By Jeff Foust on 2004 December 7 at 7:36 am ET On yesterday the Space Foundation issued a press release about the NASA funding in the FY 2005 budget. Aren’t they a little late to the party? Not really: first of all, the omnibus budget bill, while approved by Congress on November 20, had been bottled up there until Congress could get around to removing an unrelated provision (related to Congressional access to tax returns), which is being taken care of this week. Second, the Space Foundation issued a press release on November 22 with similar congratulations. So similar, in fact, that the two press releases have virtually identical wording. This section of Monday’s release shows one of the few changes:
Credit lies with many Members of Congress who were personally involved with the process, especially House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, Rep. Bud Cramer and Rep. Dave Weldon who, along with President Bush and NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe, all get top billing as the architects of this bipartisan budgetary and policy success.
Compare this to the November 22nd release:
Credit lies with many people, but President Bush, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, and NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe all get top billing as the architects of this bipartisan budgetary and policy success.
Perhaps the foundation simply wanted to give a shout out to Reps. Cramer and Weldon. Other sections of the two releases are, in fact, word-for-word identical. Of course, repetition is a time-honored learning tool…
By Jeff Foust on 2004 December 6 at 7:30 am ET An editorial in Monday’s Hampton Roads (Va.) Daily Press minces few words in its assessment of the Vision for Space Exploration:
Congress’ willingness to sink billions into a controversial and ill-defined space plan, at a time when war, homeland security and escalating domestic needs have strained the budget, is sheer fiscal irresponsibility… [G]iving O’Keefe latitude to shift money from other priorities to manned exploration is irresponsible. Spending billions on such a patently discretionary program while the deficit is soaring is irresponsible. Heaping money on a program with a stratospheric price tag, a still-fuzzy plan, and no clear payoff is irresponsible, especially while Congress is cutting domestic programs that target high-priority needs and yield real benefits, like environmental programs, financial aid for needy college students, and small-business loan subsidies.
If funding the exploration plan is, as the editorial repeatedly describes it, “irresponsible”, what should NASA be spending money on?
Congress and NASA would better serve the nation by investing in aeronautics research like that conducted at Langley Research Center. What Americans really need is not to put a few astronauts on the moon, but to get millions of people from one city to another and to deal with the congestion choking airports… Yet NASA cut aeronautics funding in half between 1998 and 2003 and wants to cut still more.
Needless to say, NASA Langley is located in the Hampton Roads area. If that editorial didn’t make it clear enough, an accompanying editorial criticizes NASA’s full-cost accounting measures that have increased the fees charged to uses of wind tunnel facilities at Langley, hurting the US aerospace industry while European rivals take advantage of similar, subsidized facilities. While it seems like a minor point, the editorial argues, “it is linked to larger and complex issues involving NASA’s priorities, management and commitment to space and aeronautics missions that make sense to the nation.”
By Jeff Foust on 2004 December 6 at 7:19 am ET Is House Majority Leader Tom DeLay an asset or a liability for NASA? In the short-term he certainly seems like an asset, particularly given his last-minute goal line stand during the final budget negotiations, threatening to block the omnibus budget bill unless $300 million was added to NASA’s budget, bringing it up to essentially the Administration’s original request. A front-page Washington Post article Monday describes DeLay’s role in getting NASA’s budget passed despite earlier efforts to cut the budget as well as some reluctance, if not opposition, to the Vision for Space Exploration in and out of Congress. The Post article notes:
DeLay, whose newly redrawn district includes the Johnson Space Center, and NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe have all but claimed a mandate; but even with the money and parts of the project already up and running, the questions that once threatened to kill the initiative still remain largely unresolved.
Is there, in fact, a “mandate” for the exploration vision? Greg Zsidisin suggests otherwise in an article in The Space Review, noting that there is not a strong consensus in support of the vision in Congress yet. Moreover, DeLay himself has some strong negatives, as well as some ethical problems, that could, through association, hurt the agency in the future. A Dallas Morning News article Monday notes that DeLay, by pushing through a controversial redistricting, has broken up what had been strong bipartisan cooperation within the Texas Congressional delegation, although members of both parties hope it can be restored. “Texas has always pulled together for NASA, for the aerospace industry, for transportation and border issues,” said Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX). “I’m confident we’ll do it again.”
By Jeff Foust on 2004 December 5 at 8:43 am ET Alex Hanna, a student at Embry Riddle and the “political officer” for Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS), asked me to post the following letter about some upcoming plans for SEDS’ National Action Network (NAN):
Continue reading Calling all students
By Jeff Foust on 2004 December 3 at 7:48 am ET The Space Access Society published an urgent alert late Thursday calling on people to contact their Senators in support of HR 5382. The Society’s Henry Vanderbilt recommends that those who wish to show their support for the bill should call or fax (but not write or email) their Senators by Monday. The Senate is scheduled to reconvene on Tuesday for a brief final lame-duck session that will be the last chance to pass the bill.
Vanderbilt said that the bill still has a “long-shot chance” at passage, although he added that apparently several Senators anonymously put holds on the bill when it came up for consideration last month, for reasons unknown. For that reasons, he said it makes more sense to ask all Senators to pass the bill rather than focus efforts on a single or small group of recalcitrant legislators. At his Cosmic Log weblog, MSNBC’s Alan Boyle said that the bill could have been caught in a “a cross-chamber dispute with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who is pressing the House to move forward with boxing-reform legislation.”
By Jeff Foust on 2004 December 3 at 7:38 am ET What’s this? An editorial that actually praises NASA’s budget increase? Don’t adjust your browser: it’s true the Cleveland Plain Dealer—the hometown newspaper for NASA’s Glenn Research Center—published an editorial Thursday that complimented NASA and Congress for the agency’s $16.2-billion budget. “To gain such an endorsement in a year when war and national security threats have dominated the headlines is remarkable,” the editorial notes, “and it’s heartening.” The editorial does caution that the flexibility included in the budget required “a greater need for wisdom on the part of Administrator Sean O’Keefe and other top decision-makers.” What’s also needed, the editorial concludes, are “many consecutive years of generous budgets for NASA.”
By Jeff Foust on 2004 December 2 at 7:42 am ET A couple of interesting commentaries from the right have very different perspectives on NASA and manned space exploration. At Tech Central Station, Charles Rousseaux, a speechwriter for Interior Secretary Gale Norton, congratulates Congress for passing the full NASA budget, as well as the House for approving HR 5382. Rousseaux does go a little overboard, claiming that “Mr. Bush simply insisted that the vision would be funded or a veto would fall”; there is little hard evidence that Bush would, in fact, have vetoed an omnibus budget bill has NASA’s budget fallen a few hundred million short of full funding.
Not every conservative is fond of the NASA budget, though. In an essay on the web site MichNews.com (“Most In-depth, Conservative, Honest News & Commentary”) Alan Caruba decries manned spaceflight in general, specifically the shuttle and station. Many of his objections are based on an article by William Tucker in the December issue of The American Enterprise, which is also critical of the shuttle and station; unlike Caruba, though, Tucker is more optimistic about private space ventures. There are a number of flaws in Caruba’s argument, the exposition of which will be left as an exercise to the reader. However, such commentary does demonstrate that supporters of the Vision for Space Exploration still have a lot of work to do to get people on board.
By Jeff Foust on 2004 December 2 at 7:18 am ET I received an email earlier this week announcing Americans for Space, a “campaign of American citizens devoted to realizing America’s destiny in space.” This effort seems primarily oriented towards informing people about the latest developments in space development, but the web site notes that future activities may include letter-writing campaigns and Congressional visits. Americans for Space is a project of the National Aerospace Development Center, a 501(c)3 nonprofit, so there will be a limit to the amount of political activity they can perform. (Full disclosure: the head of the NADC, Tim Huddleston, is a good acquaintance of mine, but we have not discussed the Americans for Space program.)
By Jeff Foust on 2004 December 1 at 7:44 am ET This week’s print edition of Space News has an article with a few interesting noted about HR 5382. According to the article, the bill was initially caught in a hold placed by Sen. John McCain on a number of “late-breaking bills” sent over from the House. McCain then agreed to a request by Sens. Sam Brownback and James Inhofe, supporters of the bill, to let the bill through. However, another senator then placed a hold on the bill just before the Senate recessed for Thanksgiving; the hold was anonymous but a source told Space News it appears to have come from a Democratic member.
If that hold is lifted—an uncertain proposition since no one appears to know who placed the hold and why—the bill still faces another obstacle. The bill’s passage during a brief, final lame-duck session next week is dependent on it going through on unanimous consent, meaning that any member could block it. The article suggests that Rep. James Oberstar, the Congressman who led the opposition to the bill in the House, might be able to persuade a Senator to do that. One Congressional aide mentioned in the article believes the bill has, at best, a 50-50 chance of passage: odds that actually sound pretty good given the obstacles it faces, and the number of times the bill has been declared all but dead in the past.
By Jeff Foust on 2004 November 30 at 6:52 pm ET A short UPI story describes some criticism of the Vision for Space Exploration from both sides of the political spectrum. At a Brookings Institute domestic policy forum Monday, Alice Rivlin, a former OMB director during the Clinton Administration, called the VSE a waste of money, saying “I think we can learn much more about the universe much cheaper from unmanned vehicles.” Her opinion was echoed by Bill Niskanen, chairman of the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute, who said that “the most important lesson” learned from manned space efforts was the high cost of sending people into orbit and “how little we’ve learned that could not be learned by satellites.” Both said that NASA was one agency where the Bush Administration could “easily” make cuts in an effort to reduce the budget deficit. Of course, given the massive size of the deficit, even major cuts in NASA’s budget would do little to meaningfully reduce the deficit.
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