By Jeff Foust on 2007 July 23 at 8:01 am ET In today’s issue of The Space Review I have an article about what the future may hold in store for NASA when the next president takes office in about 18 months. The article is based on a panel session during the NewSpace 2007 conference on Friday. (Rand Simberg has his liveblogged summary of the session as well.) There was a lot from that session that I could not fit into the article, including a discussion of how NASA is treated by campaigns and transition teams (and how people would prefer NASA be handled), concerns about the overall structure of government and the appropriations process, and a comment by Alan Ladwig skeptical of the long-term potential of ISS commercial resupply: given all the difficulties with outsourcing NASA parabolic flight services, how likely is it that commercializing ISS resupply will be any easier?
By Jeff Foust on 2007 July 23 at 7:50 am ET Last Thursday Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas and a Republican candidate for president who has been trailing in the polls, held a conference call with reports and bloggers to discuss a wide range of issues. One of the participants, who runs a Colorado-based pro-Huckabee blog, asked the candidate a rare question about space policy: with the news that the House Appropriations Committee has passed a budget that includes a provision prohibiting spending on human exploration of Mars, what is his stance about human space exploration, and what is his vision for the space program?
Huckabee started with a feeble joke:
Let me begin by saying that there are several people I’d like to send to Mars, so if we could get a vessel on that way, I’d like to put together a passenger list. Only thing is, I probably would only provide enough fuel to get them there, I’m not sure we’d get them back. By the way, don’t ask me the followup of who I’d like on that list, that would be a very closely guarded secret.
Then Huckabee described his past interest in space, and the benefits he sees space exploration in general providing the country, including a discussion of space-based air traffic control systems [emphasis added]:
I’m a child of the Space Age, born in 1955, and remember well, as a small child, John F. Kennedy’s vision to get us to the Moon. I remember sitting in my living room floor in July of 1969, when Neil Armstrong put his foot on the Moon. I’m also a person, as a 15-year-old kid, I was selected to go and spend two weeks at Cape Kennedy space program, part of Hugh O’Brian Youth Foundation. One kid from each state was selected, ten from foreign countries, it was an amazing experience. It reignited my passion about the space program. I’m saying all that as sort of a preface.
I believe that the space program has brought about far more benefits than simply the exploration of space. The side benefits in medical technology, navigation technology, digital technology, audiovisual, you know, it’s endless. And largely it was launched from the scientific research that was done in order to help us in the space race. So I think there are tremendous benefits that we would gain from an accelerated space exploration program that would help us in energy independence, that would help us in future technologies, perhaps better managing, I think, for example, that if we had a satellite-based air traffic control system, we would be far better off, in fact I know we would, that we would under the current system that is absolutely logjammed and is creating an enormous expenditure in both financial and social capital as people sit on runways for hours and hours and flights are delayed, and it’s costing companies and individuals extraordinarily amounts of money and time. So, I don’t have a dollar figure for you at this point. I’m trying to develop the national budget. But I certainly would be in strong favor of increasing our efforts in space exploration and technology.
Huckabee was then asked a followup: what would he say to those who prefer robotic spaceflight over human spaceflight? Huckabee sees a balance (and in the process dabbles in some creationism language):
I think there’s got to be a combination. We want to make sure that when we have human exploration it’s safe. We don’t want to start putting people in unnecessary risk, although space exploration is always going to be risky. But there is still a value of human exploration. Robots are wonderful, and there’s a lot of artificial intelligence that can be created in robotics, but you know I always argue that when God created the human eye, there’s never been a better camera, when God created the human nose there’s never been a better sensory device, when God created the human ear there’s never been a better listening device. There’s ultimately value in human exploration simply because you have all the tools that exist within the human capacity that simply are unmatched by any technology at this point.
One final question [again, emphasis added]:
Well, I don’t know if we could do it right away, because I don’t think we’ve got the technology to get them there and back in any period of time. So I’d want to see where we are, but if we came to the place in my tenure where that was a reasonable possibility and one that made sense, I’m not opposed to it, I’m just not quite ready to say, because I can just see the headline now, “Huckabee Proposes Mars Mission”. Again, there are some people I’d like to send over there, but probably not for the same reason you’re thinking of right now.
[The transcription above is from audio posted on Huckabee’s campaign web site; go to part 3 of the July 19 conference call, about three minutes into that section. Any errors in the transcription are solely my responsibility.]
What Huckabee thinks about space policy is, in the long run, not necessarily very relevant, given his standing in the polls these days. Nonetheless, it’s interesting to see him shy away from proclaiming his clear support for human Mars missions because of his concerns about the headlines it would generate, even while cracking jokes about sending people on one-way trips to Mars.
By Jeff Foust on 2007 July 20 at 8:29 am ET If you are looking for something to do this Sunday afternoon, you can tune into The Space Show at 3:00 pm EDT, where I will be Dr. David Livingston’s guest for the 90-minute show. One thing we will be talking about during the show will be the NewSpace 2007 conference, which wraps up Saturday, but with all that time there will be opportunities to talk about space policy and other topics. And if, for some reason, you actually have better things to do Sunday afternoon than listen to an Internet radio show, the show will be archived for later listening.
By Jeff Foust on 2007 July 20 at 5:57 am ET In his luncheon speech Thursday at the NewSpace 2007 conference, Ed Morris, director of the Office of Space Commercialization within the Department of Commerce, was asked about what could be done about the export control problems facing the domestic space industry. ITAR, like the weather, is a topic everyone in the industry loves to gripe about, but about which little is done. Or is there? Morris noted that Commerce distributed a questionnaire to industry to gauge the effects of ITAR on the overall space industrial base, including both prime contractors and lower-tier suppliers. “That survey, and the results of that survey, provide the quantitative backbone for what I hope is still going to be some action on the executive branch side in the not-too-distant future,” he said. “I’m really talking around it,” he admitted, and didn’t offer any other details about what sort of action could be taken (and, unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to followup with him after his talk, since it’s not clear exactly what the executive branch can do, since it would take legislation to remove satellite components off the Munitions List.) “It’s a long answer, and it’s probably going to get me in trouble,” he said, “but I hope to see something happening, at least some policy actions and some policy discussions, using that quantitative data and quantitative analysis in the near term.”
By Jeff Foust on 2007 July 20 at 5:39 am ET Often here, such as with this post from earlier this week, the comments evolve (or, perhaps, devolve) into a discussion about whether the US will be perceived as falling behind other countries, China in particular, should they send humans to the Moon before the US returns there. In that theme I offer the following comments on the topic by Charles Miller in his opening remarks at the “Commercial-Military Spaceplane Day” during the NewSpace 2007 conference in Arlington, Virginia on Thursday:
I hear politicians on the Hill, and even some of the space industry’s lobbyists, talk up the possibility that China will beat us back to the Moon. I can only hope they try, because, in my mind, the technology to put a few humans on the Moon in a race is a strategic dead end that delivers little benefit to national security or economic wealth. I am much more fearful that China will make a national decision to develop totally-reusable spaceplanes. That would be a Chinese capability with major commercial and national security consequences.
It should be noted that, in this context, “spaceplane” refers to any launch vehicle with aircraft-like characteristics (reusability, high flight rate, low cost per flight, high reliability), regardless of whether the vehicle is winged or not.
By Jeff Foust on 2007 July 19 at 5:59 am ET That’s the title of a report issued this week by the Select Committee on Science and Technology of the British Parliament. The report makes a number of recommendations about the direction the UK should take in space policy. I have not had the opportunity yet to go through the entire report, but some of the highlights include:
- increased support for early-stage space technology R&D;
- a “flexible” stance towards human spaceflight and launch vehicle development, two areas that the UK traditionally has not participated in;
- development of a regulatory framework to support space tourism;
- increased public education of the everyday benefits of space.
One thing the report does not call for, though, is the creation of a formal national space agency, instead recommending that the UK’s current space office, the British National Space Centre, be strengthened by “improving its profile, leadership, co-ordination and perhaps a change of name.”
What isn’t clear, particularly from this side of the Atlantic, is how influential and effective this report will be. It does come out just as the UK government is in the midst of a reorganization led by new prime minister Gordon Brown; the UK’s new science minister, Ian Pearson, has been on the job since only early this month. In the US there’s a long history of reports collecting dust on bookshelves after their release, their recommendations never enacted—will this report share the same fate?
By Jeff Foust on 2007 July 18 at 9:15 am ET NASA issued a press release yesterday to announce that the American Medical Association (AMA) had unanimously passed a resolution at its annual meeting in Chicago last month supporting human space exploration. The NASA release is short on details, other than to say that the resolution “also reaffirmed support for medical research on the space shuttle and International Space Station.” (Well, good luck with that, especially on the shuttle.) The resolution in question appears to be this one (Word format) that primarily plays up the medical research that has been performed in space to date, the medical spinoffs from spaceflight, and previous AMA support for spaceflight, and adds that the AMA has yet to make a formal statement regarding the Vision after more than three years. The resolution, which came from the AMA’s Medical Student Section, calls on the organization to “reaffirm Policy H-45.994 which supports the continuation of medical research on manned space flight and the international space station” and “support the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s new commitment for manned space exploration of the moon, Mars, and other celestial bodies for the benefits to medicine and advances in patient care.”
By Jeff Foust on 2007 July 16 at 7:20 am ET Maybe you should at least take them with a grain of salt. Take this Kiplinger.com article about NASA’s post-shuttle future, including the question of funding for the space agency:
The earliest the new lunar missions could conceivably take place would be in 2020. But again, competing budget pressures are likely to push back that timetable. And politics is also intruding into the mix. “Now that Democrats have recaptured Congress, no one is interested in finding funding for Bush’s initiative,” says Alex Roland, professor of history at Duke University and a former chief historian of NASA.
That, no doubt, will come as a surprise to members of the appropriations committee in the House and Senate, which approved bills that funded NASA at above the level the president requested, and included full funding for key exploration projects. (There’s also the issue of relying on Alex Roland as an expert on current space policy developments.) The article goes on that, “The odds are that, long before another American sets foot on the moon, China’s ‘taikonauts’ will get there first.” This, despite the lack of hard evidence that China will mount a human Moon mission until at least some time in the 2020s, if even then.
The lesson: trust space policy commentary from a business publication about as much as you would non-aerospace stock tips from the pages of Aviation Week or Space News.
By Jeff Foust on 2007 July 16 at 7:07 am ET On Sunday both Florida Today and the Orlando Sentinel published editorials congratulating the House Appropriations Committee for approving a spending bill last week that gave NASA more money than both the agency received in FY2007 and what the White House requested in its FY2008 budget proposal. The Florida Today editorial goes so far as to assign virtually all the credit to local Congressman Dave Weldon, for his “hard pushing” that “gained the support of Democrats who control the powerful Appropriations Committee.” If it really is Weldon who deserves the credit for the additional funding, then it was clearly with a different selling approach than the one he used when he complained earlier this year about the FY07 continuing resolution and asked “whether the Democratic leaders will restore NASA’s budget.” Both editorials, not surprisingly, also mention Weldon’s amendment that requires NASA to provide more details about the shuttle-CEV workforce transition, a “farsighted step” in the eyes of the Sentinel.
By Jeff Foust on 2007 July 13 at 7:24 am ET The House Appropriations Committee passed the Commerce, Justice, and Science spending bill that includes $17.6 billion for NASA. (subscription required for the Space News article) Although few details about the spending bill have been released yet, the bill approved by the full committee appears largely identical to what the CJS subcommittee approved last month. Rep. Dave Weldon (R-FL) is taking credit for one amendment, though, that requires NASA to “provide specific details of how it will integrate the current Shuttle workforce into the Constellation program”.
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