By Jeff Foust on 2005 December 19 at 5:21 am ET Florida Today reports Monday that the state of Florida is considering merging several of its space-related organizations into a single entity dubbed “Space Florida”. These organizations include the Florida Space Authority, Florida Space Research Institute, and the Florida Aerospace Finance Corp., which would continue as departments within Space Florida. This move was not unexpected, since there had been concerns raised for months that there was a need for a single state space agency to provide “one-stop shopping” for people interested in doing space business in the state. This concept may have gained additional urgency with the latest developments in New Mexico; the South Florida Sun-Sentinel writes in an editorial Monday that the state needs to take several steps to retain its leadership in space, recommending that “once a state task force on commercial space ventures issues recommendations next month, lawmakers ought to quickly adopt ideas that make sense strategically and financially.”
By Jeff Foust on 2005 December 19 at 5:14 am ET The full House approved the conference report on S.1281, the NASA authorization bill, late Saturday on a voice vote. SpaceRef reports that the Senate has yet to approve the conference report because Sen. Jim Talent (R-MO) has put a hold on the bill in an effort to convince NASA to spend much of the $25 million appropriated to hypersonics research in the FY2006 budget on the X-43C program. It’s unlikely this will permanently jeopardize passage of the report, and thus the bill, and since the Senate has no immediate plans to recess for the holidays a resolution may come sooner rather than later.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 December 16 at 6:47 am ET Everyone’s in favor a new spaceport, until someone mentions the T word. Taxes. The Albuquerque Tribune, following up on this week’s announcement of Virgin Galactic setting up operations as a to-be-built New Mexico spaceport, tracks down how the spaceport will be paid for. The majority of the money, including $100 million in capital outlays and $35 million in transportation and other funding, into the project, with $90 million to come from federal and local sources. While the federal funding isn’t specified, the local funding could come in the form of “a local option gross receipts tax” for businesses in that part of the state. That proposal has generated some opposition from politicians from that part of the state: “At first blush, I don’t think that’s the prudent way to do it,” said state senator Leonard Lee Rawson, who just yesterday was raving about the project. His concern is that the project could provide revenue for the whole state, with some taxpayers paying a disproportionate share of taxes for it.
That complaint is minor, though, compared to the reaction in Florida to the announcement. Florida Today minces no words in an editorial, saying that the Virgin/New Mexico deal “shows more starkly than ever how Florida is failing to attract the 21st century space business the state and Brevard County desperately need to offset thousands of coming workforce cuts at NASA.” The editorial also complains that the Florida legislature failed to take up a proposal to create an aerospace incentive fund intended to lure the eventual CEV developer to establish operations in Florida. Few are spared the wrath of the paper’s editorial board, including Gov. Jeb Bush:
New Mexico has a business-friendly spaceport — Florida, none.
New Mexico has anted up $225 million to spawn new-era space jobs — Florida, zilch.
New Mexico has a hands-on governor who has made space business a top priority — Florida doesn’t.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 December 16 at 6:34 am ET Florida Today follows up on the report earlier this week that some members of Congress are lobbying the OMB to increase NASA’s budget to fully fund the shuttle program, saying that without full funding one shuttle orbiter, Atlantis, will have to be mothballed. (Why Atlantis, which is slightly younger than Discovery? The article doesn’t say.) Two Congressmen who represent the Space Coast area, Dave Weldon and Tom Feeney, were among those who signed the letter. “Underfunding the shuttle is like building half a bridge,” Feeney claimed, with the ISS as the bridge. The article also quotes space policy expert John Logsdon, who plays down what he perceives as some of the hyperbole in the letter.
Florida Today, through its space blog, includes a link to the letter sent by the members of Congress to President Bush, but as of this morning the link wasn’t working. (However, a Florida Today editor emailed a revised link to the letter that does work.)
By Jeff Foust on 2005 December 16 at 6:20 am ET A House-Senate conference committee met Thursday afternoon and approved a final version of the NASA authorization bill (using the Senate bill number, S.1281) which will go to the full House and Senate for approval, perhaps by the end of the year. While the conference report has not been published online yet, some details of the bill, as noted in press releases by the House Science Committee (via SpaceRef), House Science Committee Democratic Membership, and the office of Rep. Ken Calvert, include:
- Endorsement of the Vision for Space Exploration;
- Designation of the US segment of the ISS as a “national laboratory”;
- Creation of a series of cost control and notification procedures modeled on the Nunn-McCurdy controls for DOD programs;
- Authorization for larger Centennial Challenges prizes;
- Prohibition of any layoffs of NASA personnel before March 2007.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 December 15 at 6:35 am ET The announcement this week that Virgin Galactic will establish operations at a new spaceport in New Mexico raises a question: just who is going to pay for building the spaceport, estimated to cost between $200 and $250 million? The state is expected to provide at least $100 million towards its construction (the rest to come from unspecified local and federal sources) and, according to news reports, the state legislature is expected to approve that funding. State senator Leonard Lee Rawson, a Republican from Las Cruces (near where the spaceport will be built), doesn’t have a problem supporting a project backed by a Democratic governor. “It’s new jobs; it’s economic development. I don’t think it’s a conservative or liberal issue,” he told the Albuquerque Tribune. State House speaker Ben Lujan, a Democrat, told the Washington Post, “We’ll get this through the legislature, that’s a promise.”
The Post also points out that state governor Bill Richardson is also contemplating a run for President in 2008: “The 58-year-old Hispanic governor is working to portray himself as a ‘different kind of Democrat’ who is willing to work with the private sector on daring initiatives, his campaign planners say. [Richard] Branson suggested that Richardson’s gamble on the spaceport could pay political dividends.” However, the spaceport won’t be in full operation, at least as far as Virgin Galactic is concerned, before the 2008 election.
[Disclosure: my employer was hired to perform some economic impact assessments of the new spaceport, and some preliminary “forward-looking” (that is, optimistic) estimates were released as part of this week’s announcement.]
By Jeff Foust on 2005 December 15 at 6:14 am ET The Strategic Research Institute announced yesterday that the 3rd Annual Commercial Remote Sensing Industry Conference, to be held in Washington DC in February, will focus on “new initiatives and legislation authorizing appropriations to the remote sensing industry”. Among the speakers will be Congressman Mark Udall “from the District of Colorado”. District of Colorado? I hadn’t heard that Colorado had been sent to the minors…
Interesting note: the conference is taking place on the same dates, and at the same hotel, as the FAA/AST’s annual commercial space transportation conference. Both conferences overlap with the end of Satellite 2006, the annual conference that focuses on the commercial communications satellite industry.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 December 15 at 6:02 am ET Backers of a NASA mission to the Jovian moon Europa got some good news in the final version of 2006 budget, which included report language calling on NASA to begin work on a Europa mission to replace the cancellation of the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (JIMO), and to include a new start for that mission in its 2007 budget proposal. However, The Planetary Society, citing a report in the subscription-only publication Washington Aerospace Briefing, said Wednesday that NASA has decided not to include the mission in its FY07 budget. The society has no plans to take this lying down: “Whether or not is in the budget request, we will lobby in Congress for its inclusion in the NASA program.” Europa has long been a high priority for planetary scientists, although one wonders whether it is as high a priority today compared to Titan, whose stock seems to have risen in the last year because of the interesting results collected the Cassini/Huygens mission.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 December 14 at 7:01 am ET Several members of Congress are concerned that NASA won’t have enough money to continue the shuttle program, the Houston Chronicle reported Wednesday. In a letter sent to President Bush last week, 29 House Republicans and six Democrats, led by former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX), said that they are concerned about a shortfall of as much as $6 billion in NASA’s budget through 2010 caused by OMB plans to reduce shuttle funding during that time, although the cost savings originally envisioned to support that trend have not materialized. DeLay and colleagues said that without increased funding, NASA could be forced to mothball a shuttle and jeopardize completion of the ISS. “The best way I can express it is that we don’t want to leave things to chance, with all of the data and information coming over to us,” DeLay said. The Chronicle added that DeLay has met with both OMB director Josh Bolten and Vice President Cheney about this issue, while Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) has separately met with Bolten on shuttle funding.
The article doesn’t list the 35 Congressmen who signed the letter. However, it’s unlikely you would find a fellow Texas Republican, Rep. Jeb Hensarling, included in the group. In the same issue the Chronicle profiles the Dallas-area representative who made waves earlier this year as part of the Republican Study Committee, which proposed a series of budget cuts called “Operation Offset” to pay for hurricane relief without tax increases or deficit spending. Among the cuts included in Operation Offset, as the Chronicle article notes at the end, was eliminating funding for “NASA’s New Moon/Mars Initiative”.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 December 14 at 6:45 am ET Reuters reports that the ax has fallen on part of the Space Based Infrared System (SBIRS) program. To deal with the program’s extensive cost overruns, the Defense Department plans to reduce the number of satellites in the program from the original five to two, with an option for a third. (The sensor payloads to be included on classified satellites in elliptical orbit do not appear to be affected by the change.) The decision, announced in a letter from Kenneth Krieg, undersecretary of defense for acquisition, to Congress, also includes plans to develop what in essence would be a competing system: Overhead Non-Imaging Infrared (ONIR), to perform the same missile-warning tasks as SBIRS. “Given the continued importance to support strategic and theater missile warning and defense, I am convinced there is a need to develop a competitor capability, in parallel with the SBIRS program, to ensure the nation’s missile warning capacity is sustained,” Krieg wrote in the letter.
Meanwhile, a decision on the future of the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS), planned for this month, will be delayed, according to Aerospace Daily. NPOESS, which has suffered its share of cost overruns, has apparently triggered a Nunn-McCurdy recertification review as the cost of the program has grown in excess of 2005. The Air Force is not expected to formally notify Congress of the recertification review until January, giving the Pentagon until May to complete the review. Several options for the program are on the table, Space News reported in this week’s print edition, including dropping one instrument that has been driving some of the cost growth of the program.
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