By Jeff Foust on 2006 August 15 at 6:58 am ET The annual AIAA/USU Conference on Small Satellites is taking place this week at Utah State University. I’m not able to attend this year’s conference, but the Salt Lake City newspaper Deseret News has an article about NASA administrator Mike Griffin’s keynote address at the conference Monday afternoon. And while there were apparently some generic questions about NASA budget pressures, the development of the CEV and the like, the biggest interest among attendees was with NASA’s support—or lack thereof—of student smallsat projects and related experiments. Not that they got much sympathy from Griffin:
…a USU student asked about NASA funding for student projects.
“I doubt if there is any,” Griffin said. “It simply is not among the top priorities that I have at NASA to fund student experiments. As students you need to learn science and engineering and those disciplines, and then you need to get out among companies or laboratories and continue to learn your trade.”
That’s how to grow in the space business, he said. “It is nice when we can afford to do student experiments in a context of a university. But right now, as strapped for cash as we are, I’m simply not sure that’s a luxury we can afford.”
When asked about providing flight opportunities for university-built smallsats on NASA missions (a question that caused the room to erupt in applause, according to the article) Griffin had a similar response:
Griffin responded that he has a lot of problems ahead of that one.
“NASA cannot be responsible for everything that needs being done in the space community,” he said.
“NASA is not the galactic overlord of space and shouldn’t be.”
If educators want to negotiate with firms to get students’ experiments into space, he added, “I wish you well. But it is not my job to be the broker for those launches.”
The access to space issue is probably a bigger problem than generic funding for smallsat projects: there are a number of universities that are building or have built one-kilogram “CubeSats” as student projects, but the only affordable launch option is to fly them as secondary payloads on Russian Dnepr boosters (the Dnepr that crashed last month was carrying over a dozen CubeSats.) Those launch opportunities are not frequent, though (and may be more infrequent in the future, depending on how long the Dnepr is grounded), and have some degree of export control overhead to deal with.
A side meeting at the Utah State conference this week is one titled “Session on Re-Establishing Access to Space for Student Payloads”, which has an accompanying white paper calling on the federal government in general (NASA and DOD) to provide more flight opportunities and other support for student smallsat projects. However, Griffin is right when he says that he’s got more pressing problems to worry about than support for student smallsats projects, which is why some external impetus—like Congressional pressure—will likely be needed for any significant change to take place.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 August 14 at 6:45 am ET A disagreement involving risk associated with investments in two space companies has apparently caused the state of New Mexico and an investment firm to part ways, the Albuquerque Journal reported Sunday. (The site requires a subscription, although a Salon-like ad-supported day pass is available; otherwise, the text of the article is available here.) According to the report, Fort Washington Investment Advisors had a contract to manage state investment into companies and venture funds. When the state proposed to invest $20 million into t/Space and another $20 million in Virgin Galactic, the company balked, wanting to limit its liability for any recommendations associated with the investments because it believed they were “more like economic development projects than private equity transactions.” The state objected: “We want that advice to have some weight behind it. Some teeth,” a spokesman for the State Investment Council said. The state now wants to remove the company from its fund-managing role, and, as you might imagine, all this is heading to court. What affect this might have on the t/Space investment (which was approved, but is contingent on the company winning a COTS award) or Virgin Galactic (an investment yet to be taken up by the council) is unclear.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 August 14 at 6:32 am ET Robert Bigelow is best known in space circles as the founder of Bigelow Aerospace, developer of inflatable space habitats, but in his home state of Nevada he’s also a significant political donor. An AP article reports that Bigelow has contributed about one quarter of the money raised this year by Bob Beers, a state senator seeking the Republican nomination for governor. Bigelow is “by far the biggest single source” of funding for the Beers campaign. This is not the first foray into political fundraising for Bigelow, according to the AP: “Bigelow helped to finance a media blitz against major tax increases eventually passed by the 2003 Legislature.”
By Jeff Foust on 2006 August 14 at 6:27 am ET Rep. Jo Ann Davis (R-VA) is recovering very well from breast cancer, but she’s less interested in talking about that in a Hampton Roads Daily Press article than about one of her pet peeves: the neglect of NASA’s aeronautics programs at the hands of the Vision for Space Exploration. “I’m not against space,” she said in a talk at the National Institute of Aerospace. “just don’t want to see us go to Mars at the expense of everything else.” Although it’s not necessarily a message even members of the audience fully accept:
“In 1994, the (NASA) budget for aeronautics research was $1.54 billion,” she says. It’s half that now, “and the Europeans are in fast-forward. … We’ve got an administration that continues to cut aeronautics while everyone is screaming for an increase. I don’t understand it.”
She links aeronautics with the military, then tells the students, “I hope that you all can come up and lobby Congress one day because you have a project that’s good for our national defense.”
Davis punctuates her talk with “if I stepped on anyone’s toes” because she knows that many of these students have their eyes in the stars.
“I’m space,” says Kristina Zaleski later. She invited Davis to speak on this day. Another student nearby nods. Space.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 August 11 at 6:23 am ET The online edition of Space News (registration required) reports that four members of the US Senate have requested that written a letter to NASA administrator Mike Griffin asking him not to cut ISS research funding. The letter, by Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), Bill Nelson (D-FL), Richard Shelby (R-AL), and Barbara Mikulski (D-MD)—the chair and ranking members of the Senate Commerce Committee’s space subcommittee and the Senate Appropriations Committee’s commerce, justice, and science subcommittee—are responding to reports from late last month that NASA is considering cutting back or even suspending ISS science programs for a year or more to save money. According to the article, the senators state in the letter that “want to make it clear that any option to further reduce, or curtail altogether, research aboard the ISS would be an unacceptable option and entirely inconsistent with policy guidance enacted by the Congress.” A NASA spokesman said Thursday that they could not comment on the letter, dated Tuesday, because NASA had not officially received it yet. Apparently the mail in downtown Washington is really slow these days…
By Jeff Foust on 2006 August 11 at 6:12 am ET At the end of an interview in this week’s print edition of Space News, David Cavossa of the Satellite Industry Association brought up some new legislation regarding everyone’s favorite topic, export control:
Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) has introduced a bill to make the export control act even tougher (H.R. 4572) so we’re following that. Unfortunately, it looks like things in export control are getting worse before they get better.
I looked up HR 4572, which revises and extends the existing Export Administration Act. The bill was introduced by Congressman Hyde back in December 2005, although there has been no action on the legislation since then, suggesting that it will be difficult to get is passed before the current Congress ends. Not being an export control law expert myself, it’s difficult to pick up all the issues of concern with the legislation, although one thing that stands out is that it increases the penalties for violations compared to existing law. Is there anything else in the legislation that is cause for concern for the space industry?
By Jeff Foust on 2006 August 10 at 7:18 am ET As you’re no doubt aware, James Van Allen passed away yesterday at the age of 91. Van Allen was an exemplary scientist, best known for the discovery of the radiation belts surrounding the Earth that bear his name. That discovery was made using instruments he flew on Explorer 1, the first US spacecraft to orbit the Earth; he also participated on a number of other NASA missions, from Pioneer 10 to Galileo.
While Van Allen was a staunch advocate of robotic missions, that support did not extend to NASA’s human spaceflight program. Indeed, he argued that human spaceflight served little, if any, purpose, and believed that the resources could be better spent elsewhere. An example of his thinking is an essay published two years ago by Issues in Science and Technology, where he asked the provocative question that served as the title of his piece: “Is Human Spaceflight Obsolete?” An excerpt:
In a dispassionate comparison of the relative values of human and robotic spaceflight, the only surviving motivation for continuing human spaceflight is the ideology of adventure. But only a tiny number of Earth’s six billion inhabitants are direct participants. For the rest of us, the adventure is vicarious and akin to that of watching a science fiction movie. At the end of the day, I ask myself whether the huge national commitment of technical talent to human spaceflight and the ever-present potential for the loss of precious human life are really justifiable.
It’s interesting to compare that with recent comments by another scientist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, published yesterday by the New York Times. A reader asked Tyson how he could support human spaceflight when robotic missions are “a more cost effective way to enhance our understanding of the Universe.” Tyson’s response:
Yes, I agree. And if scientific discovery were the only driver for space exploration, then we would simply never send people. But science is not, and has never been, the only driver. To think otherwise in delusional. Other factors include national pride (the recent Chinese Astronaut and the Japanese Astronauts that have visited the space station are as popular as rock stars in their home countries), national security (the military quest for the “high ground” is eternal), and the socio-political value of large NASA contracts that spread across congressional districts. Another driver, which philosophically floats above the rest, is the human urge to explore, with or without a science agenda. Note that hardly any of the great explorers of the past were scientists. And so we should recognize that the urge to visit a planet, simply because we have not done so before, expresses a desire, if not a need, that transcends time and culture.
While van Allen rejected the notion of adventure as a rationale for human spaceflight, Tyson, in essence, embraces it, calling it an urge “that transcends time and culture.”
A more direct rebuttal to Van Allen’s 2004 essay was written by Sam Dinkin for The Space Review, where he looks past the issue of adventure and sees human spaceflight as “inevitable” for the future of the species. And as for Van Allen’s criticism of the problems of the shuttle, station, and other programs, Dinkin notes that these problems only tell us “that government management of manned spaceflight has been a bust since Apollo.”
By Jeff Foust on 2006 August 10 at 6:56 am ET In the latest in an irregular series of “space polcasts”, I’ve created an MP3 of Mike Griffin’s speech and Q&A session at last week’s Mars Society conference in Washington. (The file is approx. 6.45 MB and runs a little over 56 minutes, including a brief introduction from Robert Zubrin.)
By Jeff Foust on 2006 August 9 at 7:40 am ET Friday morning’s sessions of the Mars Society conference featured a couple of talks on the relative importance of science versus exploration. First up was Scott Horowitz, NASA associate administrator for exploration:
There’s a basic paradigm shift here from where we were a few years ago. We were “science driven, exploration enabling”; that’s the phrase we always heard. We are now exploration driven and science enabling, And a lot of people don’t like that. That’s just the way it is. That’s what we’re doing. We’re going to lead with exploration, but we realize the importance and value of science, and we’re going to enable science at every opportunity. So our challenge is to include the scientific community and not be exploration-versus-science.
Horowitz’s speech was followed by one from Scott Hubbard, the former director of NASA Ames, who took a somewhat different tack on the topic. Calling astrobiology the “scientific part of exploration”, he noted:
I really hope that what Doc Horowitz said is the way we go, which is to integrate science and exploration, because I’m very concerned that we are seeing today the bifurcation that began with the arguments long ago between von Braun and van Allen, where the human exploration contingent says we can do it only with people, and the robotic contingent says we only need robots. I think the answer is the two together, and I think it needs to be driven, in many ways, by the scientific underpinnings. I realize that there is a distinction between “science driven and exploration enabled” and “exploration driven and science enabled”. I think that one must be careful that we don’t end up with two armed camps battling over this area. I think we need to have a scientific part even if the impetus is to explore and see what’s there.
This is an important issue to keep in mind, since many scientists, particularly those threatened with mission and research funding cuts in the FY07 NASA budget, pin the blame squarely on the Vision for Space Exploration, even if other factors (shuttle, station, etc.) also contributed to the funding squeeze.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 August 9 at 7:19 am ET A couple of quick notes about the debate on the deletion of the reference to planet Earth in NASA’s mission statement: in a comment in earlier post on the topic, Oliver Morton provides an excerpt of an editorial in last week’s issue of Nature that is critical of the move. (It is also perhaps the first time, and hopefully the last time, that a Nature editorial makes use of scenes from Superman III.) Also last week the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Susan Collins (R-ME) and Joe Lieberman (D-CT), sent a letter to NASA expressing their “deep concern about the recent elimination of the phrase ‘to understand and protect our home planet’ from NASA’s mission statement”. The letter concludes that the senators are willing to work with NASA “to ensure NASA’s continued contributions to the understanding and protection of our planet”, although one suspects that Sen. Lieberman in particular is a little preoccupied at the moment…
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