By Jeff Foust on 2008 January 8 at 7:04 am ET While it’s largely of academic interest only, Dennis Kucinich has reiterated his desire to have NASA focus on alternative energy research in an interview with the technology blog TechCrunch:
National Aeronautical [sic] Space Administration has always been involved as an incubator of technology. I want to task NASA with moving particularly in the area of energy technology, to create at the alpha stage technologies which private businesses and individuals could take to the beta stage and use it to grow the economy.
In a development with a little more relevance, Rudy Giuliani will pay a visit to Florida’s Space Coast on Wednesday, including a meeting with the editorial board of Florida Today. The newspaper is actively soliciting questions for their hour-long meeting with Giuliani: “If you’d like to ask him a question, send it editorial page editor John J. Glisch at: jglisch@floridatoday.com. The board will ask him as many reader questions as possible during the hour interview.” Certainly there should be a space policy question or two in that mix…
By Jeff Foust on 2008 January 4 at 6:42 am ET As you might expect, the Mars Society is disappointed that the final FY08 appropriations bill includes a provision that prohibits NASA from spending any money on work “related exclusively to the human exploration of Mars.” In a press release issued this week, the organization “expressed its disappointment” with both that language and with the overall level of funding for NASA’s exploration programs. “If this language makes it into future budgets, I guarantee that this program will slowly become a Moon-only effort – or worse,” said society political director Chris Carberry. “Congress and the next President of the United States need to accelerate this program rather than limiting it.”
The press release isn’t up yet on the Mars Society’s web site, so I’ve included the text below. Also note that Carberry will be on The Space Show program this Sunday at 3 pm EST.
Mars Society: NASA Funding Bill Could Cripple Vision For Space Exploration
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Wednesday, January 02, 2008 – The Mars Society would like to express its disappointment concerning the NASA portion of the Congressional Omnibus Appropriations Bill that was signed by the President last week.
While the bill provides additional support for science missions – including for exploration of Mars – it fails to adequately fund NASA’s plans to return to the Moon and then send humans to Mars. One of the worst aspects of the bill is that it contains language that would prohibit “funding of any research, development, or demonstration activities related exclusively to human exploration of Mars”.
Not only is this language counter-productive to running a coherent multi-year exploration plan, but it is not consistent with the NASA Authorization that Congress overwhelmingly approved in 2005. In that Authorization bill, Congress approved NASA’s plans to send humans to Mars and supported the expenditures that will be necessary to make that goal possible – something that the Omnibus bill does not do.
“Although this bill is unlikely to have a large immediate impact on the program, it sets a terrible precedent,” said Mars Society Political Director Chris Carberry. “If this language makes it into future budgets, I guarantee that this program will slowly become a Moon-only effort – or worse. Congress and the next President of the United States need to accelerate this program rather than limiting it. We certainly will not be creating an effective program or be serving the tax payers well by keeping this program endlessly on ‘life-support.'”
The Mars Society calls on members of the United States Congress to oppose any efforts to include this language in any future budgets. It is time for the United States to fully commit to sending humans to Mars as soon as possible.
The Mars Society is a private international grassroots organization dedicated to furthering the case for human exploration of Mars. Since its founding in 1998, The Mars Society’s strong commitment to both outreach and research has put it at the forefront of Mars exploration proponents, with 7000 members in 40 countries. The organization currently operates multiple world class research facilities which investigate many technical and human factors associated with human space exploration. Significant political and public outreach has led to several hundred meetings with U.S. congressional offices, and has otherwise reached hundreds of millions of people through various media outlets.
For more information, please contact Chris Carberry, or visit http://www.marssociety.org
By Jeff Foust on 2008 January 3 at 1:17 pm ET Today’s Wall Street Journal has a commentary by Richard D. Fisher, Jr., a senior fellow with the International Assessment and Strategy Center, discussing claims of Chinese work on a military space plane of some kind and its implications for US national security and space policy. (Those without a WSJ.com subscription can read Fisher’s essay on his center’s web site.) Fisher strings together evidence from Chinese military publications, blogs, and other sources that suggests China is developing something called the Shenlong, or “Divine Dragon”, spaceplane. (More of this evidence is discussed in a previous essay by Fisher, which includes some photos that suggest the Shenlong right now appears to be roughly equivalent in size and capability to the X-34 or X-37.)
To Fisher, Shenlong is an ominous development, giving China the ability to strike quickly and without any defense: “A larger unmanned space plane based on the Shenlong could easily be designed to carry out precision ground-attack missions at speeds and at altitudes that would avoid interception.” He adds: “Today the U.S. has no capability to deter China’s potential use of military space planes.”
It’s difficult to gauge how accurate these claims are—Chinese military planning is hardly transparent, as Fisher notes—but assume for the time being that these claims are accurate, and China is indeed developing a spaceplane of some kind for military applications, including weapons delivery. How, then, should the US respond? “At a minimum, Washington should delay the planned 2010 retirement of the Space Shuttle until a new space plane can replace it, as a way to retain a deterring potential military capability,” he argues. In his earlier essay, he added, “It may instead now be necessary to consider retaining one or two Shuttles and to develop defensive and offensive payloads for them, until a less expensive and perhaps smaller unmanned or manned space plane can be developed.”
That’s a difficult recommendation to take seriously. The shuttle is expensive, hardly responsive, and all but disowned by the military for nearly two decades. How the shuttle could “deter” any Chinese military spaceplane isn’t at all obvious. If the Pentagon was truly concerned about the threat posed by such a Chinese capability, a better approach might be to put more money into the Falcon program, both for the small launch vehicle and hypersonic cruise vehicle that could have “prompt global reach” (or, sometimes, “prompt global strike”) capabilities. However, Fisher doesn’t mention Falcon in his essays, and only makes a passing reference to the X-37.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 January 3 at 7:12 am ET NASA is used to being criticized in editorials from major national newspapers (New York Times, Washington Post) or papers in areas where the agency has a major presence (Florida Today, Houston Chronicle). When smaller newspapers in areas with no significant NASA presence start taking aim at the agency, though, that’s a sign that things are not well.
Today’s Worcester (Mass.) Telegram uses the recent release of the pilot survey as a springboard for questioning the usefulness of NASA in general, calling the study “another doleful example of the right-stuff agency’s devolution into a hidebound bureaucracy.” While much of the editorial is about the study itself, the editorial closes by raising questions about the effectiveness of NASA itself. “Why is NASA dabbling in air safety studies rather than focusing on expanding the boundaries of human knowledge? Does the agency that put mankind on the moon have the right stuff to plan and execute the next phase of manned space exploration?”
Meanwhile, the Fort Dodge (Iowa) Messenger criticizes NASA’s decision to delay the 2011 Mars Scout mission selection with little in the way of explanation of the conflict of interest that triggered the delay. “A conflict that costs taxpayers $40 million and delays a Mars probe by two years needs to be explained in detail,” the editorial argues. “Frankly, we don’t think NASA officials should be the people to judge whether the conflict could have been avoided. It’s our money, after all.”
By Jeff Foust on 2008 January 3 at 6:55 am ET This week’s issue of the science journal Nature reviews the various candidates’ views on science issues, including space, summarized in a single table or a text version. These capsule summaries don’t provide many new insights for readers here, although you may learn that Democratic candidate Joe Biden “wants to make China a full partner in space exploration rather than a ‘frustrated new entrant’ that has to catch up with the United States.” Also, Republican candidate John McCain, after some initial skepticism, considers the Vision for Space Exploration “not only visionary, but doable.”
By Jeff Foust on 2008 January 2 at 7:27 am ET The Barack Obama campaign has been quiet about its space policy plans since the release of its education policy in November, which called for delaying the Constellation program for five years to help pay for its education initiatives. I contacted the campaign last month to seek clarification and heard nothing back. However, a reader in New Hampshire, Don Doughty, did hear back from the campaign last week on the topic, and forwarded the message he received to me. In the message, Lisa Ellman, Obama’s policy director in New Hampshire, said Obama “will work to strengthen American leadership in space” and that he “believes that the United States needs a strong space program to help it maintain its superiority not only in space, but here on earth in the realms of education, technology, and national security.”
Most importantly, Ellman clarifies what Obama meant by delaying Constellation by five years:
Obama believes we should continue developing the next generation of space vehicles, and complete the international space station. While Obama would delay plans to return to moon and push on to mars, Obama would continue unmanned missions, and use NASA to monitor the forces and effects of climate change, support scientific research, and maintain surveillance to strengthen national security. Obama also believes we need to keep weapons out of space.
That is considerably different than what his original statement sounded like: rather than an additional five-year post-shuttle gap, this approach would appear to permit the continued development of a new launch vehicle and spacecraft (be it Ares/Orion or some alternative), but put on hold anything that would be used for lunar missions and beyond. That puts his approach closer to what Hillary Clinton proposed in October, although she did not endorse any specific delay in human lunar missions.
By Jeff Foust on 2008 January 2 at 6:46 am ET Wall Street Journal columnist Holman W. Jenkins Jr. wants to change the way NASA does business. In an essay in today’s issue [subscription may be required], Jenkins thinks NASA would do well to follow the lead of Robert Bigelow, who has offered $760 million for eight flights to his planned orbital habitats, a guarantee of business designed to help vehicle developers raise money from “mega-angels” or elsewhere. (Jenkins goes so far as to call the concept “possibly the best idea of 2007.”) NASA should follow suit, he argues, by offering similar guarantees of future business to private firms, calling current plans to develop its own launch vehicle and spacecraft “the in-house, do-it-all approach that has produced little real progress since Apollo.”
To Jenkins, what is at stake here is not just the future of NASA and private spaceflight, but even the eventual survival of the human race:
The next president should turn NASA into a buyer of services rather than a producer of them, much as the government once used mail contracts to boost the early commercial aviation industry. Only by breaking the classic NASA mold can we speed up a permanent human presence in space, thus ensuring humanity’s long-term survival.
By Jeff Foust on 2007 December 31 at 5:10 pm ET [Third in a series.]
Following up on my previous posts summarizing the budget and reviewing its various requests for reports and studies, there is some other language of interest in the appropriations legislation itself and its accompanying conference report:
Much to the consternation of The Mars Society and other human Mars exploration advocates, the bill retains the language in the House version banning funding for “any research, development, or demonstration activities related exclusively to the human exploration of Mars.”
The bill itself also prevents NASA from implementing any layoffs through the end of the fiscal year. It also requires NASA to develop a strategy “for minimizing job losses” during the Shuttle-Constellation transition, including projections of civil servant and contractor workforce levels at the agency’s various field centers. The initial version of the strategy is due to Congress within 90 days, with updates to be provided every six months “until the successor human-rated space transport vehicle is fully operational”.
The conference report notes that no money is being provided to NASA’s Centennial Challenges prize program in FY08 to fund additional prizes. “Providing additional funds to a program based on prizes only creates a sizeable amount of unused funds while other aspects of NASA’s mission are being cut or delayed due to a lack of funds,” the report notes. That language is immediately followed by nearly seven pages of earmarks totaling several tens of millions of dollars (which will be dissected in a later post.)
In the conference report, appropriations said they are “disappointed by the Administration’s request of a less than one percent increase for fiscal year 2008 and projected minimal increases of approximately one percent over the next several years.” The report singles out earth science in particular, noting the recent decadal survey and concerns about the declining number of earth science sensors in orbit. The report “recommends” $40 million to NASA to initiate some of the missions identified in that report, and asks NASA to include in its FY2009 budget submission “its plan for meeting these unmet needs.”
One science area that got an increase in the budget was research and analysis (R&A) funding: a boost of $24 million above the original request. Scientists had expressed concern in the past about cuts in R&A funding, and the report acknowledges “significant cuts in recent years” there. The report also calls on NASA to have the National Research Council assess the space agency’s overall R&A program, including the appropriate funding balance between R&A and flight missions.
The report singles out a few missions for funding. Congress provided $60 million to the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM), $38.4 million above NASA’s request, and directed NASA to move SIM into the development phase. NASA had planned to use the program solely for engineering risk reduction as opposed to an actual science mission, a direction opposed by appropriators. The bill also includes $42 million for a lunar lander mission as part of the exploration program; the report calls the mission “of critical importance for the exploration vision”.
Appropriators also called on NASA and the administration to provide “sufficient funds” for the Orion crew exploration vehicle in its FY 2009 and 2010 budget requests to keep the project on schedule, rather than try to carry over balances from previous years.
By Jeff Foust on 2007 December 31 at 4:16 pm ET Are the key participants in the national space policy debate, and the tools they use, undergoing change? That’s at the core of an article by Kathleen Connell in this week’s issue of The Space Review. Connell sees three “structural shifts” taking place that could reshape—for better or worse—the relative importance of space policy and the size and nature of NASA’s budget: the emergence of a new class of “space consumers” thanks to personal spaceflight companies, the use of new online tools to loosely organize “virtual crowds” on topics of interest or concern, and a growing appreciation of the role of space to study and even mitigate climate change. “Those would-be space leaders who understand the dynamic intersection of empowered public will, interactive technology, space consumption, and global warming will best be able to guide NASA into the second decade of the 21st century,” she concludes. “Should they also embrace these facets of the future, a future that has already arrived, they will find themselves with the credibility to also make the case for increasing budgets and increasingly robust space exploration initiatives as well.”
So how powerful and imminent are those structural shifts? It will probably take some time for the first to emerge, and even then the population of “space consumers” will remain very small relative to the overall population. The second is clearly taking place now in politics in general, although it has yet to take root effectively in space politics. And as for the third, one need only look at Hillary Clinton’s proposed space policy and the comments by others, like John Edwards, for a “balanced” space program to see that earth sciences, including climate change, will take on a larger role in the ’08 election and beyond.
By Jeff Foust on 2007 December 31 at 3:38 pm ET In today’s issue of The Space Review I have an article summarizing the positions the various presidential candidates have taken on space issues—assuming, of course, that they’ve taken any position at all. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you won’t get too many new insights in the article, given the lack of new information from the various campaigns on this topic. I did make an effort to collect some new information from the campaigns by sending a short list of space policy questions to each campaign, but none of them responded. “That lack of response is almost certainly due primarily to the relatively obscure nature of this publication,” I note in the article, but given that the somewhat better-known Washington Post was also unable to coax much information from the campaigns, it’s also indicative of the relative importance of this issue among the candidates.
Similarly, SPACE.com has a roundup of statements from the candidates on space issues. This article focuses on the statements made by the candidates themselves, even outside of the current campaign (such as a Sen. Chris Dodd press release announcing some NASA SBIR awards). It’s also more comprehensive: I did not know, for example, that Alan Keyes was running for president again. I suspect most voters in Iowa and New Hampshire don’t know he’s running, either…
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