to these proposed cuts in the days and weeks to come. Whether that will make any difference, though, remains to be seen.
Update 3/25 7:30 am: After those initial reports, NASA spokesmen told CNN and the Pasadena Star-News that “shutting down of one of the rovers is not an option,” although they confirmed that the order to cut the program’s budget had been issued. “The rovers program will continue and not one rover will be impacted by this budget challenge, period,” spokesman Dwayne Brown told the Star-News. One wonders, if these statements are accurate, if the rover program is playing a version of the “Washington Monument strategy”: claiming a high-profile program will be affected if a budget cut is enacted.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 March 24 at 1:34 pm ET “Because of the 2008 presidential election, our nation’s human spaceflight program is at a perilous crossroad,” claims Douglas MacKinnon in an op-ed Sunday in the Houston Chronicle. MacKinnon, a former White House and Pentagon official who is now director of federal affairs and communications for a K Street law firm, believes none of the three remaining major candidates is sufficiently committed to carrying out current national space exploration policy (aka the Vision for Space Exploration), although he singles out Barack Obama for particular attention. (A quibble: MacKinnon writes that “Obama went on record as saying he planned to pay for his $18 billion education plan by taking it out of the hide of NASA”; rather, Obama said he would pay for his education plan in part by delaying Constellation by five years. He also did not specifically mention Ares and Orion in the statement, contrary to what MacKinnon writes, although the campaign has been vague about what exactly they meant, especially since they have not issued a formal space policy statement to date.)
MacKinnon believes that the next president, whomever he or she is, needs to “stay the course” and continue the program. Drawing parallels to JFK, who said in a 1962 speech that “Our leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to become the world’s leading spacefaring nation,” MacKinnon writes: “No matter who is our next president, he or she is either going to have to buy in completely to the premise of that young president, or stand aside and watch as other nations lay claim to the promise of space. There is no middle ground.”
If that rhetoric isn’t strong enough for you, MacKinnon has more: “Should the next president decide to delay or cancel our next generation spacecraft and rockets for partisan reasons, he or she will be condemning the United States to second-class status in space for decades to come.” Second class in space? For decades? That is strong stuff.
Unfortunately, it’s not clear that it is all that attached to reality. MacKinnon doesn’t explain how not developing Ares and Orion would affect issues like national security and commercial space, which are not directly tied to Constellation yet arguably are just as important, if not more so, to US “status in space” than the ability of putting humans in space (it’s just that the latter is far more visible to the public than launching reconnaissance or communications satellites.) The ability to “lay claim to the promise of space” is not dependent solely, or even primarily, on developing Ares and Orion.
Essays like MacKinnon’s though, appear part of a theme that has emerged over the last several months: rather than selling the current space exploration policy on what it can do for the nation, sell it instead on the perceived dire consequences if it is altered or cancelled. But does fearmongering make for good space policy?
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