By Jeff Foust on 2005 January 14 at 6:34 am ET …to start thinking about the 2008 Presidential campaign. (This is not necessarily a good thing.) This week’s issue of Newsweek reports that the “first officially unofficial” Republican candidate may be Newt Gingrich, who has published his “obligatory political manifesto”, Winning the Future. Given Gingrich’s past interest in space policy, I skimmed through the book at a bookstore last night. Indeed, there is a page and a half devoted to space in the book, under the heading “Space, the Regulated Bureaucratic Frontier”. There, he succinctly restates his case for encouraging private space ventures, saying that President Bush’s exploration vision for NASA will fail otherwise.
Meanwhile, the Kansas City Star reported Thursday (free registration required) that Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS), who recently served as the chair of the science, technology, and space subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee, is weighing making a bid for the Presidency in 2008 as well. The article points to several signs, such as a number of recent trips to key states like Iowa and South Carolina, as well as private expressions of interest he has made to close acquaintances. Brownback shares Gingrich’s zeal for private space ventures, but is better known as a strong social conservative. His name recognition, though, is far behind most other potential candidates, including not just Gingrich but Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Bill Frist, and several others. However, 2008 is still a long way off.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 January 13 at 7:25 am ET It’s rare to hear the head of computing giant Intel talk about NASA or space policy in general, but in an interview with the magazine Industry Week Intel CEO Craig Barrett does mention NASA’s budget as part of a larger discussion of R&D spending in the US:
Additionally, there were substantial increases for the NASA budget this year, but most of this money is for facilities support and operations — not research. The President’s vision of a human on Mars cannot be realized without a substantial new and continuing commitment to basic physical sciences research.
It’s not clear what Barrett is referring to when he says that NASA’s budget increase went into “facilities support and operations”. A bigger question is, while physical sciences research is important in general, how critical is it to the Vision?
By Jeff Foust on 2005 January 13 at 7:18 am ET Hard to believe, but at least the Florida Senate thinks so, according to Florida Today. A Senate study found “nearly three dozen agencies, authorities and organizations” that mention space in their titles or mission statements. The Senate’s concern is that this profusion of space-related organizations may not give the state a united front. The solution? You guessed it, a commission, namely the “Commission on the Future of Space in Florida”. The commission—assuming legislation establishing it makes it through the Florida Legislature this year—will look at how better Florida can compete in the private space industry.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 January 10 at 7:41 am ET Space News reports Monday that NASA is taking advantage of the authority granted by Congress to redirect funding within its 2005 budget to keep some key programs funded. Among other things, NASA reshuffled funding to provide $52 million for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter program, short of the $70 million NASA originally requested but far above the $10 million that Congress allocated for it in the omnibus budget bill. To pay for it and other funding changes, NASA is cutting $100 million from the shuttle program by canceling several planned long-term upgrades; small spacecraft programs also suffered some cuts. While Congress approved $291 million to fund a Hubble repair mission, NASA is currently planning to spend only $175 million on that effort. NASA also lost nearly $130 million from an across-the-board 0.8-percent rescission applied to all government agencies “before the ink was dry on the 2005 Omnibus Appropriations Act”. (The Space News article includes a link to a spreadsheet with the details of the funding plan.)
The operating plan that NASA has crafted has been submitted to Congress for its review, and NASA is withholding public comment on the plan until Congress provides its feedback. Congressional sources told Space News that they are concerned that the plan does not describe how NASA will pay for $400 million worth of earmarks added by Congress to the budget.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 January 10 at 7:27 am ET That’s the question A.J. Mackenzie asks in an essay in this week’s issue of The Space Review. There have been several proposals to provide tax credits to those investing in new space ventures; as previously noted here, Ken Calvert, the incoming chair of the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee, has been pushing one such proposal for some time. Mackenzie believes that tax credits will not be effective because space companies do not have good business plans to most potential investors because of the long times it takes for space ventures to start making money as well as the limited size of the space market. Moreover, there is already a group of “true believer” investors out there willing to spend money on space companies without the existence of tax credits.
One thing Mackenzie leaves out in his article is that there is a test case for tax credits already: Rocketplane Ltd. won tax credits from the State of Oklahoma in a program patterned after the Calvert-Ortiz federal legislation. (Rocketplane executives call this “winning the O Prize”.) It remains to be seen, though, whether Rocketplane will be a success, and how big a role the tax credits will have played.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 January 8 at 10:45 am ET Late Friday NASA announced the three sites that will be finalists for the new NASA Shared Services Center (NSSC), a 500-person back office that will consolidate the financial, human resources, and similar tasks currently handled by the individual field centers. The three finalists—Cleveland, Huntsville, and Stennis Space Center in Mississippi—were selected from a group of six semifinalists that also included Houston, Newport News in Virginia, and Orlando.
As you might expect, that decision didn’t go over well in some of the losing cities, and politicians are speaking out. In Virginia the complaints were relatively mild, and based on a change in the site evaluation process from direct bids by cities to proposals from contractors who could choose from among the six sites. “I was very disappointed they changed the process in midstream,” Congresswoman Jo Ann Davis (R-VA), told the Hampton Roads Daily Press. “It wasn’t fair to any of the folks who put in their bids.”
The criticism was more strident from Orlando, where business leaders and politicians complained that the three finalists got a leg up by committing millions of dollars of local and state money to provide incentives. Worse, an internal NASA study had ranked Orlando the best choice among the six sites, the Orlando Sentinel reported. That upset Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL). “He feels that the decision was influenced, to some extent, by politics, since NASA itself had indicated that it wanted the center in Orlando, and that NASA’s own wishes were ignored,” Nelson spokesman Dan McLaughlin told the Sentinel. “It’s a sad day that the administration has yanked the rug out from under Orlando.” (Of course, if the administration was really involved, it would have meant that President Bush would have “yanked the rug out from under” his brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, as well.)
That comment, though, is nothing compared to a statement by Congressman Ric Keller (R-FL), relayed to the Sentinel through a spokesman: “I can’t believe the rocket scientists at NASA think a family would rather live in Cleveland than in Orlando.” Maybe that will make the upcoming games between the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers and Orlando Magic a little more interesting…
By Jeff Foust on 2005 January 8 at 10:25 am ET In Saturday’s Riverside (Calif.) Press-Enterprise (free registration required), Congressman Ken Calvert (R-CA) said he expects to be named the chair of the space and aeronautics subcommittee of the House Science Committee by the end of the month. Calvert, already a member of the subcommittee, is perhaps best known among space activists for sponsoring the “Invest in Space Now Act” (HR 2358 in the 108th Congress), better known as the Calvert-Ortiz Act after him and primary co-sponsor Rep. Solomon Ortiz (D-TX). The legislation would provide tax credits to investors in “qualified commercial space transportation vehicle development startup ventures.”
In the P-E article, Calvert has the support of Michael Gallo, president of San Bernadino-based Kelly Space and Technology. According to the article Gallo is “hopeful Calvert will help give smaller companies like his a fair shake against the big companies such as Lockheed Martin Corp. and Boeing Co.”
By Jeff Foust on 2005 January 7 at 7:48 am ET As expected, Congressman Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) will retain his chairmanship of the House Science Committee. Subcommittee assignments have not yet been announced, however.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 January 6 at 12:37 pm ET The White House is scheduled to release as early as today a new space transportation policy. This is the same policy that the administration has been working on for over two years and was reportedly nearly completed at the time of the Columbia accident, after which it was put on the back burner. Space News (subscription required) has some details on the policy’s contents, which do not appear very surprising: it will maintain existing policies, such the “assured access” policy to have both the Atlas 5 and Delta 4 EELVs available, as well as the policy that requires US payloads to launch on US launch vehicles except under special circumstances. It will also require NASA to work together with the Defense Department to study requirements for a new heavy-lift launch vehicle.
Update: 7pm The policy was indeed released Thursday afternoon.
By Jeff Foust on 2005 January 5 at 12:58 pm ET Just when you thought that the myth of a trillion-dollar Mars mission had died down comes this cartoon by the Washington Post’s Tom Toles. I didn’t see any contact information for Toles directly, but you can leave a message in a rarely-used washingtonpost.com forum on his cartoons.
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