By Jeff Foust on 2006 March 16 at 7:39 pm ET Congressman Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY), chairman of the House Science Committee, will announce whether or not he will run for reelection Friday at 3 pm, the Utica Observer-Dispatch reported Thursday. Boehlert, as previously noted here, has apparently decided whether or not he plans to run again; the Utica newspaper article adds that he informed President Bush of his decision earlier this week. Regardless of whether he runs again or not, he has to step down from his chairmanship of the House Science Committee at the end of this term because of internal House term limits.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 March 16 at 7:25 am ET Odds are you haven’t heard of Fairview Park, Ohio, a Cleveland suburb. The city, though, is trying to change that, at least in Washington, after NASA Glenn decided earlier this year to close two office buildings that lie within the city’s boundaries. That closure, according to an article Wednesday in West Life Newspaper, affects the largest group of employees in the suburb and will result in the loss of $631,000 in income taxes, which the town’s mayor described as “devastating”. Fairview Park does have a champion on Capitol Hill in the form of Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who said he has contacted Glenn officials about the closure, asking them to allow the city to redevelop the buildings for other tenants.
Kucinich is also fighting to prevent job cuts at the center, by both trying to restore aeronautics funding and making sure Glenn gets “its fair share” of exploration-related work. “The money is going into space exploration,” Kucinich said. “We’re trying to simultaneously protect aeronautics but also recognize… that the administration has taken a new direction into space exploration. We want that work. If they’re cutting jobs under aeronautics, then we’ve got to get the jobs from space exploration.”
By Jeff Foust on 2006 March 16 at 7:11 am ET The online publication American Chronicle features an op-ed by Scott Bannon, who describes himself as a “conservative liberal” (as opposed, one imagines, to a “liberal conservative”) about Republicans’ recent spendthrift proclivities. Mr. Bannon offers several solutions to the problem, including this:
Kill NASA. Hey, I love the idea of space exploration and am an avid viewer of the Discovery channel, but let’s be practical. When I compare meals-on-wheels to feed members of our “Greatest Generation” against flying a $3 billion model airplane with a camera on it into the face of a comet at 6 miles per second… neat as it may be; I have to say pass the potatoes. I know it’s a tough decision, but priorities must be set. Maybe next year we can visit Micky on the moon.
If NASA really had a $3-billion model airplane that could fly at six miles a second, it would be imprudent to crash it into a comet. A $300-million spacecraft designed to crash into a comet? A little different story. And just who is “Micky”, anyway?
By Jeff Foust on 2006 March 15 at 6:59 am ET County commissioners in Brazoria County, south of Houston, have agreed to begin work on a spaceport near a wildlife refuge in the county’s southern tip, according to an article in the local newspaper, The Facts. That sounds impressive, until you read what’s covered under the deal: an access road and a concrete launch pad, either 20-by-20 or 40-by-40 feet. Building the pad “shouldn’t take crews longer than a week”, a country official told the paper. The focus of the spaceport is on small-scale suborbital launches in the near term, primarily by amateur and university groups, but county officials hope to be able to expand the spaceport in the future to support more ambitious commercial launches. Two other sites in Texas are also interested in spaceports; that doesn’t include Jeff Bezos’ ranch in West Texas, which will reportedly be the site for tests of Blue Origin’s rumored suborbital vehicle.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 March 15 at 6:45 am ET I was telling someone yesterday that the scientific community appeared to be in “open revolt” against NASA’s planned cutbacks in space science funding. That assessment is only slightly hyperbolic: SPACE.com and Astronomy report on “NASA night” at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston. SPACE.com called the event “a powder-keg of emotion”, as NASA’s Mary Cleve and Andrew Dantzler played up the size of the planetary science budget for FY07 ($1.8 billion) while defending the cancellation of Dawn, indefinite delay of TPF, and a lack of a Europa mission. It’s clear there’s a serious disconnect between scientists, who were expecting more from the budget, and NASA, which is still trying to figure out why scientists are angry with a budget that still contains a substantial amount of money for research. After one person complained of a “science vacuum” at NASA headquarters, SPACE.com reported, Cleve responded, “I don’t understand why you’re so angry. We come to work every day and we work hard. We really care about this program.”
Astronomy reports that one congressman, John Culberson (R-TX), who sits on the House appropriations subcommittee whose jurisdiction includes NASA, circulated a letter at the meeting calling for the transfer of $1 billion in homeland security funding to NASA to offset science cuts. “Homeland Security has a surplus of at least $6.8 billion sitting in the U.S. Treasury that was intended for first responders but has not been spent in over 3 years,” he wrote, according to Astronomy. “Make Homeland Security spend $1 billion before we give them another … and use that $1 billion now where it is needed most for the nation’s security in the future – for scientific research and planetary exploration that NASA is now canceling.”
By Jeff Foust on 2006 March 15 at 6:26 am ET I saw this essay yesterday at Tech Central Station and had to do a doubletake: a space elevator as a party platform plank? James D. Miller appears to be serious: “Republicans should commit the government to building a space elevator by 2020.” Miller goes through the benefits a space elevator promises (namely, sharply reduced space access costs) and why the government, rather than the private sector, should build it (the government is already planning to spend “tens of billions of dollars on space exploration anyway”), before why Republicans in particular should support the space elevator:
I admit it: part of the reason I want Republicans to make space elevators part of their 2006 campaign is that I am a Republican and fear that otherwise we will lose considerable power in the midterm elections. A space elevator proposal would be visionary, pro-defense, pro-environment and easy to understand, so it could attract significant support for Republicans.
I know that sometimes my sarcasm detector fails, but it really looks like he’s serious here: the space elevator is needed to save the Republican Party. Plus, he thinks the Democrats would never support the concept: “The left-wing environmentalists view the threat of global warming primarily as a means of combating capitalism, and they would be horrified by any proposal that could reduce the harm of global warming without curbing commerce.” Uh-huh. Despite that, somehow I don’t think the space elevator is going be a part of Karl Rove et al.’s 2006 strategy.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 March 14 at 8:12 pm ET The chairman of the House Science Committee released a brief statement shortly after NASA delayed the launch of STS-121 from May to July:
“NASA has done exactly the right thing in pushing back the target date for the launch of STS-121 to further address safety concerns,” Boehlert said. “Administrator Griffin has made it clear all along that the launch window might have to be pushed back to July.
“Today’s decision demonstrates that safety confidence and technical readiness, rather than an arbitrary schedule, will determine when the orbiters fly. That is a decision that is in perfect compliance with the recommendations of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board and one that I applaud.”
By Jeff Foust on 2006 March 14 at 1:16 pm ET We should know in the next several days if Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY), chairman of the House Science Committee, will run for another term or retire at the end of this year. One newspaper from Boehlert’s upstate New York district, the Finger Lakes Times, reports that an announcement should come in the next seven to ten days, while the Utica Observer-Dispatch, in an article about the entry of a Democrat into the race for the seat, reported that Boehlert has made a decision but didn’t reveal what it was. (More background courtesy of CQPolitics.com.) Internal House term limits require Boehlert to relinquish his chairmanship of the science committee at the end of this year, which could play a role in his decision whether or not to run again.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 March 13 at 7:56 am ET An editorial in today’s issue of Florida Today criticizes a number of organizations for what it perceives as decisions that are “threatening new satellites for hurricane forecasting and global warming studies.” (While not explicitly stated, the editorial appears to have been prompted by an AP article on the issue a week ago.) The editorial mentions the White House and Congress, but singles out NASA for special attention, or, rather, blame: “The problem is evident at NASA, which is gutting Earth science research and putting the money into the shuttle, International Space Station and a new moonship.” The editorial then mentions two examples: the Deep Space Climate Observatory (née Triana) and the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) spacecraft.
The problem is that this is relatively small fry: Triana has been mired in controversy for years, and GPM has not been canceled, only delayed. The editorial then states that an additional problem is the delay of “a trio of next-generation weather satellites in a project jointly run by NASA, the Pentagon and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.” NPOESS, the system the editorial is referring to, is a much bigger problem than the delay of GPM and putting Triana out of its misery—and one that is largely the responsibility of NOAA and the DOD—yet it gets glossed over by the newspaper. It’s convenient to think of Earth science being victimized by manned spaceflight, and in the case of the GPM delay specifically that appears to be the case, but in the greater scheme of things NPOESS is a more serious problem—and one of its own doing.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 March 10 at 6:45 am ET The Sheboygan Press reports that the Wisconsin State Assembly has approved legislation that would create the Wisconsin Aerospace Authority, the first step towards the development of a commercial spaceport in the state. The state senate approved the legislation last week, as previously noted here.
The bill was introduced to create the framework for the eventual creation of a spaceport, but the newspaper article about the legislation plays this down: “The bill was introduced to help establish a $15 million, 52,000-square-foot Spaceport Sheboygan Space & Science Center, proposed by members of the Sheboygan Development Corp. to complement the current Rockets for Schools program hosted each spring on Sheboygan’s lakefront.” There’s a big difference between a “space and science center” and a full-fledged spaceport. (An updated version of the article explains that the creation of the authority allows the Rockets for Schools program to seek federal funds to support the creation of the center.)
Still, one of the sponsors, Sen. Joe Leibham, says, “While this proposal may seem somewhat futuristic, the reality is that the future has arrived. The amount of investments and the number of jobs being created in the aerospace industry across our nation are sky rocketing.” One wonder if the number of jobs in the aerospace industry is really “sky rocketing”.
|
|
