By Jeff Foust on 2006 March 3 at 9:22 am ET Much of the media attention devoted to President Bush’s trip to India has been about the nuclear technology agreement between the US and India. However, the joint statement by Bush and Indian PM Manmohan Singh also includes a couple of bullet points about space:
Agreed to continue exploring further cooperation in civil space, including areas such as space exploration, satellite navigation, and earth science. The United States and India committed to move forward with agreements that will permit the launch of U.S. satellites and satellites containing U.S. components by Indian space launch vehicles, opening up new opportunities for commercial space cooperation between the two countries.
Welcomed the inclusion of two U.S. instruments in the Indian lunar mission Chandrayaan-1. They noted that memoranda of understanding to be signed by ISRO and NASA would be significant steps forward in this area.
Neither development is that surprising, particularly the latter, given that both NASA and ISRO have been talking for over a year about flying those instruments on India’s first lunar mission, which is also carrying several ESA instruments. There had also been a lot of discussion about the former item, although it’s not clear if the agreements that the two countries agreed to “move forward” on were supposed to be completed before the visit or not.
Speaking of India, earlier this week the country’s Ministry of Finance issued its planned fiscal year 2006-7 budget, including a detailed discussion of ISRO’s planned budget. (For the uninitiated, a crore is equal to 10 million, and at current exchange rates there are about 44 rupees in 1 US dollar.) ISRO would get about $825 million in the 2006 budget, a significant increase over 2005, although the revised 2005 budget cut about $100 million from the original 2005 budget proposal for the agency.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 March 3 at 2:25 am ET
By Jeff Foust on 2006 March 2 at 5:59 am ET New Mexico governor Bill Richardson signed into law two bills yesterday that pave the way for the development of a commercial spaceport in the state. One bill creates the New Mexico Spaceport Authority and gives it the ability to issue bonds for spaceport construction, while another gives local governments the ability to hold referenda on gross receipts taxes to finance a share of the spaceport. (State funding for the spaceport was included in a separate capital expenditures measure.)
Separately, the state has also signed off on an investment of up to $20 million in Transformational Space Corp. (t/Space), contingent on the company winning a ISS COTS contract from NASA in the coming months. In return, t/Space would set up operations in the state. The AP article about the investment buried the news at the bottom of the article, electing to lead off instead with a $13-million loan to film a movie in the state starring Jessica Simpson. “The interest-free loan comes after Simpson and her parents recently had dinner at the Governor’s Mansion.” Well, tough to compete with that.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 March 2 at 5:46 am ET Gen. Lance Lord is set to step down as the had of Air Force Space Command at the end of this week, and his retirement is raising questions about the future of the command, including speculation that the command might be downgraded and commanded by a three-star general instead of a four-star like Lord. Sen. Wayne Allard (R-CO), co-chair of the Congressional Space Power Caucus, is concerned enough about those reports that he has sent a letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld expressing his opposition to any move along those lines, according to an online Space News article (subscription required). Allard is also concerned that the Space and Missile Command might be subsumed within the Air Force Materiel Command. Allard wonders if the DoD might be stepping back from recommendations in a 2001 report (chaired, ironically, by Rumsfeld prior to his nomination to be Secretary of Defense) that called for steps to enhance the profile of space within the Air Force. In a press release, Allard said he will bring up the issue with Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England at a budget committee hearing Thursday. “I intend to oppose any Air Force proposal that will result in a down grade of Air Force Space Command,” he said in the statement.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 March 2 at 5:29 am ET The South Africa newspaper Cape Argus reports that a new leader has emerged in a political faction opposed to the government of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe: “rocket scientist” Arthur Mutambara, who the paper describes as “a professor in robotics and mechatronics who has worked for the US space agency, Nasa”. (See his resume) From the article, though, it appears that Mutambara first has to win over rivals within the opposition before he can think about taking down Mugabe.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 March 1 at 9:40 pm ET An article published on the The New York Times web site today (and presumably to appear in Thursday’s print edition) looks again at the proposed cuts in NASA’s science programs. Buried in the article, amidst comments by concerned astronomers, is this little tidbit: “Senator Pete Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, and 56 other senators have introduced a bill to mandate a 10 percent increase per year in NASA’s science budget from now through 2013.”
It turns out this is a reference to S.2198, the “Protecting America’s Competitive Edge Through Education and Research Act of 2006″. This bill was introduced by Sen. Domenici on January 26 and actually has 57 cosponsors now, according to Thomas. The bill is primarily focused on math and science education issues, including recruiting more teachers in those subjects, providing research grants, and other aspects of science research policy. And, indeed, there is a provision for increasing the amount of funding authorized for science research at NASA, from $2.768 billion in FY07 to $4.903 billion in FY13. But note that key word there: authorization. This isn’t an appropriations bill, so it can only authorize funding for this and other research programs. Remember the difference between what Congress authorized for NASA in FY07 versus what the Administration offered in its budget proposal.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 March 1 at 9:16 pm ET A quick reminder that the full House Science Committee will be holding a hearing on Thursday at 10am on “NASA’s Science Mission Directorate: Impacts of the Fiscal Year 2007 Budget Proposal”. (See this earlier post for the witness list.) Given all the attention focused on planned cutbacks in NASA’s science program, this should be an interesting hearing.
This is also the second full committee hearing devoted to NASA in two weeks; the committee held a February 16 hearing on the NASA budget in general. By contrast, the House Science Committee’s counterpart in the Senate, the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, has yet to schedule any hearings on NASA, either by the full committee or the Science and Space subcommittee. (There is a hearing about the NPOESS weather satellite system scheduled for March 30; that will be conducted by Disaster Prevention and Prediction subcommittee.) Admittedly the commerce committee has oversight over a much broader range of issues; its recent hearings have ranged from “net neutrality” to port security. One wonders when—or if—the committee will take up the issues their House colleagues are currently grappling with.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 March 1 at 6:44 am ET Did you know that right now there are dozens of lobbyists “besieging” Capitol Hill seeking money for the Pentagon to buy space weapons? That’s the gist of an article today on Wired News, which somehow manages to conflate the March Storm lobbying effort with a very separate debate on space weaponization.
Where to begin? Let’s try this excerpt:
This week is “March Storm,” when 50 to 75 lobbyists will spend three days speaking with staffers from more than 250 offices on Capitol Hill. Some of the lobbyists represent the aerospace industry, but most have been hired by smaller space startups and entrepreneurs.
The big talking point? How the private sector can help the U.S. military build space-based weapons a lot faster and with a lot less of taxpayers’ money.
The “lobbyists” that participate in March Storm are typically ordinary people—sometimes including officials from some of the “smaller space startups” but also unaffiliated space advocates and students—who not only pay their own way to Washington, but also for the last few years have paid a registration fee to defray the costs of the effort. That’s a far cry from what comes to mind when one hears the word “lobbyist”.
And the bit about “help[ing] the U.S. military build space-based weapons”? The only element of the March Storm agenda that deals with military space is a request for the creation of the AFRL Center for Entrepreneurial Space Access to be a liaison between the entrepreneurial space community and the military on the development of responsive space launch systems, at the princely sum of $5 million in FY07. One might imagine that such systems could, theoretically, be used for future space weapons systems, but that’s certainly not the thrust of the project.
Most of the rest of the article is about a space weaponization debate wholly separate from this week’s March Storm. The author, John Lasker, relies far too heavily on Bruce Gagnon and some of his outlandish, dubious claims without making much of an overt effort to verify them (including a claim that the ACLU “uncovered court documents revealing that NASA and the U.S. Air Force were secretly monitoring” Gagnon, and that “space-based weapons will be deployed near or on the moon” by the US military.) There are some more reasoned, rational quotes from Theresa Hitchens, director of the Center for Defense Information, but no comments from other policy analysts or DoD officials other than a quote from an unnamed US Space Command PAO.
There is indeed an ongoing debate about the potential use of weapons in space, but to link it to March Storm—perhaps as a hook to make the article timely—is clumsy at best and deceitful at worst. (The article’s headline, “Space Hawks Chase Death Rays”, doesn’t help, but headline copy is often the responsibility of an editor, not the article’s author.) Given that Mr. Lasker’s past articles for Wired News have not focused on military space topics, perhaps it’s simply ignorance of the issues.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 February 28 at 6:54 am ET The Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun reports that the country’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party has started a review of Japanese space policy. The two main areas under study are current limitations on the military use of space and “the role of compartmentalized bureaucracy in the lack of cooperation among ministries and agencies.” The former issue, which dates back to the late 1960s, has not prevented Japan from launching reconnaissance satellites (one pair is in orbit today, while a second pair was lost in an H-2A launch failure; a third pair is planned for launch later this year), and it’s not clear from the article what changes the LDP has in mind. The lack of coordination among Japanese government agencies—which was supposed to be remedied, or at least reduced, by the merger of three agencies into JAXA a few years ago—has led some to worry about the health of the Japanese space industry over the long term. One option: create a “state minister for space development” and a council to oversee space policy. A final report from this review is scheduled to be completed in August.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 February 28 at 6:44 am ET A (free) Space News article this week examines the annual March Storm grassroots lobbying effort by ProSpace, which is going on through Wednesday. The major focus this year is on new proposed legislation, the “Space Prizes for the Advancement of Commerce and Enterprise (SPACE) Act of 2006″, which would establish a “National Space Prize Board” with $100 million per year for prizes that may not fit within NASA’s own Centennial Challenges prize program. ProSpace is also fighting for full funding for commercial ISS transport, as well as the establishment of the ACES, the AFRL (Air Force Research Lab) Center for Entrepreneurial Space (Access) to serve as a link between the capabilities of the entrepreneurial space community and the needs of the DoD. (Such an office was recommended by the Entrepreneurial space transportation industry consensus statement released in mid-January.) The full March Storm agenda is available online.
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