By Jeff Foust on 2006 June 28 at 5:56 am ET I noted last week that members of Congress had been quiet, at lease in public, about NASA’s decision to proceed with the STS-121 launch despite no-go recommendations from two key officials. Now, after Monday’s surprise reassignment of astronaut and JSC engineering director Charlie Camarda (which now appears to be associated with “management style” rather than a specific shuttle safety issue), some members of Congress are now raising the issue with the space agency, according to this morning’s Houston Chronicle:
Houston Democrat Sheila Jackson Lee, who sits on the House space subcommittee, sent a letter to Griffin on Tuesday requesting a meeting to discuss safety concerns related to Saturday’s planned flight.
The meeting is scheduled for this morning before Griffin travels to Cape Canaveral.
“It is my understanding that the decision to launch the Discovery was made notwithstanding the serious concerns of NASA engineers over potentially fatal design flaws of the external fuel tanks,” she wrote. “Space innovation need not be accompanied by unnecessary sacrifice or loss, nor unnecessary delay.”
The Chronicle article also reports that the staff of the House Science Committee “are talking with agency officials about the Camarda case”. However, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) gave a vote of confidence in NASA and administrator Mike Griffin, commending him for creating an atmosphere where “t is considered acceptable to, raise concerns and questions.”
By Jeff Foust on 2006 June 27 at 7:44 pm ET The Orlando Sentinel and Florida Today reported late Tuesday that Vice President Dick Cheney plans to attend the STS-121 launch scheduled for Saturday. He’s not making a special trip to the launch: assuming the launch goes off as scheduled Saturday afternoon, he’ll head up to Daytona for the Pepsi 400 race there Saturday night. (One imagines that he’ll also make some appearances for Republican Congressional candidates while he’s down there, but the Vice President’s office hasn’t released details about his trip yet.) That suggests that Cheney won’t stick around if the launch is delayed a day or more.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 June 27 at 7:33 pm ET Congressman Ken Calvert (R-CA), chairman of the space subcommittee of the House Science Committee, will appear on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” call-in show Wednesday morning at 7:30 to 8 am. Given that C-SPAN is billing him as “Space Subcmte Chairman”, expect some questions about the upcoming shuttle mission and other NASA issues—or ask your own, or course.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 June 26 at 12:52 pm ET An article by Technology Review magazine covers what is familiar ground for most readers here: the cutbacks in NASA’s science budget and the resulting cancellations and delays in various programs. However, in its zeal to cover all the programs—big and small, high priority and low—affected by the cuts, the article goes a little too far:
NASA budget cuts over the last few months have also struck spending for astrobiology programs, meant to learn about life in the rest of the universe; a new program called Beyond Einstein, aimed at learning about dark energy; and the cancellation or cutback in other research satellites, including one called NPOESS, designed to gather more information about the Earth and its climate.
[Emphasis added above.] While the planned NASA science budget cutbacks have hurt a number of programs, they have nothing to do with the long-running, multi-billion-dollar snafus that have caused the NPOESS program (for which NASA shares responsibility with the Defense Department and NOAA) to be delayed and descoped. Let’s not get carried away with the budgetary hand-wringing.
[Disclosure: I worked for Technology Review for about a year several years ago (back in the last millennium, actually).]
By Jeff Foust on 2006 June 23 at 6:50 am ET A NewScientist.com summary of Wednesday’s House Armed Services Committee strategic forces subcommittee hearing on “space and U.S. national power” plays up the worst-case scenario of an attack on US civil and military satellites:
If the US does not protect its Earth-orbiting satellites, the equivalent of a car bomb in space could take the economy back to the 1950s, according to witnesses testifying in Washington DC earlier this week.
The article goes on to discuss the effects of detonating a nuclear weapon in low Earth orbit, a move that could devastate the satellites there. However, as the witnesses at the hearing pointed out, most major communications satellites are not in LEO but in GEO, which is much harder to reach (the exceptions are the ORBCOMM, Iridium, and Globalstar satellite constellations), while navigation satellites are in MEO, which is also difficult to reach. It still makes for a very bad day for satellites (and astronauts) in LEO, but it doesn’t necessarily “take the economy back to the 1950s”. That makes the doomsday scenario hyped by NewScientist.com less of a worry that more conventional attacks on specific satellites, through anti-satellite weapons, terrestrial jamming, or attacks on ground stations.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 June 22 at 6:41 am ET NASA’s decision to proceed with the July 1 launch of the shuttle Discovery on STS-121, despite the objections of two key officials, has attracted a good deal of media attention. However, in looking through the various news reports, I haven’t seen any comments from members of Congress, although they have not been shy in the past about sharing any concerns they have about shuttle safety. Is this current debate too small of an issue to warrant (public) attention on Capitol Hill, or is something else going on?
By Jeff Foust on 2006 June 22 at 6:31 am ET The full House Appropriations Committee approved a budget bill Tuesday that includes $16.7 billion for NASA. Florida Today reports that the portion of the bill dealing with NASA was unchanged from what the subcommittee passed last week. The full House will take up the budget bill at some point, while the Senate has yet to start work on its version of FY07 appropriations bill.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 June 21 at 5:53 am ET And no, it doesn’t appear to be an approaching train. Officials with Lockheed Martin and Boeing confirmed earlier this week that they have received a draft version of the FTC “consent decree” that would permit the formation of the United Launch Alliance, with conditions. The details of the consent decree haven’t been revealed, but according to the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) are expected to include protections for competing satellite manufacturers, like Northrop Grumman, as well as “traditional antitrust safeguards aimed at promoting competition from other rocket providers”, most notably SpaceX. This development came after Michael Wynne, secretary of the Air Force, told MarketWatch that the FTC was taking too long to make a decision about the ULA.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 June 21 at 5:44 am ET Sorry about the short advance notice about this (complicated by being out of town earlier this week): the Strategic Forces Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee is holding a hearing this morning (10 am, Rayburn 2212) on “space and U.S. national power.” Scheduled witnesses include:
- Lieutenant General C. Robert “Bob” Kehler, USAF, Deputy Commander, U.S. Strategic Command
- Mr. Ed Morris, Director, Office of Space Commercialization, U.S. Department of Commerce
- Mr. David Cavossa, Executive Director, Satellite Industries Association (SIA)
- Dr. Michael O’Hanlon, Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy Studies, The Brookings Institute
The audio of the hearing will be webcast.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 June 19 at 10:21 am ET An article in this week’s Space News (freely available online) provides some additional details on the changes a subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee made to the proposed FY07 NASA budget. The subcommittee approved $16.709 billion for NASA, down from the $16.792 billion in the President’s original request. As previously noted, the subcommittee transferred $100 million to aeronautics and $75 million to science: $50 million for research grants, $15 million to begin work on a Europa orbiter mission, and $10 million for the Terrestrial Planet Finder, which NASA had planned to delay. Much of that money is coming from the $150 million cut from technology development efforts within the exploration program; some money was also cut from space station operations and administrative programs. The full House Appropriations Committee hasn’t announced a meeting to take up the budget bill, while the Senate isn’t expected to take up its version of the appropriations legislation until late July or early September, after the August recess.
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