By Jeff Foust on 2006 March 23 at 6:45 am ET It may not seem like it, but the 2008 presidential election is almost upon us. (Some might argue it’s already here.) That’s something that NASA is acutely aware of as it tries to build up public and political support for the Vision for Space Exploration, Deputy Administrator Shana Dale said at a Space Transportation Association breakfast on Wednesday morning:
We really only have about a year left until we get into “silly season” of [the] next election cycle, and we’re going to need to solidify the base: not only at a grassroots level, Congressional support, but also who the emerging candidates are. All of us need to figure out collectively how we’re going to engage with the emerging candidates and engage their candidacies to make sure that they’re supportive of where we want to go with exploration in the future.
Most of Dale’s talk was a reiteration of NASA’s plans to support the commercial space industry and also work with international partners to flesh out exploration plans. A few highlights:
- She mentioned she recently traveled to Europe and met with ESA and national space agency officials there to discuss means of cooperation on exploration; she plans to carry out similar trips to Russia, Japan, and Canada in the coming months.
- NASA is planning an “Exploration Strategy Workshop” April 25-28 at the Reagan Building in downtown Washington, that will feature participation from international partners, academia, and industry as the first step in plans for this year for “defining a strategy for lunar exploration”. By the end of the year NASA plans to complete a ten-year lunar exploration strategy, including roles for the commercial sector.
- Regarding the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program, Dale said NASA received proposals from “a wide variety of organizations” earlier this month, and is on track to select winners by this summer.
- For Centennial Challenges, Dale said that NASA plans over the next couple of years to issue several “multihundred-thousand- to multimillion-dollar prize competitions” in a wide range of areas, from nontoxic rocket engines to low-cost pressure suits to subscale orbital fuel depots.
- Dale said that NASA got a “strong response” to a request for information issued earlier this year for Red Planet Capital, the NASA investment venture modeled on the CIA’s In-Q-Tel. NASA will select a specific proposal by the end of April.
- Overall, she said, “you might say our partnership strategy is one that consists of the three I’s: building international cooperation, promoting investment, and rewarding innovation.”
- “For us in the aerospace community who deeply love the space program, it is hard for us to sit back and figure ways to engage the rest of the American public and to inspire them and encourage the excitement that we think they should feel about the Vision for Space Exploration… So that’s something we’d really like to see the community come together on in terms of helping NASA develop a strategy that, only on a very short time frame, needs to do it.”
To continue the trend, here’s the audio from Dale’s speech and the Q&A session that followed. (MP3, 26:00, 2.98 MB)
[Clarification: a prominent web site was kind enough to link to this post, but referred to this site as “Futron’s space politics blog”. Please note that this site is a personal project and not the property of, nor endorsed by, any company. Futron is my employer, but they don’t own this site nor do they endorse its contents. See the disclaimer on the right-hand site of the home page if this isn’t clear enough. Thanks.]
By Jeff Foust on 2006 March 22 at 5:40 am ET Last week the GAO issued a report on the Defense Department’s responsive space plans, particularly the TacSat series of experimental small satellites. The report, commissioned by Congressman Terry Heaton, chairman of the strategic forces subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee, is largely complimentary of the first satellite, TacSat 1, which was built in 12 months for $10 million; the report credits that in large part to setting the requirements for the spacecraft early in the process and not changing them during the development phase of the project. (Three other TacSats are in various phases of development now, but none will be as inexpensive nor be built as quickly as the first one.)
There are several concerns with the program, and responsive space in general, that the GAO report identifies. One of the biggest is the lack of a responsive launch vehicle, something being remedied now though the Falcon program; SpaceX’s Falcon 1 could also serve that role. (There is reportedly some opposition within the DOD to the Falcon program because of the perception that the launch vehicle is too small given the current lack of small payloads; a chicken-and-egg problem.) The report also raises concerns about the lack of communication between the technology and acquisition communities, and the lack of an overarching strategy for responsive space in general.
One interesting argument the report makes is that responsive space may have a role helping reform larger space programs: the report argues that TacSat-like programs can test technologies to be used in larger programs and also give personnel experience managing small programs before handling larger programs. That makes responsive space sound like a farm team for the major leagues of big military space programs. Will that make the difference in winning over skeptics to responsive space?
By Jeff Foust on 2006 March 21 at 6:47 am ET Rep. Ken Calvert (R-CA), chairman of the space subcommittee of the House Science Committee, will receive a “National Champion of Science Award” (yes, that’s the name) this morning in Riverside, California, according to a UC Riverside press release. The award is from The Science Coalition, an organization of “more than 400 member organizations”, primarily universities and companies. It turns out there are a lot of Champions of Science in Congress, who get as part of their award a personalized box of Wheaties (!) and recognition at a “Breakfast of Champions”. (Tip to the coalition: you may not want to so prominently feature Randy “Duke” Cunningham any more.) Calvert will receive the award—no word on the personalized box of Wheaties—from UCR chancellor France Córdova, who served as chief scientist at NASA for a few years in the 1990s. “Ken Calvert works tirelessly to improve public education, the environment and the advancement of NASA – all issues particularly near and dear to my heart,” she said in the press release.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 March 20 at 7:16 am ET If you missed it, earlier this month the Republican Study Committee released a revised version of its budget proposal, which balances the federal budget by FY2011. Most of what’s here is similar to its previous plans, including the RSC’s desire to cancel “NASA’s Moon/Mars Exploration Initiative”; less well understood is its request to “retire the space shuttle after completion of the International Space Station”, which is sort of what NASA has had in mind for some time now. (The RSC for some reason thinks NASA plans to retire the shuttle in 2012, two years later than the President’s deadline in the original VSE announcement, which NASA had adhered to.)
An editorial in Sunday’s Washington Post comments on the wide-ranging cuts proposed by the RSC. The Post is critical of many of the proposed cuts, but supportive—if realistic—about others:
Some of the proposed cuts, such as eliminating farm subsidies or killing NASA’s moon/Mars exploration program, are sensible. But they also are highly unlikely; just think how much trouble Congress had recently agreeing to a mere $40 billion in entitlement cuts.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 March 18 at 9:21 am ET Reuters reported Friday evening that the Defense Department has given its “conditional backing” to the formation of the United Launch Alliance. Neither the DOD nor the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), with whom DOD officials met with on Friday, are talking about these recommendations; the Reuters article is based on the insights of one analyst, Loren Thompson, who has connections with many Pentagon officials. Thompson said the Pentagon wants to “aggressively manage” the ULA, and make sure it has “a robust structure with adequate capital and expertise.” A DOD spokeswoman later told Reuters that Kenneth Krieg, the undersecretary for defense for acquisition who met with the FTC Friday, made “no ‘official’ recommendation.”
By Jeff Foust on 2006 March 17 at 4:06 pm ET Congressman Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) announced this afternoon that he will not seek reelection this fall. The local newspaper, the Utica Observer-Dispatch, has an early story about his announcement, made at 3 pm in Utica, as well as a copy of his remarks.
Regardless of his decision to run or not, Boehlert had to step down from his chairmanship of the House Science Committee at the end of this year because of internal term limits. The Hill newspaper, in an article posted shortly before Boehlert’s official announcement, passed along something interesting I had not heard before:
GOP insiders were not surprised by his announcement given that he had heart bypass surgery after winning reelection in 2004 and that House GOP leaders are considering a plan to abolish the Science Committee, which Boehlert chairs, as part of a plan to reorganize the committee structure. [emphasis added]
The article doesn’t offer any additional details about any potential restructuring, including what committee(s) would get oversight of NASA and other science programs should the Science Committee be disbanded.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 March 17 at 7:30 am ET Reuters reported Thursday night that the Pentagon is expected to forward its recommendations on the approval of the United Launch Alliance (ULA) to the Federal Trade Commission on Friday. The report offers no hints on whether the Pentagon will recommend the merger of Boeing and Lockheed Martin’s government launch operations, or if there will be any proposed restrictions or conditions on the deal. The FTC will have the final word on the proposed merger. If the ULA isn’t finalized by the end of this month, either company can withdraw from the deal, although both companies have publicly professed their continued support for the joint venture.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 March 17 at 6:43 am ET In a post earlier this week about a meeting between scientists and NASA officials at a planetary sciences conference, I noted that there appeared to be a “disconnect” between scientists and NASA officials; the latter seemed to be genuinely puzzled regarding why scientists were so angry about the NASA budget. A reader who has some insight into the tug-of-war between the two sides (but asked to be anonymous given his/her role in the debate) emailed some insights into this situation:
A lot of the press seems to be focusing on the missions that got cut or deferred, but they are focusing on the sideshow, not the main issue. The reason why the science community is so upset is because of NASA cuts to some relatively small things. The most important is the research and analysis funding. This hits the scientists really hard because it is forcing them to dismiss graduate students. University scientists are really wounded by this, because they are not simply laying off employees, they may essentially be destroying somebody’s education AND their job. And as you know, professors usually have a closer relationship with grad students than bosses have with employees. NASA’s cut to R&A, which is also in some ways retroactive, is really angering a lot of people.
In addition, NASA took a swipe at a number of other things that the scientific community considers important longer-term programs, like Explorer missions (relatively small, but important) and technology development (important for many missions, including the flagship missions). So to summarize, the scientists are most upset about relatively small budget cuts. This is something that NASA does not fully comprehend.
Second, there is also the problem that NASA has eliminated much of its advisory structure, so they did not have the kind of input from the scientific community that they normally have. If they did have that input, they probably never would have cut R&A budgets (the advisors would have warned them). Couple this with something that Cleave said a couple of months ago, when she said that the only science stakeholders are the White House and Congress—which seemed to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the fact that a major amount of NASA data analysis is done by non-NASA scientists.
Wrap it all up and NASA is presenting an image of an agency that really doesn’t understand the way the science community works. And add to this the fact that the scientists were promised a lot more in the past few years and now they are getting nothing—they expected more. So it’s not simplythe cuts, it’s the way that they have been made to a community that was feeling pretty good the past few years.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 March 17 at 6:29 am ET What does pro football have to do with a commercial spaceport? They’re both examples of bold ventures that New Mexico is pursuing, according to an article in the El Paso Times. Yesterday officials from Texas, New Mexico, and the Mexican state of Chihuahua pitched plans to attract a “binational, tri-state” NFL franchise to the region. Sounds pretty farfetched, given that the NFL doesn’t have a team in the nation’s second largest city, Los Angeles, right? Las Cruces mayor Bill Mattiace doesn’t think so:
“Look at the spaceport. That was a crazy dream,” Mattiace said, talking about the Southwest Regional Spaceport to be built 45 miles northeast of Las Cruces near Upham.
“First rockets, then footballs,” he said.
It says something about the growing acceptance of commercial spaceflight that a spaceport doesn’t seem more fantastic than luring a professional sports franchise.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 March 16 at 7:52 pm ET NASA administrator Michael Griffin spoke before a committee of the Florida House of Representatives on Thursday about issues related to the infrastructure associated with the Kennedy Space Center. According to the AP account of Griffin’s visit;
Traffic-free roads, affordable housing and quality schools in Florida all factor into NASA’s ability to attract the best workers necessary to keep the U.S. ahead in the 21st-century space race, the head of the nation’s space program told a House joint committee today.
NASA Administrator Michael Griffin reminded lawmakers that his agency chose the Cape Canaveral site in the 1960s partly for its isolation. Now workers have long commutes on crowded roads and find housing costs rising out of reach.
Griffin told lawmakers who handle infrastructure and space issues that it was essential that the highway, rail and waterway connections to Cape Canaveral are improved.
Those concerns—housing, traffic, and education—would seem to pose a problem not just for KSC. Take NASA Headquarters, for instance: while the Washington area has good schools (at least outside of DC proper), traffic congestion and rising housing costs are among the worst in the nation. The same is true for a number of other NASA centers. Will stratospheric housing costs keep us grounded?
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