By Jeff Foust on 2006 April 6 at 5:57 am ET The Senate Appropriations Committee approved an FY06 supplemental appropriations bill this week for hurricane relief and military operations. Included in the bill is $35 million for repairs to NASA’s Stennis Space Center, according to an article yesterday in Aerospace Daily. The funding is notable since the Bush Administration had not requested any funding for Stennis in the bill, yet both the Senate and the House (which previously included $30 million) added the money. Given that NASA previously estimated hurricane damages to both Stennis and Michoud at $760 million, and that only a fraction of that funding was included in previous appropriations, this is still only a drop in the bucket.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 April 5 at 6:26 am ET The Space Foundation issued a white paper Tuesday on the health of the nation’s space industrial base, with a particular focus on “sub-prime contractors”, those companies that perform work for the big aerospace companies. While recent studies have shown that the aerospace industry in general is in good shape, the Space Foundation paper notes that the situation is different for these suppliers, which tend to perform less profitable work and suffer from stagnant markets and export control restrictions. As the report states, “…because the market and margins are so small, the skills so specialized and the barriers to entry high, the base of these suppliers is small and dwindling. If these subcontractors cannot adjust to the current supply chain or survive market shocks, there is a danger that many may disappear.”
The report has a number of policy recommendations for both the DOD and Congress. These include a comprehensive review of the space industrial base at the sub-prime level by the Air Force as well as a “management plan” for that base. (The report concludes that because this industrial base is critical to national security “it must be maintained regardless of free market dynamics.”) The report also recommends changes in the export control system to make it easier for US suppliers to sell their goods overseas, or, lacking such changes, efforts by the DOD to help companies get export control licenses.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 April 4 at 6:48 am ET DeLay’s resignation announcement came less than a week after he issued a press release and participated in a House Appropriations Committee subcommittee hearing, warning that the US was engaged in a “space race” with China. As DeLay put it in his press release, “The advanced state of the Chinese space program represents a 21st century Sputnik moment. The new space race has already begun, and our only choice is to ensure the full funding of our space program to win it.” He called for a “a special oversight hearing on NASA’s human space program relative to those of our foreign aerospace competitors.” (One wonders if this pending hearing is one of the reasons why DeLay is staying in Congress for the next couple of months.)
But just how advanced is the Chinese space program? At an event at a downtown Washington hotel yesterday organized by Center for Strategic and International Studies, Luo Ge, vice administrator of the China National Space Administration, provided a detailed overview of China’s space program. I won’t go into details here, but there are a few interesting notes:
- Luo painted a picture of a relatively balanced space program, with a focus on space applications (telecommunications, remote sensing, navigation, etc.). He talked far more about those satellite programs than on its Shenzhou manned space program.
- Because of “complicated” budgeting procedures, Luo said it was difficult to put an exact value on the size of the Chinese space budget, but he estimated it at around $500 million/year.
- Luo emphasized that China’s Chang’e lunar exploration program, which features an orbiter, lander, and sample return missions, are all unmanned. He made no discussion of future manned programs beyond the development of an Earth-orbiting “space lab” by around 2015.
- When asked why China was spending money on manned spaceflight and lunar exploration after previously saying that their space efforts were guided by practical applications, Luo said that these programs were considered technology and science missions, and that some other research, including biological and agricultural experiments, had been folded into the manned program.
- Asked about whether China would participate in the ISS, Luo said that China had “always been interested, but we don’t have a ticket yet.”
Reuters has an article about Luo’s comments; the meeting was attended by a number of other journalists, so there may be more coverage of the event to come as well.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 April 4 at 6:29 am ET You want a sure way to wake up in the morning, no caffeine required? Turn on the news and hear that Tom DeLay will resign from Congress by the end of May. The news first broke Monday night with interviews with Time and the Galveston Daily News; a formal announcement will be made today. DeLay said that his decision was motivated by concerns that the November race against Nick Lampson (and perhaps former Republican Steve Stockman) would focus on the DeLay and the controversies that swirled around him, and not on the issues themselves. As DeLay told Time, “Although I felt, I feel that I could have won the race, I just felt like I didn’t want to risk the seat and that I can do more on the outside of the House than I can on the inside right now.”
DeLay’s departure, of course, means that NASA is losing one of its staunchest, most powerful supporters in Congress. As NASA administrator Michael Griffin said a little over a week ago, “The space program has had no better friend in its entire existence than Tom Delay.” DeLay is timing his departure, though, to do a little additional work for NASA. Harris County Republican Party chairman Jared Woodfill told the Austin American-Statesman that DeLay was waiting to resign “since he has significant hearings on NASA and other topics coming up.” DeLay himself told Time that he hadn’t set an exact date for his departure since “I have some things to do, to finish. I’m working very hard on the President’s vision for NASA and that’s incredibly important for the nation, as well as this district.” It’s not clear what he can accomplish in the next two months; while DeLay sits on the appropriations subcommittee with oversight of NASA, the FY07 budget will still be very much a work-in-progress by the end of May.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 April 3 at 6:29 am ET In this week’s issue of The Space Review, Taylor Dinerman takes The American Spectator to task for lumping NASA’s exploration vision in the same category as large federal programs like farm subsidies and Medicare prescription drug plans. (The article that Dinerman refers, which apparently only refers to NASA in passing, to doesn’t appear to be on the magazine’s web site.) Dinerman sees NASA as a changed agency since the VSE was introduced over two years ago, noting it is now “far friendlier to entrepreneurs than ever before”. Dinerman makes the case that, rather than being more evidence of “Big Government”, NASA is actually a key element of conservative aims to support private enterprise and maintain American preeminence, something that makes some a little uncomfortable: “The case for NASA is a nationalistic one, and while our friends on the left would have us believe that this is a dirty word, some on the right dislike it, too.”
By Jeff Foust on 2006 April 3 at 6:21 am ET I wasn’t planning to say anything about Gregg Easterbrook’s essay in Slate last week that criticized NASA’s exploration initiative. That’s in part because Easterbrook didn’t say anything new (in a blog post over two years ago he echoed a theme in his Slate essay that there would be nothing for astronauts at a Moon base to do; one would have imagined that folks like Paul Spudis would have beaten him into submission on this by now.) The other reason is that Easterbrook is not a space expert, even though he may fancy himself one: he is perhaps best known as the author of the “Tuesday Morning Quarterback” column on the NFL and its cheerleaders. (Although in one column he did take up the key space policy issue of whether Miss America is a space alien.)
His column is noteworthy, though, because it’s part of a general theme of columns and op-eds that suggest that NASA should be spending more money on science and less on the exploration vision and the shuttle/station programs. Easterbrook is picky about his science: he would rather see money spent on the Terrestrial Planet Finder rather than the James Webb Space Telescope because the latter “is highly unlikely to discover anything that will matter to your life or mine,” rather than look for other Earthlike worlds as TPF is intended to do. (Nevermind that one of the JWST’s research goals is to study protoplanetary disks and search for exoplanets, or that JWST, for all its problems, will be a whole lot less complex than TPF.) Easterbrook’s vision of NASA is one that studies the Earth, looks for other Earths, performs research to make a “fundamental propulsion breakthrough”, and searches for and mitigates any threat posed by near Earth objects. Humans in space don’t appear to make the cut.
In Sunday’s Washington Post, Michael Benson makes a somewhat similar attack on NASA. He criticizes NASA because it recently “canceled plans” for a Europa mission “for the third time in less than a decade” even though there’s evidence that the moon, as well as Saturn’s moon Enceladus, has a subsurface ocean that could support life. (One can argue that NASA didn’t cancel plans for a Europa orbiter mission, since you can’t cancel what you didn’t start.) Benson also claims that NASA “plans to slash its science budget… by a total of as much as 25 percent over this year and next.” Actually, the overall science budget is pretty flat; it’s only a subset of science programs, like research and analysis funding, that are seeing the bigger cut.
While critical of the science cuts, Benson at least doesn’t blame it on the exploration program; indeed, he is supportive of manned space exploration. “In fairness to agency Administrator Michael Griffin, he has been put in the impossible position of being asked to accomplish all these ambitious goals simultaneously and without a substantial budget increase.” As he concludes, “Yes, let’s send human beings into deep space again. But let’s also follow the water, investigate Europa and see what we can discover about extraterrestrial life.”
By Jeff Foust on 2006 April 3 at 5:42 am ET In Texas, Barbara Ann Radnofsky is a Democratic candidate for the US Senate against Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison. (“A” candidate since Radnofsky must first win a primary runoff next Tuesday.) Interestingly, she tells the Houston Chronicle that she believes that she can win votes in the Houston area by pointing out a perceived lack of attention to space issues by Sen. Hutchison:
In her hometown, Radnofsky said she detects strong sympathy with her contention that Hutchison hasn’t done enough for NASA or to obtain full federal reimbursement for the local costs of helping hurricane refugees.
“She has been completely ineffective on NASA,” Radnofsky said, adding that on many issues Hutchison has been “clearly a rubber stamp” for Bush policy.
In an “issues chart” on Radnofsky’s web site, she puts the blame for NASA funding shortfalls squarely on Hutchison’s shoulders: “Hutchison has failed to obtain adequate funding for NASA.” (page 9) Much of that statement, though, revolves around the FY07 budget request, which the Senate has yet to take up, so it may be a little too early to declare failure here.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 April 2 at 8:10 pm ET For the last several months legislators in Wisconsin have been working on a bill that would create a Wisconsin Aerospace Authority, charged with the responsibility of overseeing a state spaceport, most likely in Sheboygan. (See earlier coverage.) That bill has passed both houses of the legislature and is awaiting the governor’s signature, according to an article in Sunday’s Sheboygan Press. There’s just one problem: officials in the city of Sheboygan, like Gary Dulmes of the Sheboygan Development Corp., have a very different idea of Spaceport Sheboygan, one that is simply a “science and education center” in an old armory building.
“Is there going to be commercial space travel? Yes. Will it be here? Who knows – but that was not the purpose of the aerospace authority bill,” Dulmes said. “There’s other firms that are out there trying to do it, seeing it as a huge moneymaker, but it certainly isn’t on our radar.”
State Sen. Joe Leibham, R-Sheboygan, who proposed the WAA bill, said the nine-member WAA would oversea potential future use as a launch site, but Dulmes said nothing larger than the 10- to 12-foot rockets used annually by Rockets for Schools is in the SDC business plan.
A companion article in the Press points out that it is possible for a suborbital spaceport to develop in Sheboygan, or elsewhere in Wisconsin, but it won’t happen soon. Both Leibham and George French, president of Rocketplane (and the founder of Sheboygan’s Rockets for Schools program a decade ago), said that the authority is a necessary first step. But as Sheboygan mayor Juan Perez put it, launching rockets from a Sheboygan spaceport “sounds a little bit far-fetched.”
By Jeff Foust on 2006 March 31 at 7:13 am ET The only press coverage of Thursday’s hearing of a subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee about the NASA budget request was from Florida Today, which devoted the entire article not to the budget itself but the claim by some members of the committee that “the United States and China are in an unacknowledged space race that this country could lose” without adequate funding for the agency.
Ah, here we go again: a race between the US and China. The article includes some of the usual claims, including that China “has set a goal of putting an astronaut on the moon by 2017″, even though there has been no official pronouncement by the Chinese about such plans and all indications are that China’s space program is still proceeding at a slow pace (China, for example, has pushed back its next manned mission, Shenzhou 7, from 2007 to 2008.) There’s also as of yet no overt sign of development of a new heavy-lift launcher that would likely needed for such a mission, nor the development of a new spaceport on Hainan from which the launcher would operate, two things that are difficult to do without being noticed, as Dwayne Day noted last fall.
That didn’t stop the Congressional rhetoric, though. “We have a space race going on right now and the American people are totally unaware of all this,” said Tom DeLay. “We had a 40-year lead in space and we’re giving it up… The U.S. is quibbling over $3 billion to $5 billion. It’s amazing to me.”
Rep. Mark Kirk (R-IL), who traveled to China earlier this year, said: “The American people have no idea how massive the China space program is.” Interestingly, another congressman who went to China with Kirk, Tom Feeney (R-FL), said last month that he didn’t expect to see a space race developing between the two countries.
The chairman of the subcommittee, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), asked Griffin to produce in the next 30 days an unclassified report about the Chinese space program and its goals; Wolf added that “he would hold a hearing on the subject to coincide with the report’s release.” (Is an examination of the Chinese space program really within the purview of an appropriations subcommittee? This sounds more like a job for the House Science Committee.) NASA can start that research on Monday without leaving DC: the Center for Strategic and International Studies is hosting Luo Ge, China National Space Administration Vice Administrator, and other senior Chinese space officials for a discussion about the Chinese space program at 3 pm at the St. Regis Hotel.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 March 31 at 6:46 am ET Some of the coverage about yesterday’s release of NASA’s new “information policy” (which says, in essence, that NASA employees are encouraged but not required to coordinate media interviews with public affairs officers) focused instead on NASA administrator Michael Griffin’s apparent, if not intended, endorsement of Rep. Tom DeLay last Friday night in a speech in Houston. NASA has not yet released a transcript of the speech but the agency did provide NASA Watch with the relevant snippet of Griffin’s remarks:
The space program has had no better friend in its entire existence than Tom Delay. He’s still with us and we need to keep him there. There just are no better people.
According to the New York Times, Washington Post, and Reuters, Griffin blamed an “inartful choice of words” for any confusion, and that he meant to say that “we need to keep him as a friend” to the space program. (Is there any real danger that he will no longer be a “friend” of NASA in the foreseeable future?) There may be something to the “inartful choice of words” argument: when I first saw the phrase “he’s still with us”, I wondered who could have thought that Tom DeLay was, in fact, dead.
Reuters noted that Griffin also said, “I’m not endorsing anybody, I don’t intend to (but) I remind you that I can if I want.”
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