By Jeff Foust on 2006 October 31 at 6:31 am ET I’ve received a couple of email queries about this subject recently, so it’s worth a brief post. While the House included some money for Centennial Challenges in its FY2007 appropriations bill (the exact amount I don’t have at my fingertips at the moment), the Senate has not included any funding for the program in its version the bill (which has been approved by the full appropriations committee but not yet by the full Senate.) As the report accompanying the Senate version notes:
The Committee does not provide any funding in fiscal year 2007 for the Centennial Challenges program. Funding provided in previous fiscal years for this program is sufficient for NASA to run a prize based competition, as well as to verify that NASA will see tangential benefits from running such a program. Providing additional funds to a program based on prizes only creates a pot of unused funds while other aspects of NASA’s mission are being cut or delayed due to a lack of funds.
That doesn’t mean that the program won’t get any money in 2007, only that the Senate and House versions will have to be reconciled at some point (whether that’s in the lame-duck session after next week’s election or at the beginning of the next Congress remains to be seen.) It also wouldn’t doom the program, only prevent it from announcing additional prizes.
That said, Centennial Challenges could use a success story to demonstrate the benefits of the program. It has benefited from the media attention accorded to the Space Elevator Games and Lunar Lander Challenge, but it would have helped a lot more if one of the competitors earlier this month had actually won a prize. There aren’t any additional competitions for the program until next spring—the astronaut glove and regolith excavation competitions—too late for the current budget cycle. In any case, finding a winner is largely outside the control of NASA.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 October 30 at 12:48 pm ET Robert Pearlman, the Houston-based editor of the space memorabilia site collectSPACE, reports that he got “a recorded campaign call with a familiar voice” this morning: Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin stumping for Nick Lampson, the Democrat and former Congressman running for the House seat formerly held by Tom DeLay. “Return Nick to Congress and he will pick up where he left off with eight valuable years of seniority promoting the Johnson Space Center,” Aldrin said, referring to the seniority that Lampson would be able to use for committee assignments and the like should he be elected (seniority that would be even more powerful if the Democrats take control of the House, as many pundits are predicting.)
It’s not the first time Aldrin has made a campaign appearance, either in person or recorded. Back in 2004 he appeared at a Bush reelection campaign rally near Cape Canaveral, voicing his support for the Vision for Space Exploration (even if Bush himself didn’t bring it up in his speech.)
Checking Lampson’s campaign web site, I didn’t see anything about Aldrin campaigning for him. Lampson’s site, though, does include a policy statement about NASA. He doesn’t say anything terribly surprising: he argues for continued support for manned spaceflight and increased funding for NASA, and also calls for eliminating “a space flight gap” between the end of the shuttle program and the introduction of Orion: words that echo those of another Texan, albeit a Republican, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 October 30 at 7:34 am ET The national space policy quietly introduced by the Bush Administration early this month generated—eventually—a strong reaction in many editorials, which criticized the White House for appearing to endorse the weaponization of space as well as making it national policy to deny space to any future adversaries. An example of such an editorial is one that appeared in the pages of the Berkshire Eagle in western Massachusetts about a week ago. In this week’s issue of The Space Review, Taylor Dinerman critiques (or, perhaps more accurately, rips apart) that particular editorial, seeing it as reflective of many other similar editorials. The debate about the policy has died down for now (and maybe for good), but this is an interesting analysis of some of the arguments used in opposition of the policy.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 October 27 at 7:34 am ET The national space policy released earlier this month marked the culmination of years of work on various space policy issues. Over the last few years the Bush Administration has released statements on various space-related topics, including remote sensing, exploration, transportation, and navigation. That should cover just about everything, right?
Not necessarily. In his presentation at the Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee meeting at FAA headquarters on Wednesday, David Cavossa of the Satellite Industry Association said that there’s a need for a national policy that covers commercial satellite communications. Such a policy, he said, would handle issues of particular interest to the satellite communications industry, including export control reform and spectrum policy. The former is of interest to the domestic space industry in general (and the effects of the current policy on the industry and national security is being studied right now by the Defense Science Board, he said), while spectrum issues come up frequently for satellite communications companies, particularly as they vie with terrestrial competitors for desired frequency bands.
Regardless of whether such a policy is needed or not, it’s hard to see something like it happening any time soon. How much attention will the current administration be willing to give to the topic in its final two years (particularly given the work they put into other space policy issues over the last several years)? This might have to wait until the next administration takes office, and even then it will probably take them some time before they’re able to focus on this.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 October 26 at 7:31 am ET The Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report yesterday titled “Commercial Space Launches: FAA Needs Continued Planning and Monitoring to Oversee the Safety of the Emerging Space Tourism Industry”. The report is a review of how the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST) oversees the safety of commercial launches, and how the office is prepared to handle any significant increase in such activity should suborbital space tourism take off in the next few years. Overall, the GAO approves of AST’s current work and its plans for the future. The report does raise a few issues, including the office’s ability to hire additional qualified staff for safety oversight should launch activities increase, as well as the concerns about the dual promotional/regulatory nature of the office.
There’s a bit of a background to this report. The report was requested by Rep. James Oberstar (D-MN), the ranking member of the House Transportation Committee. Oberstar was one of the members of the House who opposed HR 5382 (the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act) two years ago, railing against what he saw as a “tombstone mentality” enshrined in the bill, which prevents AST from regulating crew and passenger before 2012 unless there’s been an accident or serious incident before then. Despite the bill’s passage at the end of the 108th Congress, Oberstar continued his opposition, first in a February 2005 hearing of the House Transportation Committee’s aviation subcommittee and, at around the same time, introducing HR 656, which would rewrite the CSLAA to include additional safety provisions. The legislation was referring to the House Science Committee, which never took action on it; it doesn’t seem as thought this GAO report would do much to revive the bill.
[Disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer: Yes, my employer does work for FAA/AST. No, we’re not involved with licensing. Yes, Futron reports were referenced in the GAO report. No, I was not involved in the GAO study in any way, although I had heard about it months ago.]
By Jeff Foust on 2006 October 25 at 5:58 am ET Last Thursday in Las Cruces, New Mexico the X Prize Foundation held an invitation-only “executive summit” to discuss issues associated with the emerging space tourism industry. The luncheon speaker was a very high-profile individual and a bit of an unusual choice: former vice president Al Gore. The entire event was supposed to be off the record and closed to the media, but the Gore speech (as well as one earlier in the day by NASA administrator Mike Griffin) was on the record, and the organizers allowed a few reporters to attend and report on those talks. (I wasn’t one of them; while Gore talked at lunch I was checking out the X Prize Cup preparations at the Las Cruces airport.)
Most of the limited media attention about Gore’s speech has focused on his comments regarding the national space policy released by the Bush Administration earlier this month, which didn’t get much attention in the broader media until a Washington Post article on it a week ago. Gore was critical of the policy, drawing some parallels to Iraq. Popular Science has a video excerpt of his talk, where he warns that the policy “has the potential, down the road, to create the kind of fuzzy thinking and chaos in our efforts to exploit the space resource as the fuzzy thinking and chaos the Iraq policy has created in Iraq. It is a very serious mistake, in my opinion.” Leonard David, of SPACE.com, also touches on Gore’s space policy comments in a blog post.
(There is some question of whether Gore’s comments were, in fact, supposed to be on the record: Alan Boyle of MSNBC, also in attendance, asked Gore if his comments were on the record and was told no; he also declined to make an officially-on-the-record statement. That distinction loses some of its broader significance with the broader coverage, including PopSci’s video excerpts. Gore does note in the video that he may make a separate, more official pronouncement about the policy at a later date.)
One thing most of the coverage missed, though, was that Gore talked about issues other than the new space policy, including some more positive comments about space commercialization. Several people I talked with in the days following Gore’s speech said that he discussed the importance of encouraging increased commercial use of space. As Charles Miller of CSI said in an email message to me yesterday, a key part of the speech was “Gore’s statement that space right now is in the exact same position that the Internet was in the 1970s… and that space needs to be commercialized in order to achieve its full potential… just like the Internet only achieved its full potential by being commercialized.” (It appears that Alan Boyle got a similar email.) Miller said that this is “a critically important statement”, particularly given the chances that Democrats will take over one or both houses of Congress next month.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 October 25 at 5:27 am ET [Sorry about the long gap between posts: I was tied up by a trip to New Mexico and other work.]
The attitude in the headline is essentially that expressed by Rep. Bud Cramer (D-AL) during a visit to Boeing’s launch vehicle manufacturing facility in Decatur, which will become the United Launch Alliance’s key facility once the ULA merger is finalized. A key excerpt from a Decatur Daily article about the visit:
“We’ve got other countries around the world who are not as careful as we are about competition,” said Cramer, including Russia and China. “We’ve got to have an active launch business, and there’s not enough on the commercial side to support” two separate manufacturers.
He said national security demands that we have a robust satellite system, which means we need to protect our launch industry.
“I want the rest of the country aware of how important the launch industry is to national security,” Cramer said.
The article adds that the FTC’s initial approval of the ULA is in the middle of a 30-day public comment period, after which the agency will issue its final ruling; no comments had been filed as of late last week, although such comments typically come at the end of the period. “We’re almost there,” Cramer said, “but we’d better be careful.” Careful, one must ask, of what?
By Jeff Foust on 2006 October 18 at 5:34 am ET It only took a week and a half, but the new national space policy quietly released on the eve of Columbus Day weekend has finally received some heavyweight mainstream media attention, in the form of a front-page article in today’s Washington Post. The article is a fairly basic review of the policy, with a not-unexpected emphasis of provisions that support, or at least do not prohibit, potential weaponization in space. (The article does quote a “a senior administration official who was not authorized to speak on the record” as saying that “this policy is not about developing or deploying weapons in space. Period.”)
Other media outlets are following in the Post’s wake, including Reuters, which has an article based on the Post article and nothing else.
Meanwhile, UPI had an article yesterday about one aspect of the policy: a potential conflict between the Secretary of Defense and the Director of National Intelligence. That conclusion comes from Steven Aftergood of FAS after a review of the policy statement that he believes “creates overlapping and possibly conflicting responsibilities” for the two officials.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 October 17 at 6:40 am ET A proposal by European officials to allow military use of the Galileo satellite navigation system has could cause new friction with the US and cost it one international partner. According to an article from the British newspaper The Independent (via the Belfast Telegraph), European transport commissioner Jacques Barrot has suggested that military users of Galileo could help defray some of the costs of the system while giving European forces a navigation system independent of GPS. British officials were opposed to such a shift.
Potential military uses of Galileo aren’t likely to win support in India, which is already weighing whether it should continue its participation in the project. The Times of India reports that Indian officials failed to reach an agreement with EU counterparts about India’s role in Galileo because of “fears that sharing of sensitive data may not be adequately firewalled from individuals and other nations participating in the enterprise.” India has already hedged its bets on Galileo by agreeing to cooperate with Russian on its Glonass satellite navigation system, while announcing plans earlier this year to develop a regional satellite navigation system.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 October 16 at 7:07 am ET It’s not uncommon in the US for NASA officials to defend, either to members of Congress or the general public, the sums of money that are spent on the space program. However, it’s a bit surprising to see a Chinese official in the same situation. According to a Reuters report, China National Space Administration head Sun Laiyan “defended the billions of dollars China — a developing country where millions still struggle to clothe and feed themselves — earmarks for space exploration.” Sun said that “We think that China’s space program can solve many economic and social problems that we are now facing.” (Sound familiar?) Sun said that China’s space budget was only a tenth of NASA’s budget, but interestingly, that amount, $1.7 billion, is about three times more than what CNSA vice administrator Luo Ge said was China’s annual space budget back in April in a speech in Washington.
Sun’s comments came with the release of a white paper titled “China’s Space Activities in 2006″. The document primarily contains descriptions of what China has done in space in recent years, as well as general plans for the future. One of the goals mentioned in the report is to “strengthen legislation work”, specifically, “o formulate laws, regulations and space industrial policies for guiding and regulating space activities, increase the level of administration by law, and create a legislative environment favorable for the development of space activities.” Another goal, according to the white paper is for the government to “increase input to the space industry” while also encouraging “the establishment of a diverse, multi-channel space funding system”, which suggests that the Chinese government is looking for outside sources of money, such as through commercial sales, to support its overall space efforts.
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