By Jeff Foust on 2006 November 8 at 7:01 am ET So what effect with the Democratic takeover of the House have on space issues? While there will be widespread changes in leadership, staffing, and the like, the effects on policy are less certain. Bart Gordon (D-TN) is in line to become the next House Science Committee chairman, and Mark Udall (D-CO) the chairman of the space and aeronautics subcommittee; since both have frequently worked, and worked well, with Republicans while in the minority it’s not clear that there would be any major shifts in focus with the Democrats in the majority. There might be more of an interest in supporting science and aeronautics research at NASA, but that had already been a concern of the committee.
On the appropriations side, Alan Mollohan (D-WV) is in line to take over the chairmanship of the science/state/justice/commerce subcommittee; he has fought for NASA funding in the past and would likely continue his advocacy here. CQPolitics.com reports that Nick Lampson is seeking a “plum spot” on the subcommittee; he’d also like a seat on the science committee. A bigger concern, though, is Rep. David Obey (D-WI), who is expected to become chairman of the overall appropriations committee. Obey has not been fond of NASA funding in the past; earlier this year he accused some of his fellow Congressmen of having “Mars fever” during a debate on an amendment to the NASA appropriations legislation that would have prevented the space agency from spending money on a manned Mars mission.
Another area of concern for space advocates is Rep. James Oberstar (D-MN), who will become the chairman of the House Transportation Committee. Oberstar was previously critical of the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act, concerned about the lack of safety provisions for passenger spaceflight in the legislation, and commissioned a recently-released GAO report on the subject. While that report didn’t appear to provide Oberstar with much ammunition to seek changes to the CSLAA, rumor has it that Oberstar is talking about revisiting the issue, this time with the added power that a committee chairmanship provides.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 November 8 at 6:34 am ET Democrat Nick Lampson is returning to the House after declaring victory in the race for the 22nd District in Texas late Tuesday night Lampson got 52% of the vote, beating out Republican write-in candidate Shelley Sekula-Gibbs, who got 42%. Sekula-Gibbs will also be going to Congress, albeit briefly: she won the special election the same day to serve out the remaining weeks of Tom DeLay’s term, an election where she was on the ballot, but not Lampson.
Elsewhere, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) won reelection, with a margin of victory larger than some earlier polls suggested. Nonetheless, he will lose his chairmanship of the appropriations subcommittee that handles NASA’s budget given that the Democrats have taken control of the House. In California, Reps. Dana Rohrabacher and Ken Calvert won reelection by wide margins.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 November 7 at 11:54 pm ET With projections showing that Democrats, as widely anticipated, taking control of the House, some highlights from races of interest:
Texas 22 remains too close to call, although Democrat Nick Lampson has a 10-point (9,000-vote) lead over Shelley Sekula-Gibbs with two-thirds of the precincts reporting.
In Florida, Rep. Dave Weldon (R) defeated Robert Bowman by 12 points with nearly all the votes counted, while Rep. Tom Feeney (R) defeated Clint Curtis by a similar margin.
Elsewhere, no surprises: Bart Gordon (D-TN) and Mark Udall (D-CO) won reelection by large margins.
In Indiana, Rep. Chris Chocola (R) lost to Democratic challenger Joe Donnelly. Rep. Chocola, regular readers might recall, made a cameo appearance here last year when he pushed through an amendment to the NASA appropriations bill that prohibits NASA from spending any money on an “artist-in-residence” program. I don’t know if any artists are dancing (singing? painting?) in the streets over this.
Finally, congratulations to Congressman-elect Space. Zach Space, that is.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 November 7 at 9:17 pm ET No big surprise here: most major media outlets have projected Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) and Bill Nelson (D-FL) as winners of their reelection campaigns. Both were anticipated to win by wide margins, and the results to date have met those expectations.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 November 7 at 6:54 am ET Oh, it’s a wonderful day today, isn’t it? Not just because we get to exercise our right to vote, but because it means an end to the flood of campaign ads where candidates and their allies accuse their opponents of being liars, phonies, spawn of Satan, or, worst of all, Washington insiders.
For space advocates, the most competitive race of interest is likely the race in the 22nd Congressional District in Texas (the seat formerly held by Tom DeLay), where Democrat Nick Lampson is facing a write-in campaign from Republican Shelley Sekula-Gibbs. A Houston Chronicle/Zogby poll last week suggested a tight race with a lot of people yet undecided: 36 percent for Lampson versus 28 percent for Sekula-Gibbs (35 percent for all write-in candidates). That’s closer than what it appeared to be earlier in the campaign, when Lampson had a larger lead (even though the 22nd District is majority-Republican, although not nearly as strongly Republican as some other districts in the region). How many of the people who say they’ll write-in Sekula-Gibbs in a poll will actually do so when they’re in the voting booth will be a key factor in the election’s outcome.
As previously noted here, Lampson has an extensive platform plank on NASA, supporting the exploration vision and calling for the elimination of a “space flight gap” between the end of the shuttle program and the introduction of Orion. Sekula-Gibbs also supports NASA in her platform, albeit in terse language: “Longstanding advocate for NASA/JSC—Supporting the President’s vision for space exploration.”
Elsewhere in the House, people like Ken Calvert, Bart Gordon, Dana Rohrabacher, and Mark Udall are all expected to easily win reelection; Sherwood Boehlert, chair of the House Science Committee, is retiring. Frank Wolf (R-VA), who chairs the appropriations subcommittee that has oversight of NASA, is facing a surprisingly strong challenge in his suburban Washington district from Democrat Judy Feder; one report calls the race a “toss up” although Wolf is still favored by many pundits to win, by a slim margin.
In the Senate, both the chair of the Commerce Committee’s space subcommittee, Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, and ranking Democrat Bill Nelson of Florida, are up for reelection today. Both, though, are expected to easily win: Nelson has a sizable lead over Katherine Harris while Hutchison leads Barbara Ann Radnofsky by 35 percentage points. Other Senate races will determine whether or not Hutchison and Nelson switch roles.
I’m Jeff Foust, and I approved this message.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 November 6 at 7:31 am ET As I noted in previous post, it can be difficult to find information on what positions (if any) Congressional candidates hold on space. I discovered this first-hand when I tried to learn what the candidates for the open US Senate seat here in Maryland thought about space policy in general, and NASA in particular. Maryland isn’t considered a “space state” in the same group as Texas and Florida, but the state is home to NASA Goddard, the Applied Physics Lab, the Space Telescope Science Institute, and a number of aerospace companies, including the corporate headquarters of Lockheed Martin. Maryland is also a partner in the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at Wallops Island, Virginia, just south of the Maryland border. So space should have a somewhat higher profile here than, say, Nebraska.
So, back in September, I sent queries to the campaign offices of Ben Cardin, a congressman who won the Democratic nomination, and lieutenant governor Michael Steele, the Republican nominee. (I also contacted the main Democratic challenger to Cardin, Kweisi Mfume, but I never heard back from him before he lost the primary to Cardin.) I was pleasantly surprised, less than two weeks later, to come home to find a phone message from a Cardin staffer. He said that Cardin agreed with Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski that NASA needs additional funding (Mikulski has been backing an effort to get an additional $1 billion for NASA in FY07), expressing concern that funding for other NASA programs could be threatened by the exploration program. Not too many details, but then there’s only so much you can squeeze into a 30-second voice mail message.
As for Steele, I never heard back from his campaign. I sent off a second, identical query through his campaign web site last week; as of this morning, still no response.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 November 6 at 7:09 am ET With election day almost upon us (and thank goodness for that), some people are still deciding who to vote for in their elections. And, for many readers of this blog (although only a small fraction of the overall electorate), Congressional candidates’ opinions about space policy are of interest. But where to find that information?
Last month the Coalition for Space Exploration quietly rolled out SpaceAdvocate.com. The site’s purpose is to “empower space exploration supporters to connect with others across the U.S. to advocate for the Vision for Space Exploration with our nations leaders.” The site is designed to provide information and support for those people who are, as the site’s name suggests, are space advocates. The centerpiece of the site is the Action Center, with information on voting records of officeholders, candidate profiles, and legislation.
The publicist who told me about the site last month said it was officially slated for debut “later this year”, although it was being shown to people at the coalition’s booth at the X Prize Cup over two weeks ago. The site, at least at the moment, is underwhelming. There’s little space-specific information about candidates and legislation: voting records show all legislation, rather that bills with some space content; candidate profiles appear taken directly from their web site, without highlighting their stances (if any) on NASA funding or related issues. Hopefully the Coalition will tweak the site before formally launching it to highlight space-specific information, but in the meantime it is better than nothing.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 November 3 at 6:43 am ET It’s rare for NASA to emerge as a campaign issue in Congressional campaigns. One of those rare events was this week, when the NASA budget made a cameo appearance in the Ohio Senate race between incumbent Republican Mike DeWine and Democrat Sherrod Brown. According to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, DeWine played up money he has funneled into the Glenn Research Center ($126 million over six years) while criticizing Brown for voting against the space station and NASA appropriations bills during his time in the House. (The article doesn’t give any specifics about Brown’s votes, nor does DeWine’s web site, but he is likely referring to efforts like this amendment to the FY2000 VA-HUD-Independent Agencies appropriations bill that would have transferred ISS funding to other programs both inside and outside the agency; Brown was one of 121 who voted for the amendment.)
Brown’s campaign was dismissive of DeWine’s arguments. “Senator DeWine claims so much credit for the work done at NASA Glenn that he’ll soon say he invented the space program,” a campaign spokesman told the Plain Dealer.
Neither candidate mentions NASA or other space issues much on their campaign web sites: DeWine makes only a passing reference, saying that he “led the charge for research and development programs at NASA Glenn Research Center”; Brown’s site makes no mention of NASA in its issues section.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 November 2 at 7:04 am ET One of the little provisions tucked away inside the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act of 2004 called on the Department of Transportation to commission a report on “the liability risk sharing regime in the United States for commercial space transportation”. Under the current system (which the same legislation extended through the end of 2009), commercial launch providers have to obtain insurance for what the government determines to be the “maximum probable loss” to third-parties in the event of an accident, after which the government would indemnify any additional damages up to $1.5 billion (in 1988 dollars), after which any losses beyond that would revert back to the launching party.
This indemnification provision has never been invoked, and many in the domestic commercial space transportation industry see it is vital to remain competitive in the global market. However, there are at least a few people in Congress opposed to the idea of government subsidizing or otherwise supporting the industry in any manner, hence the request for an analysis of alternatives to the current indemnification regime. That report has been completed and will soon be released; the results of the study were summarized in a COMSTAC meeting presentation last week by James Vedda of The Aerospace Corporation.
The short answer is that, yes, there is an alternative to government indemnification: it could be phased out by having launch providers contribute to a pool of coverage over the course of 15 years, with the government coverage dropping in response until the pool is fully funded at $1.5 billion (the government would, though, cover any damages beyond $1.5 billion.) While theoretically possible, such an alternative poses a number of challenges, including determining which companies would contribute how much to the pool, and the possibility that such required contributions would drive companies out of the market entirely.
The report did not make recommendations, as requested by Congress, which only wanted an analysis of alternatives, but it was clear that the industry, and even Vedda personally, have no desire to switch from the current system (which, again, hasn’t cost the government any money, since there have been no catastrophic accidents.) Where Congress goes from here is uncertain, but since the current regime remains in force through the end of 2009, it’s unlikely there will be much, if any, action on this in the near-term.
If all this sounds vaguely familiar, you’re right: back in 2000 Congress requested a similar report on the indemnification regime, which was completed in 2002. (The report is available online, although be cautioned that this is a PDF file over 14 MB in size.) That report found that the current indemnification regime has been effective and than no single alternative appeared more favorable. The saying about what it means to ask the same question over and over, expecting a different answer, comes to mind.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 November 1 at 6:35 am ET The Congressional reaction to NASA’s decision yesterday to reinstate a shuttle servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope has been overwhelmingly positive:
- House Science Committee chairman Sherwood Boehlert and space subcommittee chairman Ken Calvert jointly praised the decision. “The Shuttle missions to the Hubble have been by far the most important contributions the Shuttle program has made to science, and the whole nation looks forward to another successful mission that will enable the Hubble to continue to expand the horizons of human discovery and understanding of the universe,” said Boehlert.
- Mark Udall, the ranking Democrat on the space subcommittee (and in line to chair the subcommittee if the Democrats take control of the House in next week’s elections) also supports the decision. “For three years, I have worked with my colleagues and the scientific community to save Hubble, and last year I succeeded in getting language into the NASA Authorization Act which included a human servicing mission for Hubble. Today’s decision is a victory for science, for exploration, and for Colorado.” (The Colorado reference is for Ball Aerospace, which built the two instruments that will be installed on the servicing mission, and the Univ. of Colorado, which designed one of the instruments.)
- Not surprisingly, Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland is happy. “This is a great day for Maryland, for America, but most of all, for science. Hubble is a national asset and a national priority.” Mikulski adds that she “consistently fought to provide funding in the federal budget for a Hubble servicing mission… President Bush’s budget did not include funding for a Hubble servicing mission.”
- Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, chair of the space subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee, also commends NASA for the Hubble decision. “Today’s decision is a testament to the great progress made by the Space Shuttle Return-to-Flight program which has demonstrated the shuttle can conduct the Hubble servicing flight safely.”
Of course, it’s hard to imagine anyone in Congress speaking out against saving Hubble. That’d be like saying you didn’t like puppies. But then, even the love of puppies has become a campaign issue…
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