By Jeff Foust on 2006 February 13 at 6:30 am ET That’s a topic I try to tack in an article in The Space Review this week. The genesis of this article came from a number of events, from the release of the NASA budget last week to editorials last month (some of which should be familiar to regular readers of this blog) about the relative utility of robotic space science missions versus human spaceflight. Some argue that space science should be paramount, and if so, then it’s hard to make a case for anything other than robotic missions. However, despite a disproportionately large space science budget, NASA’s mission has always been more than science, and as such, human spaceflight does have a role. The challenge facing NASA is developing a compelling rationale for the agency that incorporates a balance of both space science and human exploration, and resonates with the public. As Michael Griffin put it in a speech last Thursday, “We must speak clearly and openly to the American people about the risks and rewards of space exploration and scientific discovery.” That might prove to be one of the biggest challenges of the Vision for Space Exploration.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 February 13 at 6:19 am ET That the question asked by an Orlando Sentinel article Sunday that compiles a considerable amount in evidence to suggest the answer is “yes”. In addition to the recent controversy involving media access to climate researcher James Hansen, Michael Cabbage identifies a number of other events, from campaign appearances by former administrator Sean O’Keefe to the ongoing investigation of inspector general Robert Cobb to the selection of Shana Dale, a lawyer and former House staffer, to the post of deputy administrator. The Bush administration has “taken it [politicization] to a new level,” Howard McCurdy of American University said in the article. But, he added, “they are continuing a trend.” As the article notes, expect this issue to come up during a House Science Committee hearing Thursday morning featuring administrator Michael Griffin.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 February 13 at 6:06 am ET I was a bit surprised late last week to see an AP article that quoted Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta as saying that he expected commercial space tourism to commence from the US by 2008. Not because Mineta didn’t say it—I was in the room at the FAA’s Commercial Space Transportation Conference Thursday morning when he uttered that remark—but because that seem that newsworthy. After all, space tourism operators like Virgin Galactic and Rocketplane have been on record for months that they plan to start carrying passengers by 2008, if not sooner. Why would the AP focus on that comment? Because, it turned out, the Department of Transportation itself issued a press release highlighting that comment in Mineta’s speech (the text of which is also available.) Well, at least we’re all clear on the timeline now.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 February 12 at 3:11 pm ET A lot of attention in the week since the release of NASA’s FY2007 budget proposal as been on cuts to NASA’s science programs. Two efforts that have attracted a lot of attention have been the Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) and a Europa orbiter. The former has been “deferred indefinitely”, while NASA did not include a Europa orbiter in the budget as a new start, despite specific direction to do so from Congress in the conference report on the FY06 budget.
Needless to say, scientists and groups like The Planetary Society aren’t pleased by these developments. TPS is particularly unhappy about the lack of funding for a Europa mission: “NASA’s robotic exploration program is being flat-lined, setting aside a mission to Europa to search for its ice-covered ocean and perhaps for life itself,” executive director Louis Friedman said in a press release. Later, in an interview for Technology Review magazine, Friedman said, “The ones I’m most concerned about are the mission to Europa and the Terrestrial Planet Finder.” Exoplanet hunter Geoffrey Marcy told the AP that the decision to delay TPF and a precursor mission, SIM, was disappointing since it showed that “our society can’t put more resources into answering the glorious question of whether we humans are alone in this universe.” Keith Cowing was critical of the decision to defer TPF, writing on SpaceRef.com that “This is a bad decision. A really bad one. In making it, one has to question whether this White House really meant what it said 2 years ago when it raised everyone’s expectations, invoking an expansion ‘into the cosmos’ in so doing.”
The temptation here is to lump a Europa orbiter (hereafter simply “EO”) and TPF together as signs that NASA and/or the administration is somehow abandoning science. That argument, though, seems a little simplistic. TPF and EO are very different programs facing very different challenges. EO has long been a priority of planetary scientists; a planetary sciences decadal survey report, issued in 2002, ranked a “Europa Geophysical Orbiter” mission as the highest-priority “large” mission (excluding Mars missions) for the 2003-2013 period. NASA had planned an EO mission in the late 1990s, for launch as early as 2003, as part of its “Ice and Fire” program that included a Pluto flyby and solar probe missions; that fell by the wayside because of cost growth. Europa was then going to be explored by the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (JIMO) mission, part of the Project Prometheus nuclear power and propulsion program, but JIMO died last year as NASA sharply curtailed Prometheus.
TPF, on the other hand, has always been a long-range program at NASA. TPF is actually two separate missions: a single large space telescope with coronagraph (TPF-C), and several space telescopes flying in formation to serve as an interferometer. TPF-C was planned for launch as early as 2014 before the budget release, although that date would have almost certainly slipped several years, particularly given that JWST is now scheduled for launch in 2013. The TPF interferometer, meanwhile, was planned for launch “before 2020″, a date that would have likely slipped too. TPF faced a number of serious technological hurdles, including the ability for large space telescopes to perform wavelength-precise formation flying. It’s interesting to note that the AAS, which included TPF in its list of high-priority astronomy missions in its 2001 decadal survey (a study separate from the planetary science decadal survey mentioned above), priced TPF at $1.7 billion. However, the same report priced JWST (then known as the Next Generation Space Telescope, NGST) at about $1.5 billion, including international contributions; JWST is now expect to cost around $4 billion, even after its primary mirror was shrunk from 8 meters (the size used for the 2001 NGST cost estimate) to 6.5 meters. Given that cost growth, how much would the two TPF missions cost now? Or ten years from now?
By contrast, EO doesn’t face a lot of those technology issues: orbiters are a lot simpler, and have a lot more flight heritage, than formation-flying space telescopes. Given that, as well as the high priority scientists have given for studying Europa, it’s hard to see its exclusion from the 2007 budget as anything other than the result of a budgetary squeeze. TPF, on the other hand, is a project many years down the road, with several near-term exoplanet projects—the Keck Interferometer and the Kepler mission—still on track. It’s tough to mourn for TPF to the same degree as EO.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 February 12 at 1:58 pm ET One of the major programs announced both at the President’s State of the Union address and with the release of the FY07 budget proposal last week was something called the American Competitiveness Initiative, which is designed, according to an OMB fact sheet, “to double funding for high-leverage research emphasizing the physical sciences that will provide breakthroughs in information technology, nanotechnology, and other fields of science that will have significant impacts scientifically and economically.” However, as noted here earlier, while the initiative includes agencies like NSF and NIST, it does not include NASA. Why not?
At a Space Transportation Association breakfast on Thursday, Richard Russell, associate director of technology for OSTP, addressed that issue in the Q&A session. “When the President put together the American Competitive Initiative, we went through all the various agencies, specifically looking at long-term trends in physical sciences, and physical science research, and compared where various agencies were on that track, where fundamental enabling research was occurring that was directly linked to competitiveness, and where agencies might have been lagging behind other agencies in terms of the need for additional resources,” he explained. For example, the Department of Energy’s Office of Science was singled out as one that has had flat funding in recent years but supports a lot of government and private research in key areas.
“You’ll notice that we picked either complete agencies or complete pieces of agencies,” he said. “When we started looking at it that way, it was impossible to fit NASA into the proposal. Although NASA clearly does extremely high-quality basic research in the physical sciences, if you look a lot at where the research is, and what’s supporting it… it’s not necessarily directly supporting a lot of the other agencies that are working on things that will be long-term and be of commercial viability to the country. That’s not to say that NASA doesn’t do some of that work as well,” he said, but including all of NASA into the initiative didn’t seem viable to the administration.
An interesting thought not addressed by Russell at the breakfast: was their any thought of reorganizing NASA’s research programs so as to pool those efforts that met the administration’s criteria into a single department that could have been made a part of the initiative?
By Jeff Foust on 2006 February 10 at 5:41 am ET Some members of the planetary science community are upset about both NASA’s FY07 budget proposal as well as the agency’s FY06 operating plan, which explains how NASA plans tweak its FY06 appropriation. The argument made by Mark Sykes, director of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, is that NASA is cutting solar system research programs by 25 percent from the original FY06 budget to the FY07 budget proposal. The FY06 operating plan cuts the “Solar System Research” line item from $371.3 million (pre-recission) to $326.6 million, with the bulk of the cut coming from a $35.3-million “NASA programmatic change”; research funding is further cut in the FY07 budget proposal. In a letter from Mike Griffin to House Science Committee chairman Sherwood Boehlert, Griffin explained that this change is “consistent with streamlining flight missions”. The letter also notes that NASA is transferring money to the Exploration Systems budget to speed up work on the CEV by “reducing some Science Mission Directorate (SMD) activities that are not as high a priority,” which appears to be particularly galling to Sykes and colleagues. Sykes is asking his colleagues to contact their Congressional representatives and ask that they direct NASA to restore the research funding.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 February 10 at 5:11 am ET One of the arguments made a little over a year ago as part of the reorganization of Congressional appropriations subcommittees was that by moving NASA out of the same subcommittee as the VA and HUD departments was that the space agency would no longer compete with veterans’ and housing programs for funding. That seemed to work in the FY06 budget process, with no major efforts to claim NASA money for other projects.
However, chatting with a couple participants in the Space Budget Blitz last night, a new competitor for NASA money may be emerging: law enforcement. NASA is now lumped together with the Departments of Commerce and Justice, and apparently at least one Congressional office visited by Blitz participants yesterday raised the possibility of using NASA funding to support law enforcement programs instead. NASA got a modest budget increase in the FY07 budget proposal, while the Justice Department got a $1.5-billion cut. Most of that cut is in a single line item, “Office of Justice Programs, COPS, Office on Violence Against Women”, which was cut in half to $1.2 billion. The budget narrative indicates that the administration is interested in cutting a number of programs, such as grants to state and local law enforcement agencies, that appear to be underperforming. Of course, Congress may not see things the same way, which could create some tension down the road.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 February 9 at 5:21 am ET The AP reports that the New Mexico House has passed legislation that allows localities to create taxes that could be used to help finance the planned commercial spaceport in the southern part of the state. The measure, which passed on a 42-14 vote, is identical to a measure the state Senate passed Saturday. The AP article reports that one House member from the vicinity of the planned spaceport, Rep. Joseph Cervantes (D-Las Cruces), wants “solid commitments for private industry investment in the project” before the states spends money on the project; the article doesn’t specify exactly what he has in mind.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 February 8 at 7:17 am ET The NSS issued a press release late last night/early this morning calling for increased spending for NASA. (Since the release isn’t on their web site as of this writing, I have included it below, after the jump). It’s one thing to call for Congress to increase the budget to the fully-authorized level (an increase of $1 billion); to ask that NASA’s budget rise to one percent of the overall federal budget is something else altogether: that would amount to an increase of nearly $11 billion, since the proposed FY07 budget adds up to about $2.77 trillion. That would be enough to solve the near-term funding crunch (and then some, one would hope), but would be far, far more difficult for Congress to swallow.
Continue reading One percent for space
By Jeff Foust on 2006 February 8 at 6:42 am ET The Hill is reporting this morning that former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who once wielded his influence to benefit NASA, will now have a new way to support the space agency: he is expected to be named today to the Science, State, Justice, Commerce subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, the subcommittee with oversight of the NASA budget. (The Hill first reported on this last month.) DeLay took a leave from the committee in 2003 when he became majority leader, but now that he has resigned that post, planned to return to the committee (a move aided by the resignation of Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, who also served on the full committee, in December.) As part of that shuffle, one of two existing subcommittee members with NASA ties—Dave Weldon of Florida or John Culberson of Texas—might have to move to the defense subcommittee. If this goes, DeLay would be in line to chair the subcommittee next year, succeeding current subcommittee chair Frank Wolf (R-VA)—assuming, of course, DeLay win reelection and Republicans keep their hold on the House.
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