By Jeff Foust on 2006 December 11 at 6:55 am ET In his blog at wired.com, noted sci-fi “cyperpunk” author Bruce Sterling reprints an email alert he apparently received earlier this week from The Planetary Society. “NASA Science Situation More Dire Than We Thought!” reads the subject line of the message, which begins with this statement: “The disastrous anti-science, anti-exploration agenda being foisted on NASA and Space Science has become more dangerous than we ever imagined possible.” More dire? More dangerous? Is this a reaction to NASA’s lunar base plans? (The message is dated December 5, one day after the announcement.) Reading through the message, though, that new development is this: “Now, in yet another slap at the value and future of Space Science and Exploration, NASA head Mike Griffin unceremoniously requested the resignations of two distinguished scientists from the NASA Advisory Council (NAC).” The problem is, though, that these resignations took place in August, not December. Oops. (The Planetary Society’s “Save Our Science” web site, last updated in late November, refers to the lame-duck Congress and the NASA budget, not the NAC resignations.)
So, did the Planetary Society send out the wrong message last week, or did Sterling get, um, well, cyber punk’d?
By Jeff Foust on 2006 December 11 at 6:39 am ET More than two months after the Bush Administration released the new national space policy, an administration official will give an on-the-record speech about the policy. Robert Joseph, Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security at the State Department, will speak about the policy at a Marshall Institute event Wednesday afternoon. Joseph “will discuss the importance of space for U.S. national security as well as our economic prosperity and why the National Space Policy should enjoy international support,” according to the event invitation. It’s not the first time an administration official has discussed the policy, but previous discussions have been off the record.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 December 9 at 10:04 am ET Remember when NASA administrator Mike Griffin got into a bit of hot water when he told USA Today that the shuttle program had not put NASA on “the right path”? Griffin, apparently chastened to some degree by the reaction, clarified his remarks in a memo a short time later. However, in today’s New York Times Griffin makes it clear that that he is still critical, if not of the shuttle and ISS programs themselves, but of the decisions that led to them. Griffin: “Viewed from the point of history several decades out… the period where the United States retreated from the Moon and quite deliberately focused only on low Earth orbit will be seen, to me, a mistake.”
Griffin, perhaps forestalling another round of internal criticism, said that the problem was not with the agency itself. “The space shuttle is a response to a policy mistake – it isn’t the mistake. The mistake was tearing up all the infrastructure that we built for Apollo and saying, ‘let’s just focus on low Earth orbit.'”
Could another President of Congress make the same mistake? Griffin doesn’t seem to be worried about it, even as Democrats take control of Congress: “Unless you believe that a future U.S. president or a future U.S. Congress actually wants to cancel the U.S. spaceflight program, then I actually do not perceive a big threat from changing administrations and changing Congresses.” (One could see, though, a future administration preserving a manned spaceflight program but twisting it in another direction, as Nixon did in 1972.)
The only Congressional reaction to Griffin’s remarks came from Congressman Bart Gordon, the incoming chairman of the House Science Committee, through his spokesperson: “I would rather focus on where we go from here. I support human exploration beyond low Earth orbit. However, it’s got to be paid for.” More interesting would have been the reaction from another Democrat and a strong supporter of the shuttle, like Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 December 9 at 9:05 am ET Both houses of Congress passed a continuing budget resolution late last night to keep much of the federal budget, including NASA, funded through February 15. (A Reuters article in particular noted NASA as one of the many agencies included in the stopgap measure; a NASA spokesman said that even without the bill’s passage “The poor astronauts are not going to be stranded in space.”) With Congress adjourning in the early morning hours of Saturday, it will be up to the next Congress to complete work on the 2007 budget, presumably shortly after the 110th Congress begins work in January.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 December 8 at 7:17 am ET As expected, House Democrats have named Congressman Bart Gordon (D-TN) chairman of the House Science Committee for the 100th Congress, starting in January. Gordon had been the ranking Democrat on the committee the last three years and was all but assumed to be chairman when the Democrats won a majority of the House in the November election. “Under my leadership, the Science Committee will be the committee of ‘good ideas,'” he said in a statement. He also emphasized bipartisan cooperation on issues “from education and research to energy and security.”
On the Republican side, Ralph Hall (R-TX) will be the ranking member of the committee in the next Congress. Hall said that he looks forward “to advancing a vision for science that promotes space exploration”, among other issues. He added that “Chairman Bart Gordon and I have a good working relationship.” Which makes sense, of course, because up until about three years ago Hall was a Democrat, and was the ranking member of the committee at the time he changed party affiliations (out of concerns linked to Texas redistricting). Gordon replaced Hall then as the ranking committee Democrat.
Hall beat out former committee chairman James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), who sought to return to a leadership position on the committee after chairing the Judiciary Committee the last six years. Sensenbrenner told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that he lost to Hall in part because Texas is bigger than Wisconsin, and also because of Sensenbrenner’s “willful, aggressive” style. “I’m certain there was baggage,” he told the paper. “The only way you’re successful as a committee chairman around here is by being forceful.”
By Jeff Foust on 2006 December 7 at 7:39 am ET I have to admit that I was a little surprised at the level of media attention NASA’s lunar exploration announcement Monday received, since it had been clear since the beginning of the Vision that part of the overall plan included establishing a base of some kind on the Moon. That coverage included front-page articles by the Washington Post and New York Times, the latter of which attracted the attention of none other than Stephen Colbert. (“That’s right, a giant project with no blueprint, no budget parameters, and no timetable. That means there’s only one person who can make this thing work: Donald Rumsfeld.”)
The announcement attracted its fair share of editorial reactions, most of which fell into two predictable camps: many approved it, saying there was “abundant justification” for the venture, while others worried about the cost of the project and suggested the money could be better spent elsewhere. Yeah, you could see that coming.
A few editorials do stand out: yesterday USA Today ran a pro-and-con pair of editorials on the proposal. The “opposing view” piece, by NASA administrator Mike Griffin, called the overall exploration effort “a down payment on our future” and drew parallels to Lewis & Clark and Seward’s purchase of Alaska. “Our great-great-grandparents accepted the challenge of their frontier. Will today’s generation do less? And if so, why? To save 15 cents per day?” The “pro” piece, by the newspaper’s editors, admits that NASA’s vision is “compelling” but argues that technology and cost issues argue for an alternative approach: “That approach might use off-the-shelf rockets, such as those that launch commercial satellites and military and scientific payloads, to save money. It might also take a look at the low-budget operations of space pioneers such as Burt Rutan to see whether they might be tweaked to advance beyond suborbital space tourism.” As the editorial also notes, “The human inhabitation of space in any significant numbers won’t happen until someone can tackle the costs of getting astronauts the first hundred miles up.”
An editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal also proposes an alternative that is music to the ears of many commercial space advocates. The editorial requires a subscription, but here’s the key paragraph:
Say NASA believes it can build a permanent moonbase for $100 billion in today’s dollars. Why not take half of that and offer it as a bounty to the first private company to build the station and man it. A prize in the neighborhood of $50 billion is bound to attract plenty of interest — and that number is probably much less than a realistic guess of what it would cost NASA in the end. The taxpayer would save 50% of NASA’s cost to build the base, and the result would be much more likely to be attractive to the private interests that NASA wants to draw to the project.
So, should NASA focus on space transportation versus exploration, even though previous efforts by the agency to reduce the price-per-pound of reaching orbit have failed? Is $50 billion enough to lure private interests to develop a lunar base—and if the $50 billion alone isn’t enough to the venture to be profitable, could a base eke out revenue elsewhere? What about alternative mechanisms, like a 25-year tax holiday for the first company to establish a lunar base, as has been proposed in the past by the likes of former Congressman Robert Walker and others?
By Jeff Foust on 2006 December 7 at 7:09 am ET Last month I noted here that the Coalition for Space Exploration had created a web site to help support the political activities of space supporters. It turns out the site had not yet been officially opened for business (although it was being shown to the public at the X Prize Cup in New Mexico in October), but as of yesterday SpaceAdvocate.com was officially launched at the Space Exploration Conference in Houston.
I did notice a few changes to the site from the last time a checked a month ago. There’s a legislative update page that lists any “action alerts” and pending legislation. Since we’re at the tail end of the current Congress, there’s not much in the way of either right now. Oddly, one of the bills they do list in the “current legislation” section is HR 3250, the NASA Authorization Act of 2005. That bill was superseded by other legislation that was eventually enacted, so there’s no reason to list it here.
There are also a couple of puzzling things here that may just be kinks that have to be worked out of the system. On many pages, like the legislative update page mentioned above, there’s a logo with the words “Capwiz XCdemo (won’t send messages)”. I’m assuming that’s a vestige of a test phase of the site that should now be removed; it’s also on the user registration page (where you can sign up for email updates), but when I signed up this morning I did receive a confirmation email in response. The legislation update page also has a link to a “Federal Action Alert” that is a very generic form used for composing messages to members of Congress. How generic? The pulldown menu for “Issue Area” doesn’t include any space topics, or even simply “space” itself.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 December 6 at 8:00 am ET It’s been almost exactly two months since the Bush Administration released the new national space policy, and people are still commenting on it. Yesterday the Council on Foreign Relations published a short synopsis on the idea of American “space supremacy” many see at the core of the new policy. The piece is primarily a review of a number of essays and position papers written on the policy from various points of view (including a couple of articles from The Space Review). One point where this analysis stumbles, though, is that it appears to link an incident earlier this year where a Chinese groundbased laser “dazzled” (or simply “illuminated”, depending on who you talked to) an American military satellite to the release of the policy itself: “The Pentagon has avoided specifics about the report, but soon afterward the Bush administration released an unclassified version of its new U.S. National Space Policy, which goes far beyond previous policies in asserting America’s right to respond forcefully to such threats.” Reading this, one might conclude that the new policy and its language is a reaction to that incident, when in fact the policy had been in the works for a long, long time.
Meanwhile, over at The Huffington Post, blogger RJ Esker is taking the credit—or the blame—for trumpeting the perceived militaristic slant of the policy in advance of the mainstream media. He takes issue with a James Oberg piece on MSNBC.com that claims that the media overhyped that slant: he is “sticking with my original interpretation on this one. The Administration has taken a dangerously aggressive stance regarding the militarization of space.”
By Jeff Foust on 2006 December 4 at 7:35 am ET Later today NASA will hold a press conference to announce its “global exploration strategy and lunar architecture”. What exactly this announcement will entail isn’t known, although the Houston Chronicle reported in today’s edition that NASA has selected a half-dozen justifications for its lunar exploration program, ranging from science to improving international relations. While these reasons “differ significantly” from the Cold War rationale behind NASA’s initial missions to the Moon four decades ago, some of the reasons mentioned in the article sound similar to the justifications previously made for Space Station Freedom and the ISS.
While NASA is taking this step forward in outlining the rationale for the Vision today, there are still many issues with its implementation. In an article this morning, Florida Today reviews concerns about funding shortfalls for the program raised recently by the GAO. Scott Horowitz, NASA’s associate administrator for exploration, said some of those concerns have already been addressed through design changes for the Orion spacecraft and the Ares launch vehicles, although the GAO’s Allen Li said he believes that NASA needs “to complete key design reviews before continuing to commit large amounts of taxpayer money to the project” in an effort to avoid more expensive surprises down the road.
There’s also the concern about what a new administration might do to the program two years down the line. That was mentioned in a talk at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory on Friday afternoon by Robert Farquhar of APL and Joseph Veverka of Cornell, who are working on a study of an alternative exploration architecture for the International Academy of Astronautics. As I noted in an article in this week’s issue of The Space Review, that alternative would bypass the Moon in favor of missions to the Sun-Earth L2 point, near Earth asteroids, and beyond. Farquhar, who sees a human return to the moon as a “cul-de-sac”, said he’s briefed people at NASA Headquarters about the study and they’re interested, since they want to have some alternatives to the current plan in place for whomever is in the Oval Office and the NASA administrator’s office in 2009, should the current exploration architecture fall out of favor.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 December 2 at 8:42 am ET According to an AP report, Congressman James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), a former chairman of the House Science Committee, is seeking to become the ranking minority member of the committee. Sensenbrenner had served the last six years as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and because of internal term limits would have had to give up the position regardless of how the November election turned out. With Democrats taking control of Congress, Sensenbrenner had sought to stay on the committee as its ranking minority member, but was told by House Republican leadership that the same term limit provisions that would have ended his chairmanship even if Republicans had retained control also applied to the ranking member position.
Prior to chairing the Judiciary Committee, Sensenbrenner spent four years as chair of the House Science Committee, where he often cast a critical eye on the International Space Station project and Russia’s role in it. Sensenbrenner’s spokesman said that the congressman would indeed focus on NASA, as well as climate change and general oversight issues should he win the Science Committee post. He’ll have competition, though: two current committee members, Ralph Hall of Texas and Vern Ehlers of Michigan, are also interested in the post. The GOP is expected to make a recommendation next week.
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