By Jeff Foust on 2005 September 23 at 7:50 am ET SPACE.com reported yesterday that some members of Congress may seek to find ways to convert ballistic missiles earmarked for destruction under arms reduction treaties into small launch vehicles. Rep. Dennis Rehberg (R-MT), speaking at a space policy conference in Montana last weekend, said he felt it made more sense to use retired Peacekeeper missiles as launch vehicles, particularly if it costs no more to covert them than it would to destroy them. Rehberg said that he and two colleagues, Chet Edwards (D-TX) and Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-NJ), plan to “delve into the Peacekeeper use within the arena of non-proliferation.”
Unfortunately, there’s not much more information about what exactly Rep. Rehberg wants to do. ICBM assets are already being converted into launch vehicles through the Air Force’s Orbital Suborbital Program (OSP): a Minotaur 1 rocket, whose lower stages are from Minuteman 2 missiles, launched the STP-R1 satellite for DARPA just last night. The Minotaur costs about $20 million a launch, which may not exactly be “low-cost”, particularly in the eyes of university smallsat developers; it’s also limited to government-sponsored payloads. You can also imagine that companies developing small low-cost launches would also not be pleased to see increased competition from converted missiles.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 September 23 at 6:55 am ET One aspect of Monday’s ESAS announcement that hasn’t gotten a lot of attention is NASA’s continued push to seek commercial cargo and crew services options for the ISS. That’s not new, of course—Mike Griffin made comments along those lines this summer, as did Chris Shank at the Return to the Moon Conference in Las Vegas in July—but Monday’s announcement reiterated that intent even as NASA designs the CEV to be able to support the station as an alternative. As Griffin said at Monday’s press conference, according to the official transcript:
NASA has not had at its upper levels a manager or an administrator more supportive of commercial enterprise than I. We are base lining in the out years past the retirement of the shuttle, we are base lining commercial service to the station. That is the only known and knowable, at this point, market for those entrepreneurs that I have to give. We are base lining the use of that market for them and are providing, will be providing this fall a new procurement to try to stimulate that market.
That said, at the end of the day, what commercial means is, that it is not government directed. So, I can provide the incentive and I can provide the market that I have and commercial providers will either emerge or not. It is not acceptable for a publicly funded program not to have a way of meeting its mission requirements in the event that commercial operators do or don’t materialize. So, the architecture that we have advanced allows NASA to meet its mission requirements, but also allows NASA to concentrate its resources on other more advanced activities if commercial providers can emerge in the next five to seven years. That is exactly our intent.
Our fondest desire would be to keep NASA on the very frontier of space activity, letting commercial provider fill in for those activities which are not frontier activities. We will be putting some money where our mouth is.
The Space Frontier Foundation did notice that, and, not surprisingly, heartily endorses it and calls in supporters to defend the plan: “Money must be allocated and the agency’s tendency to make creeping changes which ultimately kill innovation must be blocked.”
By Jeff Foust on 2005 September 22 at 6:10 am ET The Republican Study Committee (RSC) formally introduced yesterday “Operation Offset”, its proposed collection of budget cuts and related measures designed to pay for hurricane relief without increasing taxes or running up the budget deficit. As previously reported, the proposal calls for cutting “NASA’s New Moon/Mars Initiative”. The program is just one of dozens that the RSC offers up on the chopping block, but unlike most of the others, the report provides little justification for the cut:
In 2004, the President announced a new initiative to explore the Moon and Mars with the goal of returning humans to the Moon by 2020. NASA currently intends to use the savings from phasing out the space shuttle in 2012 to fund this program. Savings: $44 billion over ten years ($11.5 billion over five years)
For nearly all the other programs in the report, the RSC offers some explanation why the program is question is duplicative or otherwise unnecessary, but not so here. Moreover, they’re retiring the shuttle a couple years later than what has been planned all along under the VSE.
The RSC counts about 100 members of Congress in its membership, but that doesn’t mean that all 100 members are in complete agreement on the proposed cuts. Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX), a Houston-area Congressman and RSC member, spoke out in particular against the NASA cuts at a press conference, the Houston Chronicle reported. “NASA is one of those programs the American people receive benefits from,” he said.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 September 22 at 5:53 am ET The US Senate passed by unanimous consent yesterday S.1713, a bill introduced earlier this month by Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) to amend the Iran Nonproliferation Act (INA) so that NASA can purchase ISS services from Russia. The House has yet to take any specific action on INA, as SPACE.com notes, and could either pass the Senate bill or draft their own version.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 September 21 at 7:57 am ET Less than two days after NASA announced its new lunar exploration architecture, some in Congress—Republicans, no less—are considering cutting it. The New York Times reports that a group of fiscal conservatives have proposed “Operation Offset”, over $500 billion in budget cuts over 10 years to pay for hurricane relief without tax increases or deficit spending. Included in the plan, according to the Times, is “eliminating the Moon-Mars initiative that NASA announced on Monday, for $44 billion in savings”. That $44 billion, though, is only a fraction of the $104 billion NASA said Monday the new plan would cost, so it’s not immediately clear what Operation Offset would cut, nor over what period. The Times article includes comments from House Majority Leader Tom DeLay; he is opposed to some other aspects of the proposed cuts (delaying Medicare prescription drug coverage, for example) but did not directly address the proposed NASA cut, although you can imagine he would not be terribly happy about it.
In a similar vein, the Orange County Register, in an editorial yesterday, suggests that hurricane relief “is an opportunity to reform federal spending”, and that reform includes NASA. The paper suggests taking the $11 billion that was originally set to be redirected within NASA for the Vision and spending it instead on hurricane relief.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 September 20 at 7:35 am ET Now that NASA has formally released its Exploration Systems Architecture Study (ESAS)—even though many of the details of plan had been leaked to the public weeks, if not months, ago—members of Congress are weighing in. Nor surprisingly, people like Reps. Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) and Ken Calvert (R-CA) are supportive: Calvert said he “welcome[s]” the study while Boehlert calls ESAS “an effective way to move forward”, although he cautioned that “there is simply no credible way to accelerate the development of a Crew Exploration Vehicle unless the NASA budget increases more than has been anticipated.”
Not everyone shares their enthusiasm, though. Florida Today reports that some Republicans and Democrats are critical of the plan and its $100-billion price tag. This includes both liberals like Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), who said that the plan is “a terrible misallocation of scarce resources”, and Rep. Jeff Miller (R-FL), who believes that NASA should not “be immune to the budget knife.”
Somewhere in the middle is Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison. In a statement the avid supporter of the shuttle program said she would “do everything possible to keep the shuttle and crew exploration vehicle programs on course”, a declaration the Washington Post calls “enigmatic”.
Will the $100-billion price of the ESAS plan (quoted in nearly every news report about it) be an anchor that fatally weighs down the plan in the eyes of the public and Congress, in a time when hurricane relief and other programs compete for funding? Or, can NASA and its supporters make the plan so compelling the cost becomes much less of an issue? Those are the issues that will play out in the weeks and months to come.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 September 19 at 7:13 am ET I noted here last week a “hearing” last Wednesday on space security by an international organization called e-Parliament. I didn’t attend the hearing, but Taylor Dinerman did, and writes about the hearing in this week’s issue of The Space Review. He isn’t terribly enthused, to say the least, about the content of the hearing, which he considers to be an international effort to hinder the US’s ability to defend itself and its space assets.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 September 19 at 7:08 am ET Today is perhaps the biggest day for the Vision for Space Exploration since its unveiling last January: NASA is set to release its Exploration Systems Architecture Study (ESAS) with new details about how the agency plans to return humans to the Moon. Even without the details released, there are signs some members of Congress are skeptical about the prospects of the new plan: Reuters quotes Rep. Bart Gordon, ranking member of the House Science Committee, who said that winning approval for the plan “is going to be heavy lifting in the current environment, and it’s clear that strong presidential leadership will be needed.”
So even if that presidential leadership is there today, what happens in 2009 under a new administration? In an article in The Space Review, Daniel Hardin addresses the issue of the sustainability of the VSE. He calls for accelerating the plan, including a “phased retirement” of the shuttle fleet, such that by 2009 the shuttle is too close to retirement to extend the program, and the CEV nearly complete.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 September 16 at 7:17 am ET
- Take up a challenge proposed by a member of Congress
- Propose something that that member will never support
That’s the approach the Cato Institute has seem to have take with regards to budget cuts. On Tuesday House Majority Leader Tom DeLay was asked if Congress would consider budget cuts to help offset the costs of hurricane relief. DeLay’s response: “bring me the offsets, I’ll be glad to do it.” Well, Cato scholars Steve Slivinski and Chris Edwards proposed $62 billion in cuts that would offset what has been appropriated to date for hurricane relief. Included in those cuts was a plan to take $7.9 billion from NASA’s budget, a cut of roughly 50 percent. Cato’s rationale for the cut? “NASA is obsolete with the arrival of private manned space flight.” Um, whatever. That’s an argument that many in the “alt.space” community would disagree with, let alone a staunch NASA supporter like, say, Tom DeLay.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 September 16 at 7:09 am ET The Washington Post reported Friday that legislation has been introduced in the Senate to lift the Iran Nonproliferation Act (INA) restrictions on NASA. Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, introduced S.1713 (“A bill to make amendments to the Iran Nonproliferation Act of 2000 related to International Space Station payments”) yesterday. The bill would allow both NASA and US companies to purchase Russian space equipment until 2012. The Post reported that Lugar is “seeking advance approval from all 100 senators” to get the bill passed by unanimous consent. A floor vote on a House version of the bill could come next week.
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