By Jeff Foust on 2007 December 13 at 7:33 am ET [Cross-posted from Personal Spaceflight for your reading convenience.]
The attorney general of New Mexico has concluded that a local tax increase passed this spring to help fund development of Spaceport America should not be collected starting January 1 as originally planned because of a lack of a mechanism to spend the revenues. Voters in Doña Ana County, which includes the city of Las Cruces, passed the quarter-cent gross receipts tax increase in April; at the time the tax was set to take effect on January 1. However, county officials had asked that the introduction of the tax be delayed because the money can’t be spent until a spaceport tax district is created, and that district can’t form until at least one other county also approves a similar tax. Two other counties in southern New Mexico, Otero and Sierra, also plan to hold tax referenda, but not until spring 2008 at the earliest.
By Jeff Foust on 2007 December 13 at 7:25 am ET The day after NASA awarded the last major contract for the development of the Ares 1, Florida Today weighs in on a recent GAO report on the vehicle, saying that the report raises “signs of trouble” about not just the vehicle but also the overall exploration architecture. “At this early juncture, the Ares and Orion programs are starting to look like a repeat of NASA’s dismal performance on its last two major programs: The shuttle fleet and International Space Station, both of which came in far behind schedule and far over budget,” the editorial claims. More money could at least ease the problems, but the paper is skeptical that the White House and Congress would be willing and able to so, given the “enormous costs” of Iraq and growing pressure on Medicare and Social Security. “That puts NASA advocates in Congress — including Florida Sens. Bill Nelson and Mel Martinez, and Space Coast Reps. Dave Weldon and Tom Feeney — in the impossible position of trying to push the funding boulder up hill.”
By Jeff Foust on 2007 December 11 at 8:03 am ET The Washington Post reports today that a deal on an omnibus domestic spending bill has fallen through after Congressman David Obey, chair of the House Appropriations Committee, complained that the Republicans were “bargaining in bad faith” on the proposal. The Democrats had proposed a $520 billion spending bill that would include additional domestic spending that the Democrats want but would have also included additional money for Afghanistan and Iraq that the White House has been pressing. The proposal triggered a strong response from OMB director Jim Nussle, who said that if Congress passed such a bill, “the President would veto it”, causing Obey to announce the deal was off.
Obey said he would instead press for a bill that heeded the administration’s spending limits by cutting out earmarks, Iraq and Afghanistan funding, and “most of the Bush administration’s top priorities”. And what might those priorities be, the Post asks? “One possibility would be funding for abstinence education. Other targets could be nuclear weapons research and development in the Energy Department, NASA programs and high-technology border security efforts that have come under criticism for being wasteful and ineffective, said Steve Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense.” How much, if anything, Obey would cut from NASA isn’t mentioned in the article.
In any case, don’t expect a resolution soon. “If anybody thinks we can get out of here this week, they’re smoking something illegal,” Obey said.
By Jeff Foust on 2007 December 10 at 7:08 am ET Using the lackluster response to a question about human Mars exploration in a recent Republican debate as a springboard, Daniel Handlin asks why candidates aren’t more proactive about space exploration policy issues in an article in this week’s issue of The Space Review. Noting Mike Huckabee’s statement that “Whether we ought to go to Mars is not a decision that I would want to make”, Handlin writes:
However, despite Hucakbee’s exceedingly poor choice of words, the reason Huckabee made his statement was obviously not because he has a fear of making decisions. His answer is, of course, code for “I would decide not to support a Mars mission by failing to support one actively,” which for space exploration is tantamount to actively deciding against supporting spaceflight. For the President to hold NASA’s budget flat for a few years would be enough to nix a Mars mission for another 10 or 15 years. But why does this escape attention in the media?
The root cause, Handlin argues, is not one of lack of public interest, but one of poor outreach by space advocates to the public, focusing on minutiae like choice of launch vehicles and propulsion systems than an overall vision of humanity in space:
In the end, the public—those who set the agenda by voting—doesn’t care whether the Ares 1 uses J-2Xs or SSME derivatives, or what kind of propellant the CEV uses. Most people have never heard of either of these vehicles. They care about the emotional impact of space exploration—the excitement of doing something new and wonderful—and that is what needs to be presented to the public.
So how should advocates present “the excitement of doing something new and wonderful”? And how effective would that strategy be in influencing presidential politics?
By Jeff Foust on 2007 December 10 at 6:55 am ET An article in the Nevada newspaper Pahrump Valley Times (“Nye County’s Largest Newspaper Circulation”) covers a recent visit by Elizabeth Kucinich, wife of presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich. Mrs. Kucinich had this to say about her husband’s priorities with regard to NASA:
Kuchinich said her husband’s 12 point plan includes a Works Green Administration, similar to the Works Public Administration of the Depression years. She talked about an ambitious plan to retrofit American homes with wind turbines and solar panels. Mass transit systems are also desperately needed, she said.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) should be put to work on these projects, instead of sending people to the moon, Kucinich said.
Kucinich’s energy policy backs this up to a degree:
There has to be a renewable energy portfolio of at least 20% by 2010. And that means introducing wind, solar, hydrogen, geothermal, biomass, and all of the options that must be available and need incentivizing… And I’m willing to do that through NASA, which has been of singular importance to our economy by developing technologies for propulsion, for aerospace, for materials, for medicines, and for communication. We need to fund NASA in, among other areas, a mission to planet Earth.
Before human lunar exploration advocates get too perturbed, note that Kucinich’s odds of winning the Democratic nomination are, well, astronomical…
By Jeff Foust on 2007 December 6 at 7:42 am ET As the 2010 retirement date for the space shuttle looms, it’s not surprising that some people want to keep the shuttle flying for at least a little bit longer. The Orlando Sentinel reports today that some members of Congress are prepared to take legislative steps to extend the shuttle’s life. A group of Texas members of Congress, led by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, are preparing legislation that would require NASA to add another shuttle mission to launch the AMS. According to the article, 32 members of Texas’ congressional delegation—all but two of its members—signed a letter sent to President Bush last month asking him support their cause; the members also met with NASA Administrator Mike Griffin to try and convince him to add the AMS to the shuttle manifest. “We didn’t leave with everyone jumping up and down and cheering,” admitted Rep. Nick Lampson (D-TX). “We think that he’s under a good bit of pressure to not fly the shuttle after 2010. There’s a lot of money involved.” (Indeed.)
Also, Rep. Dave Weldon (R-FL) is proposing legislation that would require NASA to keep the shuttle flying until a replacement system is ready to fly—a move that would require a huge increase in the NASA budget, and also raise questions about the safety of the aging shuttle fleet. “We just don’t believe there should be a gap,” Weldon’s spokesman, Jeremy Steffens, told the Sentinel, adding that Weldon’s legislation would address safety issues and recertification of the shuttle fleet, a recommendation made by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board if the shuttle was to continue flying after 2010.
Not surprisingly, Griffin isn’t fond of any proposals to extend the shuttle’s life. “If you keep flying the shuttle… you will never finish [Constellation] on the money that we have,” he told the paper. From a technical standpoint, he added, “It is difficult to envision flying much past 2010.” Some in Congress, though, appear willing to try.
By Jeff Foust on 2007 December 5 at 5:43 pm ET The Republican leadership of the Senate Commerce Committee announced this afternoon that Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison would be leaving her post as ranking member of the Space, Aeronautics, and Related Sciences subcommittee to take the same position on the Aviation Operations, Safety, and Security subcommittee. That post had been held by Sen. Trent Lott, who is retiring at the end of the year. Succeeding Hutchison as the ranking member of the space subcommittee is Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana. Vitter has not been outspoken on space issues, to the best of my recollection, but his state is home to the Michoud Assembly Facility, whose future is arguably riding on the current implementation of the Vision for Space Exploration.
By Jeff Foust on 2007 December 5 at 7:49 am ET [I planned to post this earlier in the week but it slipped through the cracks. My apologies.]
On the Sunday before the next shuttle mission, carrying a European lab module to the ISS, not one but two major newspapers devoted articles to another ISS experiment that doesn’t have a ride to the station: the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), an experiment that should be familiar with regular readers here. The Washington Post does a straightforward overview of the AMS, comparing its fortunes with that of Columbus, the European lab module being launched this week. The Post article doesn’t go into the efforts by some members of Congress to get AMS launched, but an Orlando Sentinel article does, noting that Bill Nelson (D-FL), chair of the space subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee, has been one of the advocates for launching AMS, either on a shuttle mission or via alternative means. (Perhaps a stauncher advocate for the AMS has been Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), who has been speaking out about the AMS for at least a couple of years, but she is not mentioned in either article.)
What neither article assesses in any detail, though, is how likely it is that Congress can give NASA the additional money it needs to launch AMS, either through another shuttle mission or by modifying the AMS to launch on an expendable rocket. The latter would cost several hundred million dollars, while the former could have similar costs and also stretch out the shuttle program by an additional mission, with ramifications for the gap between the shuttle and Orion/Ares programs. If Congress could add money to NASA’s budget (no easy feat, as recent efforts have shown), it’s not clear how high a priority launching AMS would be versus narrowing the gap or other efforts. (The Post quotes Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg as saying that the AMS would offer “the only significant science ever done on the space station”; that assessment might not be shared by, say, a materials scientist or biologist.) Having the AMS in space is preferable to keeping it grounded, but at what cost?
By Jeff Foust on 2007 December 4 at 2:09 pm ET To follow up on a note last week about Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison’s long-term plans, the newspaper The Politico reported today that Hutchison will not seek the No. 3 position among Senate Republicans, in part because she had, in the paper’s words, “alienated her conservative colleagues in recent months and endangered her chances of moving up the GOP ranks.” She will retain her current No. 4 position as chair of the Republican Policy Committee in the Senate.
One factor that also weighed against Hutchison, and is of relevance here, is that she apparently plans to leave the Senate well before the end of her current term in 2012 in order to run for governor of Texas. That election isn’t until 2010, but she may leave the Senate even earlier in order to run her campaign:
Hutchison has already publicly announced that she’s not seeking reelection in 2012.
And she has repeatedly declared her interest in running for governor of Texas in 2010, meaning that she could leave the Senate as early as 2009 to conduct a gubernatorial campaign.
Also from the article:
Another Republican senator questioned why Hutchison “is running for leadership when she is leaving in 2009. She’s at a big disadvantage, because everyone knows she’s going to leave the Senate.”
Depending on exactly when in 2009 she decides to leave the Senate—if in fact that’s what she decides to do—that means only two more years of time left in the Senate, at most, for her to win additional funding for NASA for her major concerns (like closing the Shuttle-Constellation gap) or take other steps to influence Congressional space actions.
By Jeff Foust on 2007 November 30 at 7:17 am ET A GAO report released yesterday raises some concerns about the development of the Ares 1. The report doesn’t focus on specific technical issues that have been rumored to exist with the Ares 1, but instead with more general concerns: “knowledge gaps” in various technical, managerial, and financial areas; a lack of stability in Ares 1 requirements because of shifts in Orion requirements, an “aggressive” schedule for the development of the J-2X engine that will power the Ares’ upper stage, and concerns about funding shortfalls for the overall Constellation program. On that last point, the report notes:
NASA’s approach to funding is risky, and the current approved budget profile is insufficient to meet Constellation’s estimated needs. The Constellation program’s integrated risk management system indicates there is a high risk that funding shortfalls could occur in fiscal years 2009 through 2012, resulting in planned work not being completed to support schedules and milestones.
The report was requested by the House Science and Technology Committee, which released a statement by committee chairman Bart Gordon in response to the report. “The Administration has undertaken a major new Exploration initiative on a ‘business as usual’ budget, and that’s going to make it difficult for NASA to succeed,” Gordon said in the statement. “The CEV and Ares I development projects will be important early tests of the Administration’s approach, and the Committee will be actively monitoring the status of those projects over the coming months.”
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