By Jeff Foust on 2008 January 27 at 12:54 pm ET The most popular debate question suggested for this week’s debates being organized by Politico, CNN, and the Los Angeles Times is no longer related to space policy, according to a check midday Sunday. For the Democratic debate January 31, the top-ranked most popular question is related to Gulf Coast hurricane relief, although space questions still dominate the overall list (13 of the top 15). For the Republican debate January 30, the top-ranked space policy question is now only the fourth most popular, after questions about the war on terrorism, Gulf Coast hurricane relief (the same as the top-ranked Democratic debate question), and taxes. For the Republicans, only 3 of the top 10, and 5 of the top 15, most popular questions are about space.
I suspect that these standings will lead some to call for a final round of voting to push space questions up in the standings. (The site doesn’t mention when the deadline for voting is.) However, the voting process remains something of a black box, with no clues about just how many votes the most popular questions have received, nor any statement about how—or even whether—the voting process will factor into the selection of questions for the debates. It’s easy for someone to go in, spend a few seconds clicking on the vote buttons for some questions, and think they’ve done their good space advocacy deed for the day. In the long run, that time might be better spent firing off an email (or fax or letter) to their favorite candidate(s) asking them directly some of the same questions being voted on at the Politico site.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 January 26 at 9:20 am ET With Congressman Dave Weldon’s announcement yesterday that he will not run for reelection in 2008, people in Florida’s Space Coast region are pondering what impact that will have on the space program and their livelihoods. Not surprisingly, people are worried about the loss of Weldon’s seniority and influence in Washington (influence that is somewhat diminished now that Republicans are in the minority in Congress), and whether Florida will thus somehow lose out to other NASA centers in the scramble for funding.
With less than a year to go in Congress, one wonders how strongly he’ll push for his legislation to keep the shuttle flying after 2010 or secure a similar commitment in other legislation. Will he be empowered by working against the clock, or be rendered a lame duck?
By Jeff Foust on 2008 January 26 at 8:53 am ET As promised, Florida Today published a “guest editorial” by Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani today, where the candidate outlines his stance on civil and commercial space policy. After leading off discussing the shuttle-CEV gap, calling it “unacceptable”, he continues with these key paragraphs:
We will maintain America’s technological advantage in space. We will send Americans back to the moon and onto the next great frontier in human space exploration: Mars.
We will support the Commercial Orbital Transportation Systems [sic] Program to stimulate important private entrepreneurial efforts in spaceflight.
We will expand private-sector access to Cape Canaveral launch pads. To help prepare astronauts for longer stays in space, we will fund the Space Life Sciences Lab.
Giuliani also calls for an increase in NASA’s budget, but not by a specific amount: “NASA currently receives less than 1 percent of the federal budget — six-tenths of 1 percent, to be more exact. An increase would do wonders without affecting 99 percent of the federal budget.”
Still, this is one of the bolder space policy statements made by a presidential campaign to date in this campaign, committing to human missions to the Moon and Mars as well as supporting commercial efforts like COTS. However, given Giuliani’s standing in recent polls—third place, well behind McCain and Romney —this policy could soon be of only academic interest.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 January 25 at 6:09 pm ET Some space-related political news out of Florida that has nothing to do with the presidential campaign: Congressman Dave Weldon (R-FL) will not run for reelection in 2008, retiring after seven terms in the House. Weldon said he wanted to return to his medical practice and spend more time with his family. Weldon, whose district includes much of the “Space Coast” area of Florida, has taken a strong interest in NASA issues in Congress. Most recently, he proposed legislation that would extend the life of the shuttle after 2010 as a means of closing the shuttle-CEV gap.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 January 25 at 11:33 am ET Florida Today reports that Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani will call for an increase in NASA’s budget in a statement that the newspaper will publish on Saturday. (Why they’re holding the statement for publication on Saturday isn’t clear.) “An increase would do wonders without affecting 99 percent of the federal budget,” Giuliani writes in the statement. “That’s the fiscally conservative approach: getting a good return on your dollar.” The report doesn’t indicate if Giulani has a specific increase ($1 billion? $2 billion? more or less?) in mind.
One other interesting tidbit in the Florida Today piece: the end includes comments from Mark Albrecht, identified as a “senior policy adviser” to Giuliani; Albrecht tells the newspaper that Giuliani is willing to support a budget increase for NASA because he perceives it as “vital to national security”. One wonders if this is the same Mark Albrecht who had previously been president of International Launch Services and, before that, executive secretary of the National Space Council during the George H.W. Bush administration.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 January 24 at 9:05 pm ET In an interview with NPR, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama discussed his educational program and how he would pay for it. And as he did when he introduced the education program in November, he said he would look to NASA to help pay for it:
Well, what we’re going to do is, we are going to delay or cut programs that I don’t think are as high a priority. And we’ve identified a range of ways that we can save money in terms of how we purchase goods by the federal government. There are some programs related to NASA, for example, that we would not eliminate – but defer – so that the spending is spread out over a longer period of time. There are a host of programs at the federal level that I think are less of a priority than making sure that our kids are getting a good start in life.
This appears to be a reference to delaying the Constellation program for five years, a stance he clarified recently by saying he supported continued development of Ares 1 and Orion.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 January 24 at 6:29 am ET On Tuesday President Bush signed a set of directives to improve the current export control process for items on the U.S. Munitions List. While this is being called “reform” in some quarters, it’s really more of an improvement of existing processes, as outlined in a State Department fact sheet: additional funding will be allocated for the review of license applications, a 60-day deadline for a decision on a license application, and electronic application systems for all types of licenses. The reforms do not, however, involve taking anything on or off the Munitions List, such as satellite components.
Despite the limited scope of the reforms, industry is endorsing the changes. “We view the administration’s action as an important step in a long-term process to achieve meaningful reform in the way the United States regulates defense trade and advanced technology exchange,” the Coalition for Security and Competitiveness said in a statement. The coalition submitted a set of recommendations for licensing changes on the Munitions List as well as dual-use items to the administration in March 2007, a subset of which were adopted.
The problems with the export control process prompted Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) to introduce HR 4246 in November. That bill includes some of the same reforms that the administration enacted this week; one of the bill’s co-sponsors, Rep. Dan Manzullo (R-IL), told The Hill that he and others in Congress worked with the administration on the announced reforms.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 January 23 at 7:16 am ET It’s probably too soon to be talking about the legacy of Mike Griffin as NASA administrator, since he still has about a year left on the job (assuming he doesn’t leave early or is kept on by the new administration). However, any discussion of his influence on NASA, positive or negative, in the years to come is likely going to focus in large part on the Exploration Systems Architecture Study (ESAS) that he unveiled in September 2005 that outlines the launch vehicles, spacecraft, and other components NASA would need to execute the Vision for Space Exploration. And in a speech Tuesday at a Space Transportation Association breakfast in Washington, Griffin gave one of the more detailed, vigorous defenses of the current architecture yet.
Griffin said he decided to speak about Constellation because of “the inquiries I’ve had lately, in one form or another, concerning various aspects of our post-Shuttle spaceflight architecture.” While the architecture has changed little since it was released in September 2005, “the logic behind the choices made has receded into the background” and “new questioners lacking subject matter background appear”, thus making a review of the architecture timely. Much of the speech was just that: a recap of the process by which NASA chose in particular the Ares 1 and Ares 5 launch vehicles over EELV-derived or other alternatives, logic that can be examined in the text of the speech linked to above.
During the Q&A period, Griffin addressed some recent concerns about Constellation, starting with reports of the thrust oscillation problem on Ares 1. “I think I have rarely seen more of a mountain made out of less of a molehill than this particular technical issue,” he said, then spent the next several minutes endeavoring to “pound this one flat”. Thrust oscillation is a problem most solid-fuel rockets have, he said, and is caused when vortex shedding off fuel grains as the motor approaches burnout strike a resonant frequency of the casing. Griffin said there are any number of remedies to the problem, ranging from reshaping the fuel grains to detuning the motor case to avoid the resonant frequencies to isolating the stage or the payload. Moreover, he said, they’re not sure there even is a thrust oscillation problem: the current concern is based on old test data and conservative engineering. There are plans to collect test data on some of the remaining shuttle flights to see if pressure variations in the shuttle’s solids translate into loads on the vehicle.
Griffin sounded a little exasperated about all the attention given to the issue, as well as the impression in some corners that NASA was not being forthcoming about discussing the problem. “We’re kind of in a no-win position,” he said. “If we encounter issues and take them seriously, people think it’s a big deal and it’s a showstopper. If we encounter issues and say, ‘this is stuff everybody’s seen before, we’ll get to it’, then people think we’re not taking it seriously and we get beaten up for that. So it’s hard to know how to win.”
Griffin also took on reports that NASA was planning delays to some of the Ares/Orion test flights to deal with a funding shortfall. Griffin credited Constellation manager Jeff Hanley for finding ways to reshuffle the test schedule without delaying Orion’s introduction into service. “I don’t actually care, Jeff doesn’t actually care, [associate administrator for exploration systems] Rick Gilbrech doesn’t actually care what the intermediate milestone dates are. They serve the end goal, they don’t drive it.” The only problem with Hanley’s memo announcing the rephased test schedule, Griffin said, was that “headquarters got notified of it by the same email that the rest of the folks did.” Griffin said they’re looking at it to see if slipping the test schedule is the best approach before making a final decision that would affect the schedules of the companies working on the program.
At the end of the Q&A session, Griffin said he was “fascinated” by all the critical questioning about the thrust oscillation issue and other concerns. “It’s almost like people are looking for the ‘gotcha’. It’s like, ‘We know you’re hiding something, we just didn’t know what it was, but now we know.’ We’re not hiding anything.” Griffin said he’s tried during his tenure as administrator to be as open as possible with Congress and the White House. “Clearly, from Columbia, and Challenger before it, there is a history of suspicion about NASA, and I have worked really hard to try and dispel that suspicion. That’s been my biggest political challenge, to get people to understand that this management team is perfectly happy to share what we’re doing.” He concluded: “My biggest issue has been to restore people’s belief that NASA will tell the truth.”
By Jeff Foust on 2008 January 23 at 7:13 am ET “For the first time in decades, space policy is emerging as a presidential campaign issue and, political strategists say, could become a decisive factor in the race to the White House,” starts an article yesterday in the Orlando Sentinel. The report is less of a recap of the candidates’ positions on space than the fact that they’re talking about the subject well in advance of the general election. “The last time space was an issue for presidential candidates this early in an election was in 1960,” Roger Launius of the National Air and Space Museum told the Sentinel.
The article crafts a scenario that would qualify as perhaps the ultimate fantasy for some space advocates. Florida is a swing state in the general election, and, within Florida, the “I-4 corridor” is a swing region within the state, as a briefing prepared by Dale Ketcham of the Univ. of Central Florida’s Space Research and Technology Institute mentioned in the article explains. Win the corridor and you can win the state; win the state and you can win the presidency. Thus, Ketcham and other space supporters in the region argue, the candidate with the stronger space policy is better positioned to win votes that could swing the election. (Nevermind that the Space Coast is just a small part of the I-4 Corridor, nor whether a policy that caters to the interests of the KSC region would also be beneficial to the nation in general.) Space policy becomes the lever that moves the world.
Ketcham added that he was not surprised that Hillary Clinton was the first major candidate to put forward a space policy. “There is nobody in the Clinton camp that does not understand the notion that electoral votes are key to getting into the White House,” he said. It is hard to argue with logic like that: after all, if anyone working for any candidate does not understand that basic tenet of the electoral process, they probably should quit the campaign and retake a civic class.
But if candidates are developing space policies to win key votes in Florida, they’re not doing a good job of it so far. As Florida Today notes in an article and accompanying editorial today, candidates have gotten into few specifics that might win over voters on the Space Coast. “Anyone hoping to hear the candidates express strong support for NASA’s plan to build new rocket and manned spacecraft fleets to return to the moon have been sorely disappointed,” the editorial complains. “It’s certain Florida will be a key battleground in the fall campaign, at which time the party nominees may realize the space program’s importance to our state and the nation. We certainly hope so.”
By Jeff Foust on 2008 January 22 at 6:12 am ET Speaking to reporters after taking a tour of KSC on Monday, Republican presidential candidate expressed his support for the Vision for Space Exploration but would not commit to specific funding increases that may be needed to close the post-shuttle gap, according to reports by the Orlando Sentinel and Florida Today. According to a transcript by the Sentinel, Romney said he supports “the NASA program, the president’s vision program, which consists of a manned space mission back to the moon, as well as an ongoing mission to Mars.” When asked about the gap, he said that “there’s gonna have to be an effort to either narrow the gap or to maintain technology or to provide opportunities for the key engineers and personnel so that we don’t lose the capacity to carry the program forward,” which seems to open the door to not shortening the gap if he finds there are alternatives to avoid a loss of personnel and capabilities. He added that the issue is something “I’ll look at if I’m lucky enough to get that job.”
Romney was asked about whether he supported an extra $1-2 billion/year to “remain viable”. “I’m prepared to study it very thoroughly, and I’m not prepared to make commitments without having studied things,” he said, adding that he would rely on experts both within and outside of NASA during that study process. “I do not have a budget for you on the gap,” he said in the Florida Today account. “I’m not making promises, because I shouldn’t make promises until I’ve studied something.”
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