By Jeff Foust on 2007 January 15 at 7:54 am ET Yesterday marked the third anniversary of President Bush’s speech at NASA Headquarters where he unveiled the Vision for Space Exploration. The anniversary passed quietly; the closest thing to coverage of the anniversary yesterday was a Houston Chronicle article about the budget pressures facing NASA because of the lack of an FY07 budget for the agency. Maybe that absence of coverage was because the anniversary fell on a Sunday of a three-day weekend (with people more interested in, say, the NFL playoffs or the season premiere of 24), or perhaps because the Vision seems to be in fairly good shape, especially when compared to the brief, unfortunate history of its predecessor exploration program, SEI.
However, as I note in an article in this week’s issue of The Space Review, the next two years may be the most critical for the long-term future of the Vision. The budget crunch NASA is currently facing, relatively tepid public support, and continuing rumors about technical problems with the Ares 1 in particular all pose near-term challenges for NASA. While it’s unlikely that Congress or the White House will make major changes to the Vision in the next two years, all bets are off in 2009 when a new president takes office. Will he or she inherit a program beset by problems and limited public support, or one that is relatively healthy? That could make all the difference when Bush’s successor decides what direction NASA should take in his or her administration.
By Jeff Foust on 2007 January 13 at 5:10 pm ET It’s been a little over three months since the Bush Administration quietly released the new national space policy. While the initial, somewhat delayed reaction to the policy (caused by the nature in which the policy was released) has died down, people are still talking about it, one way or another, even now.
For example, Robert G. Joseph, the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, gave a speech about the policy Thursday at an event in Colorado Springs. Joseph didn’t cover any new ground in his speech, and much of its content is identical or nearly so to the speech he gave on the topic last month at an event organized by the Marshall Institute in Washington. (See coverage of that speech here and here.) The new speech does go into more details about weaponization and arms control, primarily to back up the administration’s conclusion that there is no “arms race in space”, and therefore no need for treaties to ban space weapons.
Speaking of the Marshall Institute, this conservative think tank released a critique of the policy this week. (The document is dated December 2006 but an email announcing its release was distributed just this week.) While pleased that the administration recognizes the importance of space in national policy, the author(s) (not identified by name in the document) are disappointed with both how the document was released and the strength (or lack thereof) of its language. (This is illustrated with subheadings like “An Inauspicious Launch” and “Weasel Words”.) In several cases the document contrasts the language of the 2006 policy with the much stronger (and, in the institute’s eyes, better) language in Ronald Reagan’s 1982 policy.
The Marshall Institute closes by providing five steps the current administration (and its successor) can redeem itself and build upon the plan, ranging from a proactive outreach plan to promote the policy to making steps towards the formation of a “US Space Corps” that would combine current military space activities with those of the intelligence community. While those are all fine and dandy ideas, I think it’s unrealistic to see the administration put much effort into any of them in its final two years in office. For example, the document argues that “If the current Administration truly considers space to be a national priority, then the President should make public remarks explaining how America will defend its vital interests in space.” Right now, I’m guessing the President is preoccupied on more important matters than space policy.
Those who are opposed to the policy because they think it’s too strong, rather than too weak, haven’t been silent, either. There’s an essay in that noted space journal, the Newtown (Conn.) Bee. The commentary, written by Leonor Tomero of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, claims that “the United States is reversing its longstanding leadership role in working to keep offensive weapons out of space”. It’s pretty standard stuff: if the US develops space weapons, then other countries will do so, and the US has more to lose because it relies more on space assets than other countries. (That argument, of course, assumes that other countries are sincere about opposing space weapons.)
Also, the web site of The American Prospect published an essay late last week about the new space policy, seeing it as another sign of the Bush Administration’s desire to weaponize space. As an example, the essay noted that the US cast the only vote in opposition to a UN General Assembly resolution on preventing an arms race in space. The article mentions that this is “the second year in a row the administration opposed PAROS [Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space] language.” However, the US in the past was routinely expressed its displeasure with similar UN resolutions, either by voting against them or abstaining; one example (of many) is this vote in 1998, when the US and three other nations abstained from a similar resolution.
The American Prospect essay notes that Congressman (and once and perhaps future presidential candidate) Dennis Kucinich plans to reintroduce in the 110th Congress legislation to ban space weapons. Kucinich, of course, has tried several times with such legislation, such as the Space Preservation Act of 2005, Space Preservation Act of 2003, Space Preservation Act of 2002, and Space Preservation Act of 2001. Kucinich hasn’t gotten much traction on his legislation (although the 2005 version did have 35 cosponsors) and, as the Prospect essay notes, “Despite a Democratically controlled legislature, however, Kucinich could face opposition from members of his own party.” One wonders, though, whether Kucinich will be emboldened enough to go back to language of the 2001 version of the bill, which would prohibit, among other things, “chemical, biological, environmental, climate, or tectonic weapons” and “radiation, electromagnetic, psychotronic, sonic, laser, or other energies” designed for “information war, mood management, or mind control”.
By Jeff Foust on 2007 January 11 at 12:54 pm ET NASA looks to be getting about a half billion dollars less than what it anticipated for FY2007, depending on how Congress completes the year-long “joint funding resolution” that will replace the uncompleted appropriations bills left by the previous Congress. Aerospace Daily reports that Griffin, in an interview yesterday, said that the agency will seek to cut the lowest-priority programs it can find so that it can preserve funding for key exploration programs:
“I will do everything I can to keep Orion and Ares I on schedule,” he [Griffin] says. “That will be right behind keeping shuttle and station on track, and then after that we’ll fill up the bucket with our other priorities.”
So what could fall under the budget knife? “The ideal candidate is a fairly new, lower priority effort where not a lot of money has already been invested, and by stopping it now you can react and not have to spend future money that you know you’re not going to get,” Griffin told Aerospace Daily. There are already rumors that follow-on robotic lunar missions to Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter are in danger of cancellation. Could COTS be in danger? Future Mars and other science missions? One problem with that approach is that new programs don’t offer a lot of immediate cost savings, since they’re just starting to ramp up.
Griffin also spoke this morning at a Space Transportation Association breakfast. I wasn’t able to attend, but according to Space News [subscription required] Griffin said that Ares 1 remains the top procurement priority for NASA in 2007. Griffin also said that NASA is not looking at alternatives to the Ares 1, despite rumors to the contrary.
By Jeff Foust on 2007 January 10 at 7:56 pm ET The University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center released the latest in its series of studies on public support for government spending today. (The full report is available here.) The report, which comes out every two years, is based on opinion polling where people are asked whether current spending for a wide array of government programs is too little, too much, or about right. (Respondents apparently aren’t gauged on the accuracy of their knowledge of current spending, and previous studies have suggested that a significant fraction of the public overestimates the fraction of the federal budget spent on NASA, for example.) Each program is scored by taking the percentage value who answered “too little” and subtracting from it the percentage value who answered “too much”. (For example, if 60% answered “too little” and 40% “too much”, the program would get a score of +20.) The higher the score, the (presumed) higher priority among the public for government funding of it.
The bad news: “space exploration” did very poorly, with a score in the 2006 study of -22.7: 14.7% of respondents answered “too little” and 37.4% answered “too much”. Space exploration finishes 21st out of 22 programs in the survey, with only foreign aid doing worse, with a score -53.8. Education and health top the list, with scores of +68.7 and +66.4, respectively.
The good news: public opinion of space funding has continued to improve. The 1993 version of the survey gave space a score of -44.5, the lowest since the mid-1970s. Since then, space’s score has held steady or improved. The -22.7 in this survey is the highest since a -21.6 in 1989; a score of -16.8 in 1988 is the only other higher score. Space has traditionally ranked near the bottom of the survey (but never in last place; foreign aid has ranked last in every survey dating back to 1973). “Supporting scientific research”, a category added only in 2002, got a score of +31.5 (43.6% too little, 12.1% too much), good enough for 12th place.
By Jeff Foust on 2007 January 10 at 7:18 am ET Congressman Nick Lampson didn’t win a seat on the House Appropriations Committee, as he may have desired, but has won a consolation prize by being named to the House Science and Technology Committee. Subcommittee assignments have not been announced (nor the full list of members of the whole committee, for that matter) but most likely he will be on the space and aeronautics subcommittee. “I am most proud to represent NASA’s flagship, the Johnson Space Center, and am committed to continuing to provide valuable support and resources for our nation’s space program,” Lampson said in a statement. One wonders what people who work at—or represent in Congress—other NASA field centers think about having JSC called “NASA’s flagship”.
By Jeff Foust on 2007 January 5 at 7:09 am ET As part of a rules package passed by the House yesterday, the House Science Committee has been renamed the Science and Technology Committee. Committee chairman Bart Gordon announced the change, as well as a redesigned web site (note the new URL) that looks essentially the same as the site for the committee’s Democratic Caucus in the previous Congress (artifacts of which can be seen in some of the site’s boilerplate, particularly on the title and footer of the press release page.) Among the committee’s priorities, Gordon said, will be “maximizing the effectiveness of the nation’s civil and commercial space and aeronautics programs”. Subcommittee assignments for the Science and Technology Committee have not been announced yet, and will be made in the next few weeks, along with a “housekeeping” markup session to reapprove noncontroversial legislation that the committee approved in the last Congress but failed to make it completely through the House and Senate.
By Jeff Foust on 2007 January 5 at 7:00 am ET On Thursday, the first day of the 110th Congress, the heads of the House and Senate appropriations committees, Rep. David Obey and Sen. Robert Byrd, announced that they were reconciling their subcommittee structures, which had been out of whack the last two years (in part because of a reorganization in the House led by then-majority leader Tom DeLay that was started, at least in part, to keep NASA from having to compete with the VA and HUD for funding). Each committee will now have 12 subcommittees, with NASA falling under the Commerce, Justice, and Science subcommittee.
The change on subcommittee structure, as well as the shift in control of Congress, has resulted in some new subcommittee assignments for some members. The full list of assignments hasn’t been published: the House Appropriations Committee web site, which was revamped yesterday, only states that the committee “will adopt a new subcommittee structure” this month. (The Senate Appropriations Committee web site, as of Friday morning, still had the Republicans in charge.) The Federal Times article linked to above notes that, as expected, Sen. Barbara Mikulski will chair the Commerce, Justice, and Science subcommittee; no chairman for the House’s version of the subcommittee was announced.
One shift that could hurt NASA, or at least MSFC: Rep. Bud Cramer (D-AL) has given up his post on the former Science, State, Justice, and Commerce appropriations subcommittee, which had NASA oversight, to take a spot on the Defense subcommittee. Cramer told the AP that “the defense subcommittee, which directs military spending and acquisitions, was well worth the tradeoff.” As Willie Sutton would have said, that’s where the money is.
By Jeff Foust on 2007 January 3 at 7:18 am ET One of the hallmarks of British space policy for years has been its opposition to human spaceflight, preferring to devote its funding, including its contributions to ESA programs, to robotic Earth and space sciences missions. However, The Times of London reports that a major shift in policy may be in the works. Malcolm Wicks, the new science minister, told the newspaper that the time has come to rethink the government’s stance on human spaceflight, saying that automatic opposition to such efforts is no longer warranted:
I think sometimes our understandable reluctance to fund British men and women going into space has come across wrongly as us being a bit cool about space. I think we should be hot and enthusiastic.
It’s going to be this millennium’s great adventure. I’m not changing our position on this now, but I think it would be foolish to be dogmatic about these things.
That’s hardly an unqualified endorsement of human spaceflight, but given the UK’s previous policy it at least opens the door to a bigger change down the road.
Wicks met with Michael Griffin during a trip to London by the NASA administrator a month ago and opened the door to UK participation in the Vision for Space Exploration, although at the time that interest appeared to be focused on robotic missions, including the use of small satellites, where UK-based Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd is a world leader. The Times said that Wicks “has not ruled out including British astronauts as part of any deal” with NASA. The UK could also conceivably redirect some of the financial support it is providing to ESA’s Aurora exploration program to parts of the effort that involve human spaceflight.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 December 28 at 6:15 am ET Yes, he actually has one, but not necessarily as president. Prior to being selected to replace Spiro Agnew as vice president, Ford had a long career in the House and played a role in the formation of NASA in 1958, as he recalled in an April 1975 speech at the presentation of the Goddard Memorial Trophy to the astronauts who flew on the three Skylab missions:
I can recall very vividly when the first vehicle was put in space, not by us but by one of our competitors. And I can recall very vividly the relatively small part that I played thereafter as a member of the select committee, Congressman Teague, in putting together the new organization, which we now know as NASA.
(The reference to Congressman Teague above is a nod to Olin “Tiger” Teague, chairman of the then-named House Science and Technology Committee.) As a Florida Today article reports, Ford also had a reputation as a staunch supporter of the space agency within Congress. Astronaut Vance Brand made note of it in brief comments at an August 1975 presentation of the NASA Distinguished Service Medal to him and other participants in the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project: “Mr. President, throughout your years in Congress–your leadership there, your great support of man’s exploration of space…”
Once in the White House, though, it was a different story, largely because of his brief time in office and the other priorities he faced. He did oversee ASTP and the Viking landings on Mars, both projects that had started prior to becoming president. He also continued to support the space shuttle program despite some suggestions that, given the nation’s economic problem, it should be shelved. One minor, but very public, order he made, collectSPACE notes, is to have NASA rename the first shuttle orbiter from Constitution to Enterprise, after an outpouring of fan mail requesting the renaming.
On the shuttle program itself, Ford said the following at a public forum in Evansville, Indiana in April 1976:
I recommended in January of 1975 and again in January of 1976 the full goal on the space shuttle. In 1975 there were a number of applicants because of our economic situation that said we ought to cancel the space shuttle. I said no, it was roughly a third finished at that time, I think it would be unwise, uneconomic to cancel the space shuttle, so I recommended the funding necessary to keep the program going.
I did the same for the next fiscal year, and I am glad to report, I think the first vehicle is going to be made available for public display sometime late in August or early September.
The interesting part of that statement is that it came in response to a question about whether he supported the idea “to develop space stations in which solar panels could be set up and, in turn, supply this Nation with a continued supply of completely clean, free energy”, which the questioner said could be possible provided there was “massively expanded funding for the space shuttle” (which, at that time, still promised to drastically reduce space access costs). Ford missed the space solar power part of the question, talking about expanded funding for solar power research in general. Given that this was still a very novel idea at the time, this is almost certainly the first—and probably to date the only—time a president has been asked a question about space solar power.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 December 23 at 12:51 pm ET Saturday’s issue of The Tennessean features a number of editorials and op-eds on NASA’s plans to establish a lunar base, including an essay by Rep. Bart Gordon, incoming chairman of the House Science Committee. Gordon likens a lunar base to existing bases in Antarctica in terms of scientific and strategic importance:
Like our bases in Antarctica, a moon base appears to offer the promise of a research facility that could advance our knowledge, prepare the nation for future exploration and promote international cooperation in science and technology. And like our presence in Antarctica, it’s strategically important for us to be on the moon, given other nations will eventually be there, too.
However, Gordon said he and others in Congress need more details about the base from NASA, and signs from the administration that they’re serious about the project by requesting the appropriate amount of funding for the overall exploration program: “If a return to the moon is really the president’s priority, he needs to come up with the funds required, not simply take money from NASA’s other core missions and programs.”
An editorial in the same issue endorses, to some degree, the lunar base plans, although not on its scientific merits so much as for national spirit: “…inherent in the debate over the choices the United States makes over space exploration is the nice realization that in terms of discovery, America has a can-do spirit again.”
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