By Jeff Foust on 2008 March 7 at 6:34 am ET In his prepared remarks Thursday at the Goddard Memorial Symposium, presidential science advisor John Marburger covered some of the same ground as he did in his speech there two years ago, where he said the debate over the Vision for Space Exploration was, at its core, “whether we want to incorporate the Solar System in our economic sphere, or not.” That rehashing was deliberate, he said, in order to reinforce the concept.
He did, though, take time to review some of the conclusions of the exploration workshop held at Stanford University last month, as described in the joint communiqué released after the event. He said while he agreed with some of the points, including one that said that “sustained human exploration requires enhanced international collaboration and offers the United States an opportunity for global leadership”, there was language in some of the others that made him “uneasy”.
For example, he disagreed with part of the first statement, which said, “The purpose of sustained human exploration is to go to Mars and beyond.” Marburger countered that the purpose of sustained lunar exploration was “to serve national and international interests”, which he added is broader than simply going somewhere and returning. He cited the policy statement released when the Vision for Space Exploration was announced, which states, “The fundamental goal of this vision is to advance U.S. scientific, security, and economic interests through a robust space exploration program.” “Exploration that is not in support of something else,” Marburger said, “strikes me as somehow selfish and unsatisfying.”
He also disagreed with another part of the same point: “The significance of the Moon and other intermediate destinations is to serve as steppingstones on the path to that goal” of going to Mars and beyond. That language, he said, leaves out the economic potential of the Moon and other such “steppingstones”. “What are we going to do with those steppingstones once we’ve planted flags on Mars and beyond?” he said. “I read in these points a narrowing, not an expansion, of the Vision for Space Exploration. They ignore the very likely possibility that operations on the Moon and other intermediate destinations will serve national and international destinations other than science, but including science as a very important objective.”
“Exploration by a few is not the grandest achievement,” he said. “Occupation by many is grander.” (Although he added that by “occupation” he did not necessarily mean settlement but instead “routine access to resources”.) His long-term vision for the future is “one in which exploration has long since ceased and our successors reap the benefits of the new territories.”
By Jeff Foust on 2008 March 7 at 5:58 am ET The grassroots space lobbying group ProSpace has released its agenda for March Storm 2008, which starts with training this weekend. The agenda focuses on three keys areas: Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS), detection of near Earth objects (NEOs), and space solar power (SSP). Its biggest requests are in COTS: ProSpace is asking for two more funded COTS awards, and that “any additional funds” go to COTS rather than Ares 1 and Orion. ProSpace is also asking for “sufficient funds” in 2009 and beyond for resupply services to “maximize the use of ISS”.
For NEOs, ProSpace is asking for support for proposed legislation, the “NEO Detection, Impact Response and Collision Mitigation Planning Act” (not to be confused with the “NEO Preparedness Act”, HR 4917, that Rep. Dana Rohrabacher introduced in December) that would direct the National Science and Technology Council to study NEO search and impact mitigation efforts. On the SSP front, ProSpace is asking members of Congress to sign a letter for John Young, Undersecretary of Defense for
Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, asking him to follow up on the NSSO’s SSP study last year by developing a road map for future SSP work.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 March 6 at 1:35 pm ET Presidential science advisor John Marburger, speaking Thursday morning at the Goddard Memorial Symposium, downplayed any prospects for a new space race between the US and China. “I think it would be a serious mistake to construe the relative activities of China and the US as the beginning of a new space race,” he said in response to a question after his prepared remarks. “It would lose the opportunity for synergistic efforts” between the two nations down the road.
Later, Marburger was asked how a Chinese manned landing on the Moon, before the United States returns, would be viewed here in the US. (NASA administrator Mike Griffin has previously said that when (not if, in his opinion) that happens, “Americans will not like it, but they will just have to not like it.”) “These are events that can seized upon by the multitude of advocates that we have… so who knows how that event will be ‘managed’, if you will, or spontaneously strike the imagination of the people,” he said. “If we’re in a very tense time with China when that happens, then it’s possible that the impact might be very great” but may have less of an impact here if relations with China are more “relaxed”.
Marburger made it clear he preferred that latter scenario. “We’re more effective if we can do this in a relaxed way,” he said, referring to the implementation of the exploration vision. “We can’t afford to make each one of these events a big, expensive show that doesn’t build for the future. We will be most successful in the future if we do this in a planned way and really try to signal our seriousness to other countries that we want to do this together.” In conclusion, he said, “We ought to try as hard as we can to exert a discipline on ourselves not to overreact, not to see in these various efforts by other nations opportunities to make a quick hit in some way, a quick splash of our own, and spend a lot of money and not get enough for it for the future.”
By Jeff Foust on 2008 March 6 at 6:29 am ET NASA administrator Mike Griffin gave the keynote speech yesterday at the Goddard Memorial Symposium, for the third year in the year (“I think you guys need to get a life,” he joked.) His speech had the theme of “The reality of tomorrow”, borrowing from a statement by Robert Goddard: “It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow.” So what are Griffin’s hopes for today?
One of them is a desire for more unity within the space community. “Over the course of my career in this business, I have often been disheartened by the large number of diverse, I can only say ‘entrepreneurs’, in search of NASA funding who place their self interests over the greater good of the aerospace community,” he said. These are people, he said, who try to promote their own pet projects over those priorities laid out by the White House and Congress or decadal surveys in various scientific fields. “If we wish a better reality for tomorrow, we as a community must police this behavior; those who engage in it must be made to feel, and must be, unwelcome in the community at large. My hope for today is that there will in the future be more respect for each others’ work.”
Related to that is a desire to rebuild credibility that Griffin believes has been undercut by cost and schedule overruns for projects that turned out to be more difficult than their proponents originally stated. “NASA managers, the White House, and Congress have seen this behavior too many times, and the agency has lost a great deal of credibility over the decades as a result,” he said. “There was a time—I remember it, and many of you here are old enough to remember it also—when what NASA said could be taken to the bank. Anyone here think it’s like that today? No show of hands for how great our credibility is? Thought not.”
Griffin did call for more use of commercial capabilities where available. He noted the agency’s recent contact with Zero G Corporation for parabolic flight services, and added that NASA will take “a hard look over the coming months” at whether the agency needs to keep its own aircraft for such flights. He also mentioned the recent RFIs for commercial suborbital services issued by NASA last week. “I very much hope NASA researchers and astronauts will be proactive in taking first advantage of such capabilities as they are developed by the nation’s entrepreneurs.” Later, in response to a question on the subject, he called “entrepreneurial commercial space endeavors that seem to be burgeoning in this country and maybe even elsewhere—I view them as almost unmitigated good”, adding that NASA “can’t pick winners, but we can use winners.”
By Jeff Foust on 2008 March 6 at 5:36 am ET A couple of pieces of state legislation related to commercial space have passed milestones in the last several days:
In Hawaii, the House approved unanimously Tuesday HB2259, legislation that support work to develop a commercial spaceport in the state. Specifically, the legislation appropriates an unspecified sum to the state’s Office of Aerospace Development “to conduct feasibility studies for a spaceport and to pay for consultation and other expenses incurred in applying to the Federal Aviation Administration for a commercial space transportation license.”
Meanwhile, in Virginia, Governor Tim Kaine signed into law this week SB286, a “zero-g, zero-tax” bill for commercial spaceflight operations in the state. The bill amends the state tax code so that, starting in 2009, no tax would be charged on revenue from commercial human spaceflight launch services and training, or NATS COTS resupply services, provided those launches take place from a facility in the state. The fiscal impact statement for the legislation notes that the impact of the tax exemption “is unknown, but likely minimal”, because of the lack of activity in this sector.
The summary also notes that “In addition, only two companies, neither of which appears to have nexus with Virginia, have signed contracts with the COTS division of NASA,” when in fact one company with a funded COTS award, Orbital Sciences Corporation, is based in Virginia and is considering launches from Wallops. (The summary is stated February 26, about a week after Orbital’s COTS award was announced.) Orbital’s use of Wallops is not a done deal yet, but company CEO David W. Thompson said yesterday at the Goddard Memorial Symposium that they would make a final decision in the coming months.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 March 5 at 6:38 am ET On Monday the Defense Department issued the 2008 edition of “Military Power of the People’s Republic of China”, an annual report that assesses Chinese military capabilities. There’s a brief section titled “Space and Counterspace” that offers a general overview, including a brief discussion of the January 2007 ASAT test and related developments. One sentence of the report claims that, in addition to its groundbased direct ascent ASATm “China is developing other technologies and concepts for kinetic and directed-energy (e.g., lasers and radio frequency) weapons for ASAT missions,” but goes into no further details.
That’s different from just a few years ago when, in the 2004 report, the DoD claimed that China was developing “parasitic microsatellite” technology: a small satellite that would presumably be able to approach and destroy or disable another satellite. The 2004 report cautioned, “This claim is being evaluated,” and, as it turns out, the claim was unsubstantiated: it was traced back to the web site of a “self-described ‘military enthusiast'” with little credibility.
This is an egregious example, but hardly the only one, of misinterpretation of information of Chinese space capabilities and intentions. In an article in Monday’s issue of The Space Review, I describe a recent presentation that examines the miscommunication between the US and China on space issues. Gregory Kulacki of the Union of Concerned Scientists described research he performed where he examined 1,500 articles published in China since 1971 that mention ASATs. Most of those articles are general reviews or polemics, but get far more attention in the US than the much smaller number of technical articles that could provide more accurate insights into Chinese capabilities and intents. “A lot of the information that our analysts and intelligence officers are consuming—that’s driving their perceptions of Chinese intent regarding their civil and their military space programs—is based on very shoddy sources,” he said.
This creates an echo chamber involving the “polemical communities” in the US and China, who react to each others’ publications regardless of the quality of the information they contain. “There is this whole tiny dialogue between these two hawkish communities in these two countries that dominates the entire discussion on this in the public domain,” Kulacki said.
This doesn’t mean that China isn’t a threat to US security, in space or elsewhere (something that Kulacki acknowledges), but that the information that underlies the debate may sometimes be of questionable quality. Given that China’s civil space capabilities and plans are increasingly trotted out as arguments for continuing or accelerating NASA’s own exploration initiatives, that’s something to keep in mind.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 March 4 at 6:57 am ET In Monday’s issue of The Space Review, Alex Kirk recounts last month’s “Blitz” by the Space Exploration Alliance (SEA), where a group of space activists met with over 120 Congressional offices about the NASA budget and other space policy issues. Kirk reports that what got the most attention and (positive) reaction from members and staffers were specific issues, such as COTS and space solar power, rather than focusing on generalities like NASA’s overall funding level. He concludes:
The lesson to be learned from this is simple: whenever possible, space advocates should make their pitches in support of NASA or other space exploration activity very targeted and explicit. A letter or a call to an office that simply states general support for space is certainly preferable to no contact at all, but if an individual or a group can call for funding for a specific aspect of space exploration, or come out in support of or opposition to a specific bill, their impact will be magnified substantially.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 March 4 at 6:36 am ET On Sunday Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton issued a statement “in support of U.S. aerospace and aviation”. The statement is largely a restatement of her October 2007 science policy and follow-up statements, with additional aviation-specific items. The section of greatest relevance to space policy:
Hillary will double NASA’s and FAA’s aeronautics R&D budgets as part of her plan to reverse the Bush administration’s war on science. She will pursue a balanced strategy of robust human spaceflight, expanded robotic spaceflight, and enhanced space and Earth science activities. She will speed development, testing, and deployment of next-generation launch and crew exploration vehicles to replace the aging Space Shuttle program. At the same time, Hillary’s innovation agenda calls for stimulating in-house research and commercial development by making the R&D tax credit permanent. She will also double federal investment in basic research, which is critical for ensuring that America is at the forefront of new ideas.
The one new item is the statement doubling NASA’a aeronautics budget (for which the Bush Administration proposed just under $450 million for FY2009); in her October statement she committed only to “make the financial investments in research and development necessary to shore up and expand our competitive edge.” The statement doesn’t indicate, though, how long it would take to phase in that doubling (would it take effect in FY2010, or would the budget gradually grow over a number of years?) and whether or not that additional aeronautics funding would come at the expense of other NASA programs.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 March 3 at 6:45 am ET Today’s Houston Chronicle features an article about the space policy positions of the remaining presidential candidates, including a number of new, albeit minor, details. (Disclosure: I was interviewed for, and quoted in, the article.) Perhaps the biggest is a formal clarification from the Obama campaign that the Illinois senator supports reducing the gap between the Shuttle and Constellation, not extending it as the Clinton campaign has insinuated in recent weeks:
Obama supports closing the five-year gap by developing the Orion ship (and the Ares I rocket) as soon as possible, said campaign spokesman Nick Shapiro.
“We support replacing the shuttle and minimizing the gap. We also support delaying steps to take missions to the moon and Mars,” Shapiro said. “One of the many ways we’re paying for the education is delaying the mission to Mars.”
However, as Jim Muncy pointed out at a Space Transportation Association event last month, much of the Constellation-related spending in the initial years of the next administration would be devoted to Ares 1 and Orion, not “the mission to Mars”.
Also: Republican John McCain told the Chronicle of his support for human spaceflight but also a need to “prioritize” NASA programs, somewhat echoing what Obama told a Cleveland TV station last week:
“Manned spaceflight is something that is elemental and a vital part of our space program. I think we’ve got to catch up,” McCain told the Chronicle.
He said he wants to close the gap in manned spaceflight, but “I think we’ve got to sort out our priorities better. In other words, we can’t do everything. From my observing NASA, I think that sometimes we have tried to spray money in a whole bunch of different programs without the priority that I think they deserve.”
Finally, in a statement that may be meant more for his Congressional reelection campaign than his presidential bid, Ron Paul told the Chronicle that “the United States could be using extra funds now being spent overseas to increase funding for NASA.”
By Jeff Foust on 2008 March 2 at 12:27 pm ET NPR’s All Things Considered program on Saturday included a segment on how the three remaining major presidential candidates stack up on space. The four-minute report largely covers material previously reported here (NPR was no more successful than anyone else in coaxing more information out of the Obama campaign about his space policy views). One interesting bit at the end: in response to the old Mike Huckabee statement about sending Hillary Clinton to Mars, the Clinton campaign responded that “she’d love to go to space—after she’s completed her presidency.”
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