By Jeff Foust on 2006 April 19 at 6:24 am ET In Monday’s issue of The Space Review, Taylor Dinerman contrasted the commercial spaceport situations in New Mexico and California: while New Mexico was investing over $100 million into a new spaceport, attracting Virgin Galactic and the X Prize Cup, California has done little to promote Mojave Airport, an FAA-licensed spaceport that was the site of the SpaceShipOne flights in 2004. As Alan Boyle reports in MSNBC’s Cosmic Log weblog, things aren’t getting better for Mojave: an effort to secure an $11-million loan for a passenger terminal there failed to win enough votes in a California State Senate transportation committee hearing to advance to the full Senate. (See earlier coverage of this legislation.)
The measure, SB 1671, apparently suffered from a report filed by Jennifer Gress, a consultant to the Senate’s Transportation and Housing committee. One concern expressed in the report is whether the East Kern Airport District, which operates Mojave Airport, “has fully explored alternatives to a state General Fund-backed loan.” The report also expressed concern that the funds would be used to support Virgin Galactic, “a company whose owner has a net worth in the billions.” (“Millions for a billionaire”, as the report pithily summarizes.) Stu Witt, Mojave Airport manager, told MSNBC that the bill isn’t dead yet: another committee vote is scheduled for next week.
Update 12:30 pm Wednesday: It turns out the reports of the bill’s near demise were exaggerated: Alan Boyle, in an updated version of his blog entry, reports that the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Roy Ashburn, rounded up four additional votes for the bill a few hours after the hearing, giving it one more than the seven needed to be reported out of committee. So there’s still some hope yet for funding for Mojave.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 April 18 at 12:48 pm ET An article in this week’s issue of Flight International magazine has a provocative headline: “US claims right to set new space tourism regulations globally after treaty examination”. As the opening paragraph summarizes:
US persons or organisations operating suborbital test flights outside the USA will still have to obtain a Federal Aviation Administration permit, according to newly proposed rules. This is because, under existing international treaties, governments are responsible for launches made by their citizens or legal entities beyond their own borders.
Another case of imperialist American hegemony? Hardly. While the Flight International article treats this as something of a revelation, this appears to be simply a continuation of existing policy that requires US operators to obtain launch licenses from the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST) even if those launches take place outside the US. For example, the HyShot 1 and 2 suborbital launches of an Australian hypersonics experiment required AST licenses even though they took place from Woomera, Australia, because they used a commercially-supplied US rocket, the Terrier-Orion. In addition, the multinational Sea Launch venture, led by a US company, Boeing, performs launches under an AST license even through they use a Ukrainian rocket with a Russian upper stage, launching from a Norwegian-built floating launch platform in international waters. So it’s only natural, under the existing regulatory regime, to extend that policy to cover suborbital space tourism flights.
[Disclosure: my employer performs work for AST, but is not involved in the licensing or rulemaking process. A slightly longer version of this post appears on the Personal Spaceflight blog.]
By Jeff Foust on 2006 April 18 at 7:08 am ET Today’s Orlando Sentinel features an op-ed on China’s space program by Vincent Sabathier and G. Ryan Faith of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. In the essay, they argue that the US would be better served by cooperating with China’s space program, rather than competing with it. The ISS, they believe, could provide an opening for such cooperation, for practical as well as political purposes:
Much as Russian participation in the international space station was preceded by the famous Apollo-Soyuz mission during the Cold War, Chinese participation in the international space station can be a precursor for cooperation in decades to come. More practically, after the space shuttle is retired in 2010 the United States will not have a manned-spaceflight capability for as long as four years. Under current plans, during this gap there will be only one way to get to and from the international space station — via the Russian Soyuz. Having another backup such as the Chinese Shenzhou will be critical to the safety of the international-space-station crew. By the time the shuttle is retired, China will certainly have the ability to provide this backup to the Soyuz until the new U.S. vehicle is ready for flight.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 April 17 at 1:06 pm ET There are a few, well, cranky people out there who don’t seem to care much for spending money on NASA. From today’s Durant (Okla.) Daily Democrat (“Gateway to Lake Texoma”), comes an essay by Harold Harmon, who seems to be having a bad day. Or week. Or longer:
We’ve also decided that 2003 UB313 is just barely larger than Pluto. Xena, as it has been named, could surpass Pluto as the 10th planet.
Could you have slept tonight without knowing that?
Like the trial [of Zacarias Moussaoui], these space-exploration things cost money. Like the trial, American citizens will receive little of value at the end of the road.
Ouch. Meanwhile, an anonymous person writing in the “You Said It” column of the Hagerstown (Md.) Herald-Mail isn’t too happy about the LCROSS lunar impact mission announced last week:
I see that gas just took another hop. Why do we have to depend on foreign oil anyhow? Is it because of the environmental people in the U.S.? I don’t see what they have done as far as clean air. People are still dying at a young age. And the government is going to let NASA put a thing up in space and burn a hole into the moon? What’s the matter with our government?
What is the matter, indeed.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 April 17 at 6:53 am ET An editorial in the Cleveland Plain Dealer is concerned about the future of NASA’s Glenn Research Center. Interestingly, the focus of its ire is less on NASA headquarters or Congress than on Glenn’s leadership itself, which the paper’s editors believe are not doing enough to promote the center:
It’s hard to escape the feeling that Glenn is rapidly heading toward a last chance to make itself relevant to NASA, which really does have too many installations with too little funding and too little work to do. If it won’t fight for its own survival by shaking things up internally and presenting NASA a center too good to let die, the best congressional delegation in the world won’t be able to prop it up forever.
Greater Clevelanders are rooting for NASA Glenn. But will it get into the game?
By Jeff Foust on 2006 April 17 at 6:45 am ET Who knew that Canada was “a world leader in the militarisation of space”? That’s the claim made by an article on the web side of the New Socialist Group, a Canadian group for those people “who wish to replace global capitalism with a genuinely democratic socialism.” And how is Canada helping to militarize space? Through Radarsat, a radar mapping satellite whose imagery is used in part by military forces, including the US. Nevermind that Radarsat has a wide range of commercial and civil applications, or that the US has other radar reconnaissance satellites.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 April 17 at 6:35 am ET Wisconsin governor Jim Doyle signed legislation Friday that establishes the Wisconsin Aerospace Authority, the first step (maybe) towards the creation of a commercial spaceport in the state. However, as previously noted, the focus of the legislation is creating a vehicle for funneling federal dollars for the creation of a space science education center in Sheboygan. The facility will include “an IMAX theater, planetarium, interactive exhibits and potentially a zero-gravity simulator and NASA-affiliated museum,” according to the Sheboygan Press. (Zero-gravity simulator?) The article makes virtually no mention of an actual spaceport in Sheboygan or elsewhere in the state.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 April 14 at 7:06 am ET Most of the media attention regarding a House Appropriations Committee subcommittee hearing two weeks ago about the NASA budget focused instead on claims by members of the subcommittee that the US was engaged in, and perhaps losing, a new space race with China. The American Institute of Physics published its own summary of the hearing yesterday, one that focuses more on budget issues than foreign policy.
A major theme of the hearing, according to the AIP, was that cuts in science programs were unfortunate but justified because flying out the remaining shuttle missions and developing the CEV were more important. NASA administrator Michael Griffin said that the agency had “created an irrational exuberance” in the science community by leading them to believe that 5-7 percent annual growth could be continued indefinitely when the overall agency budget was increasing at only 2-3 percent. While some tweaks to the science budget are possible, he cautioned against larger shifts:
However, he cautioned the committee that NASA’s budget request “represents a careful balancing act,” and strongly urged them to resist the temptation to “rob Peter to pay Paul” by shifting funds from the CEV and human exploration to NASA science missions. He argued that the gap in U.S. human access to space between the shuttle’s retirement and operation of the CEV would be “far more damaging to the space program overall” than some loss of space and Earth science expertise. Human space flight capabilities, he said, are part of what “define a nation as a superpower.”
That seemed to have triggered the discussion about the space capabilities of other nations, and China in particular. One interesting quote not widely reported elsewhere, though, came from Rep. Jose Serrano (D-NY), who seemed concerned that any kind of space race with China might be “a dangerous road to take because it may not lead us where we want to go.”
By Jeff Foust on 2006 April 14 at 6:50 am ET The Center for Strategic and International Studies issued a brief analysis of the NASA budget, focusing on the changes in out-year projections for the agency’s budget through the end of the decade. Those projections are significantly lower in the FY07 budget proposal than the one two years ago, which was released immediately after the unveiling of the Vision for Space Exploration. These reductions, as well as increases in shuttle cost projections since two years ago, have put a crunch much of the agency. Worse, the $2.3 billion added to the shuttle program in 2007-2010 in the FY07 projection versus FY06 won’t be enough:
But even with this $2.3 billion increase in shuttle funding, there will still be a shortfall of as much as $3.7 billion, if the ISS is to be completed. Perhaps, the reduction of the number of shuttle flights from 19 to 16 based on the elimination of two contingency logistical flights, the cancellation of the HST servicing mission, the retirement of the shuttle Atlantis in 2008, and the extension of shuttle flights through 2010 will be enough to provide sufficient resources to complete the ISS.
I’m not sure what the CSIS means by the “cancellation of the HST servicing mission”; to the best of my knowledge NASA has made no decision yet whether to reinstate the mission, although the agency has appeared to be leaning heavily in favor of flying that mission.
The report concludes with a warning about cutting science programs, and its effects on international cooperation in carrying out the VSE: cut too much science—which has benefited from strong international cooperation—then potential partners might be driven away; cut too little, and there won’t be enough money available to carry out the Vision. “As we have seen previously with ESA,” the report warns, “if the scientific community becomes a sufficiently large constituency, then it becomes very difficult indeed to focus any effort on the human component of space exploration.”
By Jeff Foust on 2006 April 13 at 7:19 am ET The Vision for Space Exploration often, and erroneously, gets distilled down to a “manned mission to Mars” in the media. In the political arena, it’s often also used in passing as a rhetorical tool against the administration—something that is not taken seriously. A couple of recent examples:
- Foreign Policy magazine, in a blog posting, reviews some potential candidates to succeed Donald Rumsfeld as defense secretary, including LSU president and former NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe. In an argument why O’Keefe (who, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, is quite happy at LSU) shouldn’t be defense secretary, James Forsyth argues: “Does the Pentagon need another boss who is in love with management speak? Also, would invite cracks that victory in Iraq is as likely as his putative manned mission to the [sic] Mars.”
- Margaret Carlson, a columnist for Bloomberg News, brings the topic up at an end of a column about the president’s low poll ratings. “He [Bush] might try resurrecting his lofty goal of a manned mission to Mars from his halcyon days in 2004. He’d be welcome there. Or, perhaps a more modest program to bring the commander-in-chief back down to earth. That’s the voyage that would pay dividends, and it’s about all NASA can still afford.”
Two years in, and the Vision still has (or has once again) credibility problems in some elements of the media.
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