By Jeff Foust on 2007 September 25 at 1:10 pm ET In yesterday’s issue of The Space Review I published an article on recent comments by NASA administrator Mike Griffin on the roles of the public and private sectors in spaceflight. These comments include not just the ones he made during his “Space Economy” speech at a luncheon on September 17 but more informal remarks during a meeting that evening of the MIT Enterprise Forum. In both cases he made the point that the government needs to help foster the development of new space industries through mechanisms like the COTS program, likening it to government incentives for aviation in the 20th century.
However, at the MITEF event, he went farther, discussing how he felt that the government, including NASA, could be major customers for the emerging suborbital spaceflight industry: “If I was still at the helm of NASA when such a service became available, I would guarantee you that we would use it to begin entry-level training of astronauts,” he said. He said, though, that he didn’t want to go too far away from traditional government models, rejecting concepts like extremely large prizes for Mars exploration: “The people who suggest that we should put up a $100-billion prize for the first company to take us to Mars are idiots.” (Speaking of Mars prizes, the New York Times’ John Tierney touches on them in an essay in the ScienceTimes section today, but in the context of billionaires funding them to attain a measure of immortality.)
Griffin’s conclusion: “We need an appropriate balance between government sector activity and private sector activity. My point is that, for fifty years in the space business, we have not had that appropriate balance. We need to move more towards the middle.”
By Jeff Foust on 2007 September 20 at 6:47 am ET When the public-private partnership that was originally envisioned to pay for the development of Europe’s Galileo satellite navigation system fell through earlier this year, it became clear that if Galileo was to continue, it would have to do so entirely at the expense of European taxpayers. Now it appears that EU has found a way to make that happen: it “found” over €2.4 billion (US$3.3 billion) needed to finance Galileo from other programs, notably “Preservation and Management of Natural Resources” (aka agricultural programs), which has a sizable surplus. Proponents of Galileo say that this approach allows them to continue the program without seeking additional money directly from national governments or cutting other programs.
The decision has to be ratified by EU member nations, and it appears from media reports that there will be at least some opposition to that approach. Ordinarily any budget surplus would be distributed back to EU member nations, and some farmer groups want the money spent on additional agricultural programs, not Galileo. The International Herald Tribune also noted that, in the eyes of some, Galileo has become “a personal quest” for EU transportation minister Jacques Barrot.
The EU transport ministers are scheduled to meet again in early October to review the proposal, although it may take much longer to win over some governments. In the meantime, one wonders if it was any coincidence that, on the eve of the EU announcement, the White House announced that equipment designed to degrade GPS signals would no longer be included on future GPS spacecraft. “Although the United States stopped the intentional degradation of GPS satellite signals in May 2000,” the White House statement read, “this new action will result in the removal of SA [selective availability] capabilities, thereby eliminating a source of uncertainty in GPS performance that has been of concern to civil GPS users worldwide.” Like, for example, in Europe.
By Jeff Foust on 2007 September 17 at 5:16 pm ET Earlier today NASA administrator Mike Griffin gave a luncheon speech in Washington to talk about the “space economy”,
a concept part of the agency’s new strategic communications plan. His most noteworthy comment, though, came near the end of the Q&A session after his talk, when he was asked about the potential for cooperation and competition with other emerging space powers, including (but not limited to) China:
I personally believe that China will be back on the Moon before we are. I think when that happens, Americans will not like it, but they will just have to not like it. I think we will see, as we have seen with China’s introductory manned space flights so far, we will see again that nations look up to other nations that appear to be at the top of the technical pyramid, and they want to do deals with those nations. It’s one of the things that made us the world’s greatest economic power. So I think we’ll be reinstructed in that lesson in the coming years and I hope that Americans will take that instruction positively and react to it by investing in those things that are the leading edge of what’s possible.
It wasn’t explicitly clear from his comments whether he was referring to robotic or human exploration of the Moon, but most people in the room appeared to interpret it as referring to human lunar missions.
Update Tuesday 12:30 pm: Griffin told Aerospace Daily that he indeed was referring to human lunar exploration in his comments, particularly if China elects not to develop a heavy-lift vehicle: “If one is willing to make use of multiple Earth-orbit rendezvous, a really big rocket is not required,” he told Aerospace Daily in an email. “It’s pretty cumbersome, but it can be done.”
By Jeff Foust on 2007 September 13 at 11:18 am ET The Huntsville Times reports today on comments made by Reps. Bud Cramer (D-AL) and Bart Gordon (D-TN) at an all-hands meeting at NASA MSFC yesterday. The two said they were particularly concerned that NASA might have to operate under another continuing resolution, depending on what the Senate does with its version of appropriations legislation. Cramer: “There is a probability of another temporary continuing resolution. We still have to work that out.” Presumably any continuing resolution would be short-lived, unlike the year-long continuing resolution that has funded NASA and many other federal agencies in FY07, although the article doesn’t make that point clear.
The article does include this odd passage: “Some are concerned that as much as $100 million in NASA cuts could delay lunar exploration programs such as Marshall’s Ares I rocket and probes aimed at finding water on the moon.” The “some” mentioned above is vague, although the preceding paragraph mentions “NASA and congressional leaders”; the article also doesn’t specify who was responsible for these potential “$100 million in NASA cuts”. It’s possible this is just a reference to the decreased funding level NASA operated under this fiscal year compared to what was expected, but it’s hard to be certain from the language of the article alone. While both Gordon and Cramer think NASA’s funding should be increased, neither specifically mentioned supporting something like the so-called “Mikulski miracle” to add $1 billion to NASA’s FY08 budget.
One other interesting quote from Gordon, about the strains on the agency created by all the agency’s priorities and its limited budget: NASA is trying “to squeeze $23 billion or $24 billion worth of science and research into an $18 billion budget.”
By Jeff Foust on 2007 September 12 at 12:55 pm ET The Mars Society sent out an alert to its members last week regarding language in the House version of the FY2008 NASA budget that would prevent NASA from spending money on projects exclusively intended for human Mars exploration. (It’s not clear exactly how many projects this would affect, although it’s unlikely to be more than a few small technology development efforts.) The Senate version of the budget, approved by the appropriations committee but not yet acted upon by the full Senate, doesn’t have that language, but the Mars Society is concerned that the language could make its way into the final version after a House-Senate conference. “It is highly likely that actions taken in the next few weeks will determine whether the anti-Mars language will end up on the final budget,” the announcement stated. “Although we have done an amazing job thus far – more than 1,000 faxes sent, numerous Congressional meetings organized, innumerable phone calls made, and 200 letters signed at the Mars Society Convention in Los Angeles – we need to intensify our efforts for the next few weeks.” The society is calling upon its members and others to fax and/or call their members of Congress to request that this language not be included in the final version of the bill.
By Jeff Foust on 2007 September 12 at 12:47 pm ET Almost immediately after a Proton-M rocket failed and crashed on Kazakh territory downrange from the Baikonur Cosmodrome last week, the Kazakh government moved to ban Proton launches from Baikonur. This isn’t the first time the Kazakh government has moved to ban Proton launches after an accident, in part because of environmental concerns associated with the Proton’s rather noxious mix of propellants, nitrogen tetroxide and unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine. (The Kazakh government put a similar ban in place after the failure last year of a Dnepr, a converted ICBM that uses similar propellants.) Typically the bans are lifted after the investigation into the failure is completed.
An editorial in the Russian newspaper Vedomosti (via the English-language paper The Moscow Times) argues that—surprise!—the failure will also become an issue in Russian-Kazakh relations. The failure took place while the Kazakh president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, was not far from the impact site, and hence have also banned any launches when “the president is in an area falling under a rocket’s planned trajectory”. The editorial suggests that the Kazakh government may use the accident to revise the Russian lease on Baikonur, for which the Russian government pays Kazakhstan $115 million a year in rent. “These announcements look like they were made as a signal that the Kazakh government is getting ready to lodge some serious complaints with Moscow,” the editorial states. “The complaints will undoubtedly come with a price tag.”
By Jeff Foust on 2007 September 10 at 7:40 am ET An article in today’s Houston Chronicle plays down the effect the suite of minor scandals that have dogged the space agency this year will have on the agency’s FY08 budget. The House has already passed its version of the budget, giving NASA several hundred million more than what the president requested; the full Senate has yet to act on its version of the budget, although the Senate Appropriations Committee also approved a budget that gives NASA more than originally requested. The appropriations bill that includes NASA is likely to be rolled up with several other outstanding bills into an omnibus package later this fall, according to the Chronicle.
One Houston-area congressman, Nick Lampson, whose district includes JSC, claimed that the timing of these problems was an issue. “If all of this had happened before we passed the House bill, maybe” it would have affected the budget, he said. But, of course, a lot of it did happen before mid-July. When I talked with Lampson at the ISDC in Dallas on Memorial Day weekend, the scandal du jour centered on NASA’s inspector general, which Lampson shrugged off. “Everything’s a distraction,” he said at the time. That seems to be still true today.
By Jeff Foust on 2007 September 9 at 6:33 pm ET The front page of today’s Washington Post has an article discussing the potential closure of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico because of budget pressures at the NSF. The giant radio observatory, operated by Cornell University, will have to shut down in 2010 unless the university can find other sources to cover half of the observatory’s $8-million budget. NSF came to that decision in order to help close a projected shortfall in its budget for astronomy programs (a shortfall that may be easing now that NSF’s overall budget, as part of the American Competitiveness Initiative, is in line to double over the next several years.)
One challenge for backers of Arecibo, the article posits, is politics. Because the telescope is in Puerto Rico, a commonwealth with only a single non-voting “resident commissioner” in the House, it is at a disadvantage compared to other endangered astronomy facilities in New Mexico and West Virginia, who have ardent and powerful supporters in Congress. The closest the Post finds to an Arecibo supporter in Congress is Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), who wants to preserve Arecibo’s powerful planetary radar that is used to study near Earth objects, a pet interest of his. Rohrabacher would like to see NASA step in and cover any shortfall in Arecibo’s budget: “There are things in the NASA budget that are far less defensible than identifying and tracking objects coming from space that could cause colossal loss of lives on our planet,” he said, not identifying anything specific. (This is the only time NASA is mentioned in the article, and it’s at the very end: a change of pace given the usual attention focused on the space agency and cutbacks in space science funding in recent years.)
Another issue, though, mentioned in the article is the difficulty striking a balance between supporting existing, aging facilities and building new observatories. “The ambitions of the astronomy community for new things was far outstripping the capacity of the federal budget to cover them,” Wayne van Citters, NSF’s astronomy division director, told the Post. Given that it’s not at all obvious what an “appropriate” level of funding should be for astronomy programs (at the NSF or NASA, for that matter), the desire for both building new telescopes and maintaining existing ones—not to mention funding astronomers to actually use those facilities and analyze the data they collect—makes situations like these almost inevitable.
By Jeff Foust on 2007 September 9 at 6:07 pm ET Earlier this summer, as you may recall, NASA completed a new strategic communications plan with a “core message” as its central theme: “NASA explores for answers that power our future.” The response to it has been, shall we say, less than overwhelming. So much so, in fact, that Loretta Whitesides, blogging on Wired.com, solicited suggestions for a new slogan, claiming that, “The campaign [surrounding that slogan] now seems to be aborted.” Could Wired readers come up with alternatives?
Wired.com readers did respond, with all the seriousness you would expect from such a request. Which is to say, not much. As of late Sunday afternoon, the list of “top-rated” submissions (available on a follow-up blog post or directly here and apparently ranked by the difference between positive and negative votes) features such sterling submissions as “All your space are belong to U.S.”, “NASA: Billions Of Dollars Spent and Still No Death Star”, and the utterly nonsensical “SO I HERD U LIEK MUDKIPZ” as the top three. If there are any gems, they’ve long been buried in a mass of LOLcats, Uranus jokes, and other drivel. (Perhaps the best one, still ranked in the top 25 for now, is “Ya know what? We’re beginning to think our slogan doesn’t suck too bad after all this [expletive] here.”)
Lesson? One of the key rules for effective communication is to know your audience, and Wired.com’s audience—bored geeks and geek wannabes (after all, how many real geeks read Wired now, compared to its heyday in the mid-90s?)—was certain to respond to this request with equal measures of sarcasm and silliness. (Having a system to view and vote on the submissions only amplified the problem.) If NASA needs a livelier slogan than “NASA explores for answers that power our future”, it’s not going to be imposed from the outside, and certainly not from the readers of Wired.com.
By Jeff Foust on 2007 September 6 at 7:52 am ET You’re doubtless already aware of today’s House Science and Technology Committee hearing about NASA’s astronaut health care studies, including allegations of intoxicated astronauts. At the same time as that hearing, though, the House Homeland Security Committee will be hosting another hearing, “Turning Spy Satellites on the Homeland: the Privacy and Civil Liberties Implications of the National Applications Office”. The hearing was triggered by reports last month, including in the Wall Street Journal, that the Director of National Intelligence will give the Department of Homeland Security access to reconnaissance satellite imagery of US territory for possible law enforcement applications. The astronaut health care hearing is likely to attract more media attention today, but the subject of the other hearing may be far more significant in the long run.
|
|
