By Jeff Foust on 2007 November 20 at 7:31 am ET It doesn’t necessarily have the drama of, say, a Mike Griffin appearance on Capitol Hill (which says something right there) but to a significant (and lucrative) part of the overall space industry, it is important: international regulators decided late last week to preserve a key spectrum band for satellite services. There was a proposal going into the 2007 World Radiocommunication Conference in Geneva last month to allow terrestrial wireless broadband services, like WiMAX, to use a swath of the C-band spectrum reserved for satellite services, something the industry said would create interference that would make satellite use of the spectrum untenable in much of the world. But thanks to a “well-organized lobbying campaign that included support from governments, international organizations, non-profits, and technology companies”, regulators decided to preserve that C-band spectrum for satellite services.
By Jeff Foust on 2007 November 18 at 8:20 pm ET Sunday’s Washington Post reports that new allegations have linked Congressman William Jefferson, albeit tenuously, with NASA. Jefferson, a Democrat from Louisiana, was indicted this summer by a federal grand jury for soliciting bribes and reporting trips to Africa as official business. According to the report, in 2005 “Jefferson allegedly agreed to urge NASA in a letter to consider doing business with a U.S. rocket technology and rocket launch services company. In exchange, the company allegedly agreed to pay Jefferson’s family business and a relative.” The brief article doesn’t have any more details.
The actual filing by federal prosecutors with the US District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, cited in the article (and available online for those able to jump through a few hoops on the court’s web site) has some more details, although it does not mention the company in question by name, referring to it only by the pseudonym “Company H”. According to the filing:
Company H was pursuing a number of business opportunities, including commercial launch contracts with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (“NASA”) and the development and use of the former NASA Advanced Solid Rocket Motor facility in Mississippi and another facility in Louisiana. Executives with Company H were also interested in developing a separate satellite communications company that would provide global beaming of audio, video, and Internet services, which would potentially have a significant market in Africa.
An unnamed individual, “Businessperson BC”, had a consulting agreement with Company H and arranged a meeting between them and Jefferson and a family member:
At the meeting, Defendant Jefferson agreed to undertake official acts to support Company H by, among other things, writing a letter to NASA. Shortly after that meeting and before sending the letter to NASA, Defendant Jefferson told Businessperson BC that Defendant Jefferson wanted the same consulting agreement for Family Member 4 with Company H as had been done with Company C, namely, that Family Member 4 would receive a commission from Company H for certain sales and transactions in West Africa and Central Africa relating to the satellite aspect of the business ventures. Businessperson BC agreed to suggest to Company H that it hire Family Member 4.
Such an arrangement was apparently reached by June 2005, according to the filing, and Jefferson then acted:
On or about July 14, 2005, Defendant Jefferson wrote a letter on the letterhead of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation to NASA’s Administrator on Company H’s behalf. In the July 14 letter, Defendant Jefferson wrote of the challenge “of providing the necessary budget resources to NASA, in an era of tight budgets,” and in the next sentence he wrote “we encourage your close consideration of [Company H].” At the time, Defendant Jefferson was the Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, and his signature block contained the letters “M.C.” following his name, which is an abbreviation used to refer to a Member of Congress… Defendant Jefferson did not disclose to NASA’s Administrator that a consulting agreement was being pursued to benefit Family Member 4 or a Jefferson family-controlled company.
The filing then notes that 20 days after the date on Jefferson’s letter, searches were executed on Jefferson’s home and other locations, “and this scheme did not develop further.”
Naturally, one wonders who “Company H” is. Whomever they are (or were), they certainly had grandiose plans, seeking not only to develop launch vehicles but also a global satellite communications system. It seems highly unlikely that this was a large aerospace company, since they would (presumably) know better than to make such shady arrangements; moreover, Jefferson would seem to be an unlikely member of Congress to curry favor with. This looks more like the actions of a small operation trying to get their foot in the door.
By Jeff Foust on 2007 November 16 at 6:59 am ET Yesterday’s Senate hearing wasn’t exactly a lovefest for Griffin: there were a number of tough questions from the two senators in attendance, Bill Nelson and Kay Bailey Hutchison, touching on everything from shuttle retirement plans to the impending US reliance on Russian spacecraft for ISS access to potential layoffs at KSC after the shuttle retirement to questions about how to get one experiment, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, to the station given there’s no room for it on the shuttle manifest. And the solutions Griffin offered to some of the problems, like ISS access, didn’t seem convincing to the senators: Griffin spoke with guarded optimism about COTS, noting the progress SpaceX is making, but Nelson was openly skeptical that a commercial ISS access option would be ready by 2010, noting the long development time for the European ATV and Japanese HTV vehicles.
As the hearing dragged on, it appeared that Griffin became increasingly frustrated. “We are where we are as the result of prior decisions made by prior administrations and prior Congresses,” he said at one point late in the hearing, as Nelson quizzed him on NASA’s need to rely on Russia for ISS access once the shuttle is retired. “I don’t like it, and I consider it to be unseemingly in the extreme and unwise strategically for the United States to be dependent on any other nation for any other thing. I could not be more clear on that. This is where we are, and I’m doing the best I can to chart our course out of it. I did not get us into this position; I’m doing the best I can to get out of it. And if you think I like it, you would be wrong.”
Nelson asked, in response, “So what do I do, besides pray?”
Griffin: “I guess you need to hire somebody smarter than me, because I have not been able to figure out a better one. I take responsibility for the plan we have, going forward. I don’t have a better one. I share your concern… I don’t have a better plan. I’m sorry.”
There was, though, a bit of levity in the hearing as Sen. Hutchison took note of Griffin’s stark assessments:
Hutchison: “Dr. Griffin, like Sen. Nelson, I’ve worked with you for a long time. I respect you. I think you’ve done enormous things for NASA. But you are not an encourager.”
Griffin: “Yes, Senator, I’m sorry that I’m not an encourager. I want to never, ever, ever promise you something that I can’t deliver.”
A little later:
Nelson: “We need to get Dr. Griffin to be an encourager.”
Hutchison: “He is – notoriously – an engineer.”
By Jeff Foust on 2007 November 16 at 6:01 am ET During yesterday’s Senate hearing on the impending retirement of the space shuttle, NASA administrator Mike Griffin and space subcommittee chairman Sen. Bill Nelson got into a debate regarding exactly when the space shuttle would be retired. Griffin’s opening statement stated the following: “I would like to give you an update on our plans to ensure that space transportation capabilities remain available through the completion of ISS assembly and during the ISS post-assembly period after the Space Shuttle fleet has been retired in 2010.” In his own opening statement, Nelson expressed concern that “NASA is improperly planning to retire the space shuttle on an arbitrary date in 2010, rather than completing the current manifest as required by both the President’s Vision document and the authorization act.”
Griffin, in response to a question along those lines from Nelson, said, “The President has directed that the space shuttle be retired by the end of 2010, and our budgetary planning does show that we will finish our last space shuttle flight in fiscal 2010, and at this point we have five months of margin to do that.”
“I want to challenge that,” Nelson responded. “Because I’m reading from the President’s Vision for Space Exploration, and it says, ‘Retire the space shuttle as soon as assembly of the International Space Station is completed, planned for the end of this decade.’ So where do you see that the President has ‘required’ – is the word that you used?”
“Well, I stand corrected, sir,” Griffin said.
Or was he? It’s easy to see where the confusion stems from. Nelson appeared to be quoting from this document about the Vision for Space Exploration from January 2004, which does indeed state, “Retire the Space Shuttle as soon as assembly of the International Space Station is completed, planned for the end of this decade”. However, an accompanying fact sheet states something subtly different: “The Shuttle’s chief purpose over the next several years will be to help finish assembly of the Station, and the Shuttle will be retired by the end of this decade after nearly 30 years of service.” (This comes after a passage that states that “America will complete its work on the International Space Station by 2010″, which is itself deliciously vague.)
Then there’s what President Bush himself said in his speech at NASA Headquarters on January 14, 2004. “The Shuttle’s chief purpose over the next several years will be to help finish assembly of the International Space Station,” he said. “In 2010, the Space Shuttle — after nearly 30 years of duty — will be retired from service.”
Nearly a year later, the administration released a new space transportation policy that words the shuttle retirement slightly differently, and in a manner that Sen. Nelson would likely approve of: “The Space Shuttle will be returned to flight as soon as practical, based on the recommendations of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board; used to complete assembly of the International Space Station, planned for the end of this decade; and then retired.” (Emphasis added.)
Despite all the word games, it seems likely that, barring an accident of some other major change in direction for the space agency, the shuttle will remain in operation until the ISS is complete—or, rather, the ISS will be declared complete when the shuttle is retired (after all, “assembly complete” for ISS has historically been a flexible target.)
By Jeff Foust on 2007 November 15 at 12:08 pm ET There has been a lot of speculation (okay, rumors) the last couple of days about the fate of the so-called “Mikulski Miracle”, the $1 billion the Senate added to NASA’s FY08 appropriations, as the conference committee works out the differences between the House and Senate versions of the Commerce, Justice, and Science appropriations bills. This morning, during the hearing of the space subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, who had been working with Sen. Barbara Mikulski on such a measure since last year, appeared to indicate that the extra billion had been dropped from the conference report: “Of course, you know, I, along with Sen. Mikulski, tried to put one billion into this year’s appropriation which, at this point, does not appear to be successful in the conference committee.”
(Space News also filed a report about Hutchison’s comments [subscription required] this morning.)
If that’s correct, and the extra billion has been dropped from the final version of the legislation, it would be a setback to NASA supporters. However, given that the appropriations bill stands a good chance of being vetoed by the president, it’s was going to be an uphill fight to get that extra money even if the money survived the conference committee. The question now is: what happens if/when the bill is vetoed? Will there be another opportunity to increase the agency’s budget, or will it have to fight to keep the money it currently has?
By Jeff Foust on 2007 November 15 at 7:55 am ET Right now a number of companies are busy working on their proposals for funded Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) agreements as part of the new round (officially designated JSC-COTS-2) that opened up when NASA terminated its existing funded Space Act agreement with Rocketplane Kistler (RpK) last month. While NASA is proceeding with the competition, with proposals due Wednesday the 21st, there are still some factors involving RpK that could throw a wrench in NASA’s plans.
As Space News reported in its print edition this week, RpK filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office (GAO) about the new competition on October 30. The protest is not about their original agreement, because that was performed under a Space Act agreement that, unlike conventional procurements, is not subject to GAO protests. “RpK did not protest our decision to terminate,” Neil Woodward of NASA’s Exploration Systems Mission Directorate said Monday at the Reach to Space conference at George Washington University. RpK followed an appeal process internal to NASA that has since concluded, he said.
The RpK GAO protest, instead, is on how the new competition should be structured. “They did file a GAO protest on the second announcement,” Woodward said. “What they’re protesting is whether it should be done as a Space Act agreement or under federal procurement regulations; that is, whether it should be a FAR [Federal Acquisition Regulation] procurement, or whether it could be an agreement, which is what we have been doing.” While the protest proceeds, NASA is continuing with the current competition, with plans to make one or more awards early next year. Left unsaid is why RpK would seek to change the procurement process.
One of RpK’s major complaints about its original COTS award was that NASA was sending mixed messages about the level of support it was giving to the program, either though comments by NASA officials or its contract with Roskosmos for additional Progress and Soyuz flights to the ISS, making it difficult for RpK to demonstrate to potential investors that there was a viable market for commercial ISS resupply. Woodward disagreed that NASA, unintentionally or otherwise, gave out conflicting messages. “Our messages have actually been consistent” from the original COTS announcement to the request for information the agency issues earlier this year for COTS phase 2.
By Jeff Foust on 2007 November 14 at 6:46 am ET The latest proposal to scrape up the billions of euros needed to fund Europe’s Galileo satellite navigation system “fell on deaf ears” yesterday, the AP reported. Germany had proposed getting the European Space Agency to pay some of the additional costs of the Galileo system, but no other European Union finance ministers supported the proposal during a meeting Tuesday in Brussels. Germany put the proposal forward as an alternative to using agricultural subsidy surpluses to fund the €2.4 billion ($3.5 billion) needed to deploy Galileo after plans to have a public-private partnership pick up the tab fell through earlier this year. A final decision on how to fund Galileo is planned for an EU summit meeting in December.
Some in the UK, meanwhile, are resisting the EU push to use taxpayer money to fund Galileo, at least without some sort of independent examination of the worth of the system, A parliament committee called on the government to “top this folly and endeavour to bring the European Commission to its senses”, in the words of its chairperson, Gwyneth Dunwoody. “What taxpayers in the United Kingdom and other European countries really need and want is better railways and roads, not giant signature projects in the sky, providing services that we already have from GPS and other systems.”
By Jeff Foust on 2007 November 13 at 12:45 pm ET The space subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee will be holding a hearing this Thursday morning (10 am, SR-253) on “Issues Facing the U.S. Space Program after Retirement of the Space Shuttle”. The purpose of the hearing, according to the subcommittee, will be to “address issues related to the retirement of the Space Shuttle, its remaining missions… [NASA’s] plans to compensate should they not fulfill all mission requirements on schedule, and other issues facing NASA when the Space Shuttle is retired.” (Such as, presumably, “The Gap”.) Administrator Mike Griffin is scheduled to testify, along with associate administrators Bill Gerstenmaier and Richard Gilbrech.
By Jeff Foust on 2007 November 12 at 7:21 am ET A couple of space policy pieces in today’s issue of The Space Review:
Chris Carberry explains why it’s so critical for space advocates to ask Congress to strike the language in the House version of the NASA budget that prohibits funding of human Mars exploration projects. His concern: that if the language was left in place, it would be harder down the road to remove it, and could embolden opponents of human spaceflight in Congress to seek stricter prohibitions. “If we hand the opponents of Mars exploration an easy victory, it is highly likely that they will continue to shift the status quo again next year and the year after that,” he writes. “Soon, not only Mars exploration will be threatened, but the Moon and other things.”
Taylor Dinerman takes another look at Hillary Clinton’s proposed space policy and notes that NASA, unlike other agencies mentioned by name in the overall science policy, is not identified as receiving an overall budget increase. Since she states that she will strengthen earth sciences and aeronautics programs at the agency, “it’s hard to see how this could be done without cutting into the budgets for science and exploration.” He also touches on workforce issues, particularly during the transition from the shuttle to Ares and Orion. However, he concludes, “The junior senator from New York’s policy is probably the best and most realistic one we can expect from a Democrat.”
By Jeff Foust on 2007 November 10 at 7:56 am ET There’s no shortage of potential financial concerns at NASA that are worth of the attention of the media, from whether the agency’s budget is sufficient to handle all of its projects to worries about cost and schedule overruns on various programs to general financial management concerns. But those are all dry, boring steak to the sizzle that really attracts the attention of TV in particular: parties.
With all the righteous indignation of a local news I-Team report, the CBS Evening News reported on how NASA is spending up to half a million dollars to honor shuttle workers in December, including rooms at a “luxury Florida hotel”, “fancy receptions”, and view of a shuttle launch. “All paid for by your tax dollars,” the report continues, adding that such events are held for every shuttle launch (although at the current flight rate, it’s not clear how you get from a half-million per event to $4 million a year, as the report claims). Juxtaposed against that is the Senate’s approval last month of a billion-dollar increase in NASA’s FY08 budget. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK): “I think it’s kind of ironic that they’re gonna be extravagant at how they spend money and they’re coming to us saying they want more money.”
(This is not the first time that the CBS Evening News and its anchor, Katie Couric, have taken a jab at NASA: recall a little over a year ago Couric wondered what NASA’s budget “could do for people right here on planet Earth”.)
Setting aside the question of whether spending that money on the event makes sense, here’s a question for CBS News: was it worth three minutes of a half-hour telecast to focus on something that costs a couple million dollars a year when many people have questions about whether NASA is going in the right overall direction with a budget in excess of $17 billion a year?
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