By Jeff Foust on 2005 June 13 at 7:38 am ET Besides Tuesday’s hearing by the House Science Committee about the ISS, there are several other space-related hearings and votes scheduled for the coming weeks. The full House is scheduled to vote some time this week on the Science, State, Justice, and Commerce appropriations bill, which includes NASA’s $16.5-billion budget. (The Senate has yet to take any action on its version of this appropriation.) Meanwhile, Lori Garver, writing for The Planetary Society, reports that both the House and Senate will be moving forward later this month on authorization bills for NASA. The House Science Committee’s space subcommittee will mark up its version of the authorization bill on June 23, with the full committee scheduled to handle the bill a week later. The Senate Commerce Committee’s space subcommittee will mark up its authorization bill on June 23 as well, handing it over to the full committee for consideration the same day.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 June 10 at 8:41 pm ET Earlier this week Craig Steidle, NASA associate administrator for exploration, told his employees that he was planning to leave the agency by the end of the month. His departure was prompted by a planned reassignment to an unspecified position at a field center, which Steidle turned down. This looks like it may be the first in a wave of reassignments or resignations as new NASA administrator Michael Griffin seeks to put his own stamp on the agency: news@nature.com reports that other officials expected to leave in the near future include deputy administrator Fred Gregory, associate administrators Al Diaz and Bill Readdy, and deputy associate administrator Michael Kostelnik, who oversees the ISS program. Others are also expected to leave in the near future. At what point does the standard reorganization of officials during a change of leadership become something more like a purge?
By Jeff Foust on 2005 June 10 at 12:14 pm ET On Tuesday June 14 the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee has scheduled a hearing titled “Live from Space: The International Space Station”. The three witnesses are all astronauts with ISS experience: Michael Fincke, Peggy Whitson, and John Phillips. Of course, Phillips is actually on ISS right now; as the schedule notes, he will be “testifying live from Low Earth Orbit.” [emphasis in original]. Question: while past Congressional hearings have included witnesses appearing via teleconference, is this the first time a hearing has featured someone testifying from space?
By Jeff Foust on 2005 June 10 at 7:42 am ET A reader with some insight into the development of the report by the House Appropriations Committee on the Science, State, Justice and Commerce appropriations bill passed along an interesting provision that has a “95% chance” of making it into the final report:
NASA’s mission to research, investigate, and explore the limits of aeronautics and the outer reaches of space, is unique among Federal agencies. While NASA is a civilian agency, its pursuits and capabilities have a direct impact on the strategic and economic health of the nation. Too often, those who benefit most form NASA, the American people, are not aware of those successes, benefits and opportunities. The Committee directs NASA to engage in a national awareness campaign. The purpose of such a campaign is to provide NASA with a venue in various media (print, radio, television, Internet, etc.) to articulate missions, recent accomplishments and recruitment efforts to young Americans. This will also provide a mechanism by which to excite and encourage our young people to enter the fields of science, math and engineering and in doing so help maintain America’s leadership in those fields.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 June 10 at 7:30 am ET Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) is urging NASA and the federal government to consider the threat of an impact by a near Earth object (NEO). The Long Beach (CA) Press-Telegram reports that Rohrabacher will make “direct appeals” to NASA administrator Michael Griffin and other officials this week to urge them “to take seriously the threat of an asteroid hitting the Earth, and designate responsibility for defending against such an occurrence.” The article adds that both Rohrabacher and Rusty Schweickart, the former astronaut who has been beating the drum of late on one NEO in particular, 2004 MN4, “denied promoting the creation of an entirely new federal agency to fend off asteroids, as an online technology magazine had reported,” a reference to the Wired News article on the topic last week (which Wired has already corrected.)
By Jeff Foust on 2005 June 9 at 12:59 pm ET Today’s issue of the Washington Examiner (a free daily newspaper in the DC area) features a pair of op-eds that are at least mildly critical of the Vision for Space Exploration. In “2005: A Space Odious”, Charles Schultze, a senior fellow emeritus at the Brookings Institute, sounds off about the relative ineffectiveness of manned spaceflight versus robotic spacecraft in general, with an eye towards what he calls the “lunar-Mars program” (he does not use the VSE name):
Given the budget deficits the country faces over the next decade and the much larger problems posed by Social Security and Medicare in subsequent decades, we can ill afford to waste increasing billions of dollars on losing investments like the manned space program and especially on the massive expense of a lunar base followed by a trip to Mars.
In “A vision for understanding Earth”, Peter Bryant, a PhD astrophysicist turned software engineer and blogger, specifically emphasizes the importance of earth sciences versus the VSE:
In these times of uncertainty, one of this country’s highest priorities should be to protect public health and safety by gathering as much information about our planet’s life support systems as possible. We need a “Vision for Understanding Earth” more urgently than a “Vision for Space Exploration.”
While both make some good points, particularly about concerns that science programs at NASA are getting squeezed in the short term (something House appropriators agree with to some degree, having added $40 million for them in the FY06 budget), I am personally disappointed with the logic of both essays. Both try to establish a dichotomy: in one, you can either save money to restore Medicare and Social Security, or you can fling people across the solar system; in the other, you can either study the Earth to save us from natural disasters, or you can fling people across the solar system. Both, I think, are false dichotomies: Medicare and Social Security require fundamental structural changes that cannot be solved even if you disbanded NASA (good robotic science missions and all) and dispersed its budget to those programs. Climate change and other earth sciences studies are serious issues that require roles for multiple government actors, not just NASA. Rather than constructing simplistic either-or decision sets, let’s see if there’s a way to do both—and take advantage of what benefits of exploration we can reap in the process.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 June 9 at 7:50 am ET The Florida Legislature last month did not pass a bill this year that would have created a state space commission—legislators killed the bill because of unrelated amendments—but that’s not going to stop Governor Jeb Bush. According to Florida Today, Bush will establish the commission anyway through an executive order, most likely during a board meeting of the Florida Space Authority on Friday. The purpose of the commission, the paper states, “would be to protect the $4.5 billion annual space industry impact in the state” during the phase-out of the space shuttle and the ramp-up of the Vision for Space Exploration. A follow-up article today suggests that one thing such a panel might recommend is consolidating the various state agencies involved in promoting space business in Florida. The editors of the paper are all for it: they ask the commission to recommend devoting more resources to economic development, research, and education, among other items.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 June 8 at 8:02 am ET It’s not quite “the best of times, the worst of times”, but it was clear yesterday that civil space fared better than military space in the eyes of Congressional appropriators. The House Appropriations Committee signed off on a $16.5-billion budget for NASA, making no apparent changes to what the Science, State, Justice, and Commerce subcommittee approved last month. That budget is $15 million more than what President Bush requested, but adds over $50 million to aeronautics and $40 million to science programs. A Hampton Roads (Va.) Daily Press article points out what was cut to make up for those additions: $50 million from exploration programs, $10 million from ISS, and $10 million from “launch services” for the shuttle (it’s not clear what this last item is, particularly since the committee press release noted that the shuttle program is fully funded.) The Daily Press article also notes that Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) opposes any effort to cut ISS funding to support aeronautics.
The same committee, though, did not look as favorably on some controversial military space programs. The committee cut $126 million from the Space Radar program, and $400 million from the Transformation Communications Satellite (T-Sat) program, the committee’s news release noted. This leaves T-Sat with $436 million and Space Radar with only $100 million in the FY06 budget. House authorizers made similar cuts earlier this year, and Space News adds (subscription required) that the full committee is also “deeply concerned about the negative trends in space acquisition”, a sentiment shared by many on Capitol Hill.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 June 7 at 1:00 pm ET In a statement issued today, the American Geophysical Union (AGU) is calling on the administration and Congress to increase funding for NASA’s earth and space science programs. The AGU believes that funding requirements for shuttle return to flight, ISS assembly, and “launching the Moon-Mars initiative” are forcing NASA “to do more than it can with the resources provided”, with the sciences on the losing end. Of particular concern are cuts in two small spacecraft programs, Earth Space System Pathfinder and Explorer, which have led to delays or elimination of several planned or proposed missions, which will, the AGU claims, “degrade our weather forecasting, search and rescue, and life and property protection capabilities,” among other things. (There’s probably a bit of hyperbole there.)
The statement’s call to action, though, is pretty weak: the AGU simply asks NASA, the administration, and Congress “to renew their commitment to Earth and space science research” without any specific recommendations, such as increasing NASA’s overall budget or transferring money from other programs within the agency to shore up the science programs.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 June 6 at 7:22 am ET Some astronomers have speculated that the universe will end in a “big crunch” as it collapses back onto itself, a conclusion that has fallen out of favor as evidence grows that the expansion of the universe will continue to accelerate. However, NASA’s budget expansion will not accelerate, and as a result the agency’s astronomy programs are starting to experience their own version of the big crunch, Space News reports this week. Cost overruns on several programs, including JWST (as previously reported here), SIM, and other missions, along with the potential costs of a Hubble servicing mission, are putting the squeeze on NASA’s astronomy program, known simply as Universe. Neither JWST nor SIM are in danger of cancellation, but scientists, engineers, and project managers are faced with trying to at least reduce the size of the overruns.
How did these programs get into trouble? David Black, president of the Universities Space Research Association, speculates the agency’s shift to full-cost accounting may have played a role. “My observation is that few, if any, of the [NASA field] centers really got it right when they had to estimate their costs so that we are now seeing the cost of civil service manpower at some centers going through the roof.”
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