By Jeff Foust on 2008 February 8 at 6:59 am ET Compare and contrast: first, an op-ed in Wednesday’s Orlando Sentinel by Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison and Barbara Mikulski, who put forward a standard set of arguments (we can’t trust the Russians, the Chinese are coming, etc.) to press for more money for NASA:
However, once the international space station is complete, the U.S. will have to endure a five-year period in which we will not have the capability of delivering our scientists to it. Such a delay makes no sense. Considering the tens of billions of dollars we’ve already invested in the station, it is essential that Congress take the necessary steps to shrink that gap as much as possible.
According to NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, an extra $2 billion investment would make Orion operational two years ahead of its current schedule. This seems like a worthy investment for Congress to make.
Also on Wednesday, Washington Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein is economical with his words as he takes a knife to NASA to help reduce the budget deficit:
We all love manned space flight, but at this point, we’re not learning much from it. There’s another $5 billion.
(Actually, $5 billion is the approximate total for just shuttle and ISS; if you add in Constellation, that’s another $3 billion. Don’t tell him.) Pearlstein was asked about that cut in an online chat later Wednesday and responded:
Don’t see much more upside there, at least as a national priority. Sorry. Exploration of outer space, which is cheaper and is more at the frontiers of knowledge — that’s probably worth doing, people who know more about these things tell me.
These two differing proposals do have one thing in common. The odds that Congress would approve such a drastic cut of NASA’s budget is approximately zero. The odds that Hutchison and Mikulski can win an extra $2 billion for NASA to accelerate Constellation, given their track record to date, may not be that much higher.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 February 8 at 6:27 am ET At the end of an interview with CBS News’ Bill Harwood, NASA administrator made some interesting comments regarding recent criticism of the Ares 1 launch vehicle, such as the potential thrust oscillation problem with the vehicle’s first stage:
Q: On a different topic, the Ares rocket and the Constellation program continue to generate questions among outside observers as to viability of the rocket system, due to vibration and other issues, and the overall architecture of the moon program. Why is that?
A: Let me get down to the bottom of it. There were winners and losers in the contractor community as to who was going to get to do what on the next system post shuttle. And we didn’t pick (Lockheed Martin’s) Atlas 5, in consultation with the Air Force for that matter, because it wasn’t the right vehicle for the lunar job. Obviously, we did pick others. So people who didn’t get picked see an opportunity to throw the issue into controversy and maybe have it come out their way.
[…]
I think you have been around long enough to know technically this is just not a big deal. It’s about winners and losers. In the larger context, it’s about winners and losers and people seeing an opportunity to reclaim a share of the pie that was lost. And I hate it when it comes to that. But that’s it. The fact of the matter is, Ares, the rocket, and Constellation, the program, are designed to go to the moon and to provide a capability, if necessary, to service the space station in Earth orbit.
The Atlas 5 needs substantial upgrades in order to be a useful part of the lunar architecture and those upgrades, when we added them all up, cost more than the Ares 1. It’s that simple. Now if you just want to go to low-Earth orbit and nowhere else, then the Atlas 5 will do just fine. And I encourage its use for that. What I don’t encourage is for people to say that going to low-Earth orbit and stopping there again is a good goal. That’s not what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to get back to the moon and we want to go on to Mars. And that needs something bigger.
Those comments seem to suggest that Griffin believes that Lockheed Martin (or now, more accurately, ULA, since Lockheed and Boeing have combined their EELV lines into that joint venture) is behind the criticism of Ares 1. While I know there are people at ULA who believe that Atlas 5 could carry out the role of launching Orion, it seems a bit of a stretch to think that they’re the only critics of the current architecture.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 February 7 at 7:42 am ET Last week I looked at whether the various Republican presidential candidates’ space-related campaigning had any effect on the outcome of the primary in Brevard County, Florida, the “Space Coast”. The answer appeared to be no: the results in Brevard were essentially identical to the statewide results, with no bump for candidates like Rudy Giuliani who took strong positions on space policy.
In a similar vein, I looked at the results from Super Tuesday in Madison County, Alabama, which is home to Huntsville and the Marshall Space Flight Center. The area did not see the same level of campaigning as Brevard did, because Alabama was one of many states up for grabs on Tuesday, although both Bill Clinton and Mike Huckabee paid visits to the city on Saturday. Would Barack Obama’s proposal to delay Constellation for five years hurt him in the county? Would John McCain’s space policy statement help him there?
You can probably already guess the answer now. In the Democratic primary Obama won Madison County, 60-39, over Hillary Clinton. That’s actually better than he did statewide, where he captured 56% of the vote. Among the Republicans, Huckabee narrowly beat McCain, 33-32%, closer than the 41-37 margin of victory statewide for Huckabee. However, Mitt Romney did much better in the county than he did statewide, coming in a very close third in the county versus a distant third throughout the state. In Florida, Romney declined to make any funding commitments or even explicitly agree to close the Shuttle-Constellation gap, something which probably didn’t go over any better in Huntsville than it did on the Space Coast.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 February 7 at 7:14 am ET Now that the administration has released its FY 2009 budget proposal, Congress is gearing up for hearings on that budget, including some devoted to the NASA budget. The House Science and Technology Committee will hold a hearing on February 13th at 10 am devoted to the NASa budget request, with NASA administrator Mike Griffin the one scheduled witness so far. The space subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee, meanwhile, has a similar hearing scheduled for February 27th at 2:30 pm. The Senate hearing was actually announced back on January 23rd; nothing like planning early, it seems.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 February 6 at 5:51 am ET Tuesday morning the Space Transportation Association (STA) hosted a breakfast featuring what it billed as something of a debate between Lori Garver and Jim Muncy on the various presidential candidates’ stances on space policy. In reality, the event was more of a discussion of the candidates’ views on space than a debate, although there was a Freaky Friday-like twist: Garver, a Democrat, talked about the Republican candidates, while Muncy, a Republican, talked about the Democratic candidates. “This gives you respect for the other side, how challenging it is,” Garver said.
For those who have been following what the candidates have been saying about space here and elsewhere, there was not much in the way of new insights about the candidates views. Garver said that John McCain has a “nuanced” position on space from his time in the Senate, and procurement has been a big issue for him in regards to aerospace. McCain introduced a bill in 1991 to cancel the space station program, she noted, but has since been supportive of the effort. She called McCain’s statement on space policy “a very good statement” and “very positive”, and added that McCain would “in general be supportive” of commercial space initiatives.
Muncy said that Barack Obama’s space policy is “fairly well thought out” overall, although he did identify one conflict between the policy and previous statements by the campaign to delay Constellation for five years to help pay for his education program. The Obama statement explicitly supports the continued development of Orion and Ares 1, but Muncy noted that Constellation funding will be dominated by those two efforts through about 2011 or 2012, when development of the Ares 5 and other Constellation components ramp up. Muncy also lauded Obama’s technology and innovation policy: “It would have been nice to have seen some of those folks who wrote the technology policy, as thought out as it is, writing the space policy.”
Muncy also discussed the Clinton campaign’s follow-up statement in November on space policy (which, to the best of my knowledge, has not been posted online), which tried to make clearer Clinton’s support for an eventual human return to the Moon, also included support for additional investments in aerospace and aeronautics R&D, “including through incentives and cooperative ventures”. He called that the one statement by any candidate other than now-withdrawn Rudy Giuliani that referred to commercial and entrepreneurial space. “For that reason, this Republican probably would, if he was voting in a Democratic primary, endorse Senator Clinton.” That statement was greeted with a chorus of “ooohs!” and claps from the audience.
Garver and Muncy also used the event to step back and address the relative importance of space policy in the overall campaign. Space is not a top-tier issue, Muncy said, but it does have “tentacles” that reach into other topics, from the environment to the military. Moreover, most of the space policy discussion to date has focused on civil space, with little or no mention of military or commercial space issues. Still, he concluded, “short of a 21st century version of Sputnik, it’s hard for me to imagine what would cause more attention to space in February of an election year.”
By Jeff Foust on 2008 February 5 at 5:37 am ET The reaction to the proposed FY 2009 NASA budget has been decided muted: few people seem terribly excited about the budget, but then, few people are terribly outraged about the budget as well. After taking into account the accounting shift that moves management and operations expenses into the Cross-Agency Support account, there are few radical shifts in the budgets, just continued trends with some smaller tweaks. (Interesting trivia: the FY09 budget is the first where Constellation, at $3.05 billion, exceeds the Space Shuttle, at $2.98 billion.) NASA is squeezing more science out of a static budget, and there’s continued support for COTS.
Congressional reaction to the budget isn’t exactly positive, but not overly harsh, either. “At first blush, it unfortunately appears to be a ‘business-as-usual’ budget that does little to address the significant challenges NASA is facing,” Bart Gordon, chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee, told Florida Today. He expressed concern about the level of aeronautics funding in particular, as well as a lack of funding needed to accelerate Constellation. Bill Nelson, chair of the space subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee, is also disappointed, citing the lack of funding to close the Shuttle-Constellation gap.
Other reactions:
- The proposal reduces NASA Langley’s budget from $700 million to $608 million, but center director Lesa Roe is not panicking, noting that the proposal doesn’t include funding for specific science and exploration work planned for the center.
- NASA Glenn is also concerned about budget cuts that would reduce the center’s funding by 4.3% in FY09. Like at Langley, though, they expect funding from additional projects to make up some of the difference.
- NASA Ames is pleased by the inclusion of a small lunar spacecraft program, which includes $80 million in 2009 for work on a lunar orbiter, to be followed by small landers. “We are now basically the lead agency for lunar science,” center director Pete Worden told the San Jose Mercury News.
- The Planetary Society concludes that the budget is “strong on Earth, weak on Mars”, given its emphasis on new Earth sciences missions and reshuffling of Mars missions. The NASA budget documents do mention planning (but as yet no funding) for a Mars sample return mission tentatively planned for the 2018-2020 timeframe.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 February 5 at 5:16 am ET Later this week the Air Force Academy’s Eisenhower Center for Space and Defense Studies will be holding its annual National Space Forum in Washington, with this year’s topic being: “Space Challenges Facing the New American Administration of 2009″. In this week’s issue of The Space Review, Mike Snead offers some suggestions for discussions during the event. There are many issues that attendees can and likely will discuss there, but Snead focuses on a core issue:
However, the real strategic issue on the table for the next administration is about the needed transformation of America into a true spacefaring nation. We are not yet at this point and our current civil and commercial programs are not bringing us closer to this goal where Americans, as spacefarers, will be able to safely and routinely access and operate in space. To change course to enable America to successful compete and win the new space race, the next American president will need to set new strategic goals for civil and commercial space.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 February 4 at 10:40 am ET The White House has posted this morning the overall FY2009 budget proposal, including an overview of the NASA budget. The administration is requesting over $17.6 billion for NASA in FY09, up from the $17.3 billion the agency got for the current fiscal year. The summary has only a few details about the budget, calling out specific spending on a few programs like Ares 1, Orion, Shuttle, and ISS. There is a reference to $105 million for “a program of small lunar robotic missions and research”, as well as $173 million for COTS and plans for $2.6 billion over five years to purchase transportation services to ISS.
Interestingly, there’s a huge increase in the “Cross Agency Support programs” line item, from under $500 million in 2008 ($556.4 million according to the final omnibus appropriations bill) to $3.3 billion in 2009: apparently some programs are being moved into that line item, but the summary isn’t specific on what. Also, the New Millennium technology demonstration program would be cut by $54 million “due to its limited results”.
More details will be released this afternoon at a NASA briefing. (I’ll be occupied with a different meeting today, so I’ll have to wait until this evening to review the budget in greater detail.)
By Jeff Foust on 2008 February 4 at 9:17 am ET In this week’s issue of The Space Review I report on Mike Griffin’s defense of the current exploration architecture that he made in a speech last month. This is an expanded version of a post here on the speech, with a review of the logic that NASA followed under Griffin that led to the current two-vehicle shuttle-derived approach, as well as some of the current questions about the architecture such as the thrust oscillation issue.
The last part of the article goes into a slightly different direction, bringing up a familiar topic: whether the US is somehow falling behind China and other countries in human spaceflight. Griffin notes that China is developing the capabilities that could allow them to send humans to the Moon, while Russia already has virtually all of the pieces other than a lander and, now that the country is in better economic health, “can pretty much do it” within a half-dozen years of starting. As for the importance of all this, Griffin said, “I consider it to be impossible that other nations will be leading in space and the US still regarded has having primacy in the world. If other nations are leading in space, then the United States will be like Spain or Holland: once great, but no longer important in the affairs of humankind.”
Is that necessarily the case? Would the US lose its leadership in world affairs if other nations took a leading role in space (where “leading in space” is apparently defined by the achievements of human spaceflight)? It would probably depend on the circumstances: an ignominious collapse of a post-shuttle architecture, with nothing to replace it, could be a blow to national prestige on the global stage. On the other hand, a deliberate decision to, say, turn human spaceflight over to the private sector and focus government programs on key issues facing the nation and world today (like climate change, alternative energies, biotechnology, etc.) might be perceived quite differently, and could even enhance US leadership globally. The “human spaceflight = global leadership” argument worked during the 1960s, but may not be nearly as clear and effective in the 2010s and beyond.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 February 3 at 10:08 am ET Yesterday two of the best-known sons of tiny Hope, Arkansas—former president Bill Clinton and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee—were on the campaign trail in Huntsville, Alabama: Clinton in support of his wife’s bid for the Democratic nomination and Huckabee in his own pursuit of the Republican nomination. Huntsville is one of the few communities in the US where space is a big local issue, thanks to the presence of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center and businesses associated with the work there. So did either speaker devote any time to space policy during their appearances? Only briefly.
Bill Clinton, in his speech, mentioned space only in passing, according to a Huntsville Times account: “‘I know this is one of the more prosperous parts of the state,”‘ he said, adding that his wife strongly supports the aerospace program.” (It’s not clear if the nonstandard “aerospace program” usage was something Clinton himself said, or was an invention of the reporter.) Huckabee said just a bit more about space in a press conference after his speech, according to another Times article:
In a press conference after the rally, the former governor said he sees the space program as being critical to the economics of North Alabama, but even more so, “it is important to our country.” He lauded science experiments and space travel as necessities that provided the world with gems such as cell phones, digital cameras, heart catheterization and the miniaturization of technology.
Nothing new here, other than that campaigners say little about space even in a place where it matters to a lot of people—and that itself is not necessarily new nor surprising.
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