By Jeff Foust on 2005 March 23 at 7:39 am ET Could Congress force NASA to repair the Hubble Space Telescope? That’s the suggestion of an article on the New Scientist web site Tuesday, which notes that the House Science Committee “could introduce legislation to force a rescue mission – using either robots or astronauts.” The committee is apparently considering such a move, depending on the contents of a number of reports, including an assessment of the risks of a shuttle servicing mission, it is expecting to receive from NASA as soon as next month. What new administrator nominee Mike Griffin thinks about Hubble—a very big question mark at the moment—will doubtless also play a role. A bigger question, though, may be whether Congress should force NASA to carry out a mission that the agency has, for better or worse, determined to be too risky—particularly in the case of the shuttle option—or otherwise unlikely to succeed.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 March 22 at 7:10 am ET Two Republican members of the US Senate have spoken out recently to defend NASA centers in their states that could be subject to cutbacks or (as some fear) closing. Tuesday’s Cleveland Plain Dealer reports that Sen. Mike DeWine (R-OH) acknowledged that this year’s budget battle for NASA Glenn “is going to be a tougher fight.” DeWine admits that “we know we’ll lose some” employees, but is worried about cuts steep enough that would bring the center below a “critical mass” needed to carry out research there.
Meanwhile, Tuesday’s Hampton Roads Daily Press features an op-ed by Sen. George Allen (R-VA), writing in response to an editorial the newspaper published Friday asking readers to speak out to Congress in support of NASA Langley. Allen writes that he and fellow Virginian “representatives in Washington share the newspaper’s concern and are acting to reverse the unwise, harmful proposals related to aeronautics research and development jobs that are essential to the Peninsula and America’s future.” He notes that he inserted a “Sense of the Senate” amendment in a budget bill last week which states the Senate’s “belief that $1.5 billion should be allocated to the new aeronautics vehicle systems programs over the next five years.” Of course, belief is one thing, but funding to support those programs is something else entirely…
By Jeff Foust on 2005 March 21 at 7:45 am ET As previously noted, some localities are bracing for a potential NASA center closing review (or BRAC, to use the DOD terminology), never mind the fact that there is no BRAC process planned for NASA at this time. In this week’s issue of The Space Review, Taylor Dinerman makes that case that a BRAC is a bid idea because of cultural issues. Namely, two of the leading centers that might be closed in a BRAC, Ames and Glenn, are among the few major “Northern” centers the agency has; the rest are in the South. (I would gently disagree with Taylor that Maryland is a Southern state; in my experience living in the Maryland suburbs of DC the last few years, the Baltimore-Washington corridor at the very least has a distinctly Northeastern, not Southern, feel.) Regardless, having all of NASA’s major centers concentrated in one area of the country may not help the agency win support nationwide. Moreover, the process of a BRAC itself would create a political fight that “would cripple the organization for years, just as a badly managed merger can wreck a pair of strong corporations.”
By Jeff Foust on 2005 March 21 at 6:40 am ET The New York Times reports Monday on how some non-exploration NASA programs, like aircraft flights to monitor tropical clouds, are being threatened by budget changes at the space agency. However, the problem is not just a change in NASA’s priorities given the Vision for Space Exploration (although that is a significant factor), but also the introduction of “full-cost accounting” at the agency. While such accounting is designed to reflect the true cost of programs, the Times reports that “the agency does not always shift money along with this new budget responsibility”, resulting in delays and even cancellation of some programs. Robert P. Kirshner, president of the American Astronomical Society, notes that this change means that any plans for a Hubble servicing mission involving the shuttle now have to account for the full cost of such a mission, but “they don’t charge shuttle trips to the space station in the new way.”
The article also notes some scientists, while personally enthused by the Vision for Space Exploration, are chafing against the “top-down” approach that ignores the research priorities that scientists have laid out in recent years through such mechanisms as the astronomy and planetary science decadal plans. But as Ghassem Asrar, deputy associate administrator for NASA’s science mission directorate, notes, the agency didn’t ask scientists “to pass judgment on the composition of the NASA program.”
By Jeff Foust on 2005 March 21 at 6:22 am ET A Houston Chronicle article Monday notes that Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) now has considerable influence over NASA in the Senate: she chairs both the science and space subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee as well as the commerce, justice, and science subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, both of which have oversight over NASA. She tells the Chronicle that she has been “very concerned about NASA’s drifting” in recent years, adding that “I think we now have a chance to refocus NASA and fulfill its mission and have a vibrant purpose.”
Continue reading Hutchison’s vision for NASA
By Jeff Foust on 2005 March 20 at 1:55 pm ET I noted in my article in The Space Review last week that Michael Griffin is not yet well known outside of the space community: on Google the top result for “Michael Griffin” was an escape artist who promises “½ intensley [sic] original magic”. Fortunately, over the last week Dr. Griffin is starting to get a little respect. The Michael Griffin search on Google still returns the escape artist at the top result, but my TSR article is now second (!!) and some SpaceRef pages with copies of his Congressional testimony rank fourth and fifth. Still in the top ten, though, are an Irish estate agent, a University of Texas football player, and a British furniture builder. (The results are a little different if you put his name in quotes.)
The same is true if you’re a little more informal and search on Mike Griffin instead: links to articles on MSNBC.com, SpaceRef, and even this blog show up in the top ten. However, the top entry belongs to Big Mike Griffin, a singer who has “taken the biker – blues community by storm”.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 March 18 at 12:45 pm ET Earlier this week I noted that a Senate hearing would likely be one of the last where Peter Teets, the acting Air Force secretary and director of the NRO, would appear. That indeed is the case: the Defense Department announced today that Teets has submitted his resignation, effective a week from today. Teets had been acting secretary of the Air Force for only couple of months; he had been the Undersecretary of the Air Force, as well as the DOD’s “Executive Agent” for space, since 2001. (Teets previously had been president of Lockheed Martin, retiring in 1999.)
The departure of Teets, who was the top-ranking official with the DOD primarily associated with space, threatens to create something of a power vacuum for military space issues within the DOD. Robert Dickman, who had been the deputy for military space within the office of the Undersecretary, left the Pentagon last month to become executive director of the AIAA. All this comes at a time when many major military space programs (like Advanced EHF, SBIRS, space-based radar, etc.) have come under considerable Congressional scrutiny.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 March 18 at 7:52 am ET NASA officials have stated on a number of occasions that they have no plans right now to close one or more of its field centers; instead, current efforts are focused on closing specific facilities at those centers. That, however, hasn’t stopped people from taking preemptive action to fight potential center closings.
The AP reported yesterday that Ohio state senator Robert F. Spada, a suburban Cleveland Republican who is also Assistant Majority Floor Leader, has introduced a resolution to “memorialize Congress to take appropriate action so that NASA Glenn Research Center is excluded from the list of base closures for the Base Realignment and Closure process.” (The full text of the resolution, SCR 12, wasn’t available yet on the Ohio Senate’s web site as of this morning.) Never mind the fact that there is no “Base Realignment and Closure process” at NASA right now. The resolution was mixed in with a number of others designed to protect Ohio military bases that could be subject to an authentic BRAC.
Meanwhile, the Hampton Roads Daily Press, in an editorial Friday, urges its readers to “jump and shout” to let NASA and Congress know not to close the Langley Research Center. The editors don’t take at face value the statement by NASA associate administrator Vic Lebacqz that there are no plans to close Langley, comparing his one-word denial (“no”) to previous infamous statements by Bill Clinton and Paul Wolfowitz (ouch!). The editorial asks Virginia senators John Warner and George Allen to press NASA administrator nominee Michael Griffin on this during his upcoming confirmation hearing.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 March 17 at 7:42 am ET The Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun reports that the Japanese government is considering a rather bold new space policy for that country that would include manned space flights. (Perhaps the headline “JAXA seeks to bodily go” is really a pun rather than a typo. Then again, maybe not.) The plan, scheduled for approval later this month, calls for modifying the H-2A Transfer Vehicle (HTV) originally developed as an unmanned cargo spacecraft for the ISS into a manned vehicle ready for crewed missions by around 2015. The plan also calls for JAXA “to secure superiority in the use of the moon’s resources” in advance of participation in an international lunar base by 2025.
The plan does not come cheap: the first ten years of the program would cost Japan 250-280 billion yen ($2.4-2.7 billion) a year, compared to JAXA’s current annual budget of 180 billion yen ($1.7 billion). However, many Japanese have felt that their space program has fallen behind China’s: the failure of an H-2A less than two months after China launched its first manned mission in October 2003 was a rather pointed demonstration of those worries. If a new “space race” does develop, it will not be between the US and China, but between China and Japan (and perhaps India and South Korea as well.)
By Jeff Foust on 2005 March 16 at 6:45 pm ET The Washington Post has an article in today’s issue that goes into more details about the planned cuts both in employees and facilities at the agency’s various field centers. Besides the job cuts, which have been previously reported, the article indicates that 14 facilities at NASA field centers, including ten wind tunnels, could be closed. Also on the chopping block is the US-Japanese centrifuge module for the ISS, currently being built at NASA Ames. One interesting note is that, with the lack of a full-time administrator, the planning for the cuts is currently led not by acting administrator Fred Gregory but by associate administrator for exploration Craig Steidle.
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