By Jeff Foust on 2006 January 23 at 7:00 am ET The wave of commentary about the relative utility of humans versus robots in space exploration has made its way to the nation’s largest newspapers. Monday’s Boston Globe takes a fairly subtle approach, praising Stardust and New Horizons while mentioning only in passing that such missions demonstrate “the scientific value of robotic projects that do not bear the risk and expense of manned missions.” Another subtle dig: “Both Stardust and New Horizons have survived cost-cutting at NASA necessitated by its new mandate from President Bush to plan manned flights first to the moon and then to Mars.” Of course, Stardust launched five years before Bush unveiled the Vision for Space Exploration, so it didn’t have to do much to survive. (Even New Horizons finally had its hard-won acceptance by the space agency when the Vision came out.)
Sunday’s Los Angeles Times is a little more direct in its criticism of NASA and the Bush Administration. The Times doesn’t claim to be opposed to manned spaceflight per se, but believes that “the agency’s priorities are badly skewed”, and that more emphasis should be placed on robotic missions like the aforementioned Stardust and New Horizons. Referring to President Bush’s speech introducing the VSE two years ago, the editors write: “Afterward, Bush dropped his proposal like a sizzling meteorite, having scarcely mentioned it since. Unfortunately, though, it still seems to be guiding the thinking of NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin.” What the editors don’t mention—perhaps because they simply aren’t aware of it—is that the Vision has been formally, explicitly endorsed by Congress in the NASA authorization bill signed into law late last year.
The core issue missed by editorials like those in the Globe and Times, not to mention those published last week, is this: is NASA a science agency or a space agency? If the former, then one can make a strong case for additional funding for robotic missions (although humans can do science that robots cannot, a rationale for the Vision for Space Exploration that has not been exploited to date by NASA, as Chris Gainor discusses in The Space Review this week.) But if NASA is a space agency, with many other priorities besides planetary science and astronomy, then the arguments of these recent editorials become much weaker. It will be interesting to see if anyone in Congress picks up on these editorials in the weeks and months to come and pressures NASA to shift funding between robotic and human spaceflight.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 January 20 at 5:59 am ET The launch of a typical NASA planetary mission doesn’t attract too much attention in Congress, but yesterday’s successful launch of the New Horizons mission to Pluto did warrant a couple members to issue press releases. Rep. Mark Udall (D-CO) congratulated NASA on mission, noting that “this mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt and beyond will generate new knowledge about our solar system and its origins, while also serving as a powerful demonstration of U.S. leadership in space exploration.” Of course, Udall isn’t motivated solely by noble interest in planetary exploration: several companies and organizations involved in the mission are located in his district. “This program demonstrates how Colorado is home to one of the most innovative and robust space industries in the country and is a leader in America’s space program.”
Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) also issued congratulations for the mission, emphasizing the effort she made to salvage the mission after NASA budget proposals a few years ago failed to include any funding for New Horizons: “When NASA tried to kill this program, I said no. I restored the funding for this mission because it was important for science, exploration and discovery – the very things that make our space program the best in the world. Discovery and innovation should be the hallmarks of our space program – not budget cuts and cancelled missions.” Like her House colleague, though, there were other motivations that led to her support: the spacecraft was built in Maryland at APL. “Maryland is the epicenter of NASA’s science programs. I fought for Hubble, I fought for Pluto and I will keep fighting for science, innovation and discovery. I will not let NASA back down from its commitment to science – it’s too important to Maryland, to America and to the world.”
By Jeff Foust on 2006 January 19 at 6:40 am ET Florida governor Jeb Bush yesterday unveiled a request for $55 million in state space spending to go along with recommendations of a commission examining the future role of the state in the space industry. $35 million would go to renovating buildings at Cape Canaveral to support CEV operations, in a bid to lure CEV work to the state, and the rest would go to a range of initiatives from eliminating the sales tax for space companies to the creation of a combined space industry office, Space Florida, which would be charged with carrying out other commission recommendations, including the creation of a commercial spaceport. In an editorial, Florida Today is critical of the plan because it does too little: “Gov. Jeb Bush’s funding plan is pitifully inadequate and makes us doubt the depth of his commitment. He wants to spend $55 million to get things moving, with $35 million targeted to help land the CEV at Kennedy. That total is about one-fifth of what New Mexico just spent.”
Speaking of New Mexico (which hasn’t spent anywhere close to $55 million, let alone five times that, on spaceports and related initiatives just yet), governor Bill Richardson released more details about how that state’s proposed spaceport would be funded. The state would pay for $135 million of the $225 million total cost of the facility, with most of that coming from capital projects funds over the next three years. Local gross receipts taxes would provide $30-50 million, and the state hopes to get the rest from the federal government; Sen. Pete Domenici has pledged his support for the project. The AP article states that some legislators are opposed to the project, saying the money could be better spent elsewhere, as well as expressing concerns about cost overruns. Richardson is up for reelection this year, and one Republican challenger, J. R. Damron, has criticized Richardson for supporting the spaceport, among other projects: “Friends, I am convinced there are many things the people of this state need a lot more than trains, jets and ports to send rich people into space.”
By Jeff Foust on 2006 January 19 at 6:15 am ET This time of year it’s customary for NASA officials, as well as their counterparts in other federal agencies, to beg off questions about the pending budget proposal, claiming that either they don’t know the details of the budget or noting that the details are embargoed until the budget’s release in early February. Of course, every word they say on the subject is scrutinized, looking for clues about what the budget will contain.
For example, at the American Astronomical Society (AAS) conference in Washington last Tuesday, Griffin was asked about the fate of space sciences in the upcoming budget. After noting that space science has done well over the last decade he said the following:
We’re in a budget environment right now where that level of growth can’t be maintained, although science at NASA will still have growth. But we are all hurting. Now, the president’s FY07 budget will be out shortly. I do not yet know in all its details what it will contain.
The implication from that excerpt was that either the FY07 was indeed not yet finalized, or that Griffin was being very tight-lipped about its contents. Compare that to Griffin’s response this Tuesday at a KSC press conference, when a reporter asked him about the FY07 budget:
We have, of course, in this nation—I do not need to be the one to tell you this—a difficult budgetary environment. NASA is not looking forward or expecting any gifts of robust growth from either the administration or the Congress. We expect to keep approximately the funding we have, which will essentially be a very low growth funding profile and therefore, all of the components, each separate component of what NASA does can expect to have, at best, only modest growth.
Does that mean anything changed in the week between those two statements? Did NASA get a decision on its budget from the White House? The more recent statement is not that surprising, unless you were holding out hope for another large budget increase. We’ll know one way or another in about two and a half weeks…
By Jeff Foust on 2006 January 18 at 7:55 am ET Apparently the confluence of the return of Stardust and the impending launch of New Horizons touched a few more nerves than just the Des Moines Register, as noted here yesterday. The Seattle Times compares the risks and benefits of human and robotic spaceflight:
Opportunities and dangerous initiatives beyond human limits reinforce concerns about sending human explorers into ever-more complex missions. In recent years, the Space Shuttle program downshifted into potentially dangerous resupply runs with vague scientific rationales.
Manned space flight has political and emotional limitations that do not burden the efforts of [Stardust principal investigator Don] Brownlee and his colleagues. There are financial limitations, to be sure, but nothing relaxes the purse strings like success.
As Earthlings argue the merits of human space travel, more and more work like Stardust can be undertaken; that’s another achievement of this successful mission.
The Berkshire (Mass.) Eagle is even more critical, claiming that 2006 could be remembered as “the year the unmanned space program peaked and began a rapid descent unless Washington and NASA get their spending priorities in order”:
Washington has been generous to NASA of late, but typically, it has put off tough choices. The space shuttles, patched together like old Chevys, are being kept around to serve the International Space Station, which is too far along to abandon though it has no purpose. A new shuttle program is in the planning stages, and Congress has ponied up money to get President Bush’s pointless manned program to the moon and Mars under way. At some point something will have to be cut, and there is reason to fear that the unmanned effort will be sacrificed at the altar of the much pricier, and much more problematic, manned program.
The Washington Times also weighs in on the contrast between robotic and human space exploration, although not without the same degree of negativity as its counterparts above:
The combined cost of these three missions [Stardust, Deep Impact, and New Horizons] is about $1.3 billion, or just around the average cost of a single shuttle mission. That’s still not exactly cheap, but the contrast should be considered as NASA struggles to justify the shuttle’s relevance (especially when the success of a shuttle mission, at least to the general public, is determined by whether all astronauts return safely).
More importantly, robots should not be hogging all the glory. NASA must expedite the shuttle’s phaseout and get to the business of realizing the president’s goal of putting a man on Mars.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 January 18 at 7:43 am ET The Capitol Hill newspaper The Hill reports on the maneuvering former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay is performing to get a seat on a choice appropriations subcommittee, a move that could have ramifications down the road for NASA. After saying earlier this month that he would not seek to regain the majority leadership post, DeLay announced that he would reclaim the seat he held on the House Appropriations Committee that he gave up when he became majority leader in 2003. According to The Hill, DeLay is reportedly seeking the seat on the defense subcommittee vacated by Rep. Randy Cunningham when he resigned. DeLay may face some opposition to that seat, although Rep. Ken Calvert (R-CA), who chairs the space subcommittee of the House Science Committee and had reportedly been promised the appropriations post before DeLay returned to the committee, now says that he will not oppose DeLay’s request for that vacancy. The article also notes that “if Republicans maintain the majority this November, DeLay could become the subcommittee chairman for the panel that oversees NASA, a major employer in his district, or for the Foreign Affairs Subcommittee.”
By Jeff Foust on 2006 January 17 at 8:11 am ET Amid all the congratulatory news about the successful return Sunday of NASA’s Stardust spacecraft, is shouldn’t be that surprising that someone has tried to use the mission to make a point about space policy. An editorial in Tuesday’s Des Moines Register takes note that Stardust was a robotic mission:
Best of all, the stardust was successfully collected in a robotic space expedition. It’s a reminder that unmanned space travel can be as fruitful as manned travel. It’s cheaper, safer and just as exciting. A spacecraft delivered solar sprinklings to curious, 21st-century humans — without risking human life.
A quibble: one can argue that human life was at risk with Stardust, since there were people in airplanes and helicopters observing the reentry and participating in the recovery of the capsule. Still, a little more proof that the argument of robotic versus human spaceflight has not gone away.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 January 17 at 8:09 am ET In Sunday’s New York Times featured an op-ed by Robert Park bemoaning NASA’s decision to terminate the Triana mission. (See previous discussion of that decision.) Park argues that the ties the mission had to then-Vice President Al Gore doomed the mission:
Scientists had dreamed of such an observatory for years. They hoped Mr. Gore’s influence would make it happen. Mr. Gore’s support would end up destroying it. Those who hated him, hated Triana. His dream of inspiring environmentalists and schoolchildren served only to trivialize the project. It was ridiculed as “Gore’s screen saver.”
Roger Pielke Jr., writing on the blog Prometheus, takes issue with Park’s assessment. Pielke notes the concerns about the science the mission could perform, even after the National Research Council issued a “luke-warm endorsement” of Triana, including a letter he and Bob Harriss, formerly of NASA, wrote to Science after the NRC report came out:
In the case of Triana, by focusing exclusively on “scientific merit,” the NRC report neglected two important aspects of program evaluation: the cost-effectiveness and opportunity costs associated with the mission–which are particularly important given that no recently published NRC reports called for a mission such as Triana as part of the nation’s remote sensing strategy.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 January 16 at 6:35 pm ET What role can—and should—the US government play in supporting the development of low-cost, responsive space transportation? That is the question tackled in a one-page statement released today that represents the consensus of over two dozen companies and organizations in the industry. The genesis of this document was a one-day meeting held at the request of the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) in Los Angeles last October immediately before the Space Frontier Conference; AFRL wanted industry feedback on what it can do to promote the development of responsive space options by entrepreneurial firms. Those participants later decided to compile their opinions into a single document, although not at the request, nor with the endorsement, of AFRL.
The document lists a number of proposals for how the government, in particular the DOD, can support the entrepreneurial space transportation (EST) industry. Those ideas range from more interaction between government agencies and EST firms, to setting a minimum fraction of government space transportation research funding on projects that would “have broad utility” for both the government and industry, to everyone’s current favorite hobbyhorse, export control reform. Now that the document is out there, it will be interesting to see what sort of response (if any) it gets from the DOD, NASA, and Congress, and how quickly—if at all—people will move to try to implement these proposals.
By Jeff Foust on 2006 January 16 at 7:43 am ET The New Mexico state legislature will convene this week for a brief 30-day session where, among other things, legislators will be asked to support funding for a commercial spaceport in the southern part of the state, with space tourism operator Virgin Galactic as the anchor customer. When the Virgin Galactic agreement was announced last month the plan appeared to have bipartisan support among legislators, but as the Santa Fe New Mexican reports, there is some opposition to the plan:
Lawmakers will be eager to bring home their share of the bacon to their respective districts, and some have expressed doubts about some of Richardson’s capital-outlay proposals, including shelling out $58 million in state funds to help pay for a spaceport where British tycoon Richard Branson would start a space-tourism business.
While some legislators have long dreamed of such a project, state Sen. John Grubesic, D-Santa Fe, said last week, “There’s a lot of other pressing needs in this state. I don’t see the benefit of launching rich people into space.”
However, Gov. Bill Richardson, a potential Democratic Presidential candidate in 2008, does have some support from the federal level. The AP reports that Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM) has pledged to “do all I can” help the spaceport work with federal entities from the FAA to the Bureau of Land Management to see the spaceport project through.
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