Space Politics

HR 3752 vs. S 2772

By Jeff Foust on 2004 September 10 at 12:32 pm ET

In late July Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) introduced S. 2772, the Space CHASE Act, in essence the Senate version of HR3752 with some changes in the wording to assuage the concerns of one suborbital vehicle company. However, Clark Lindsey reports on HobbySpace that the Senate doesn’t plan to consider S. 2772; instead, it will consider HR3752 and incorporate the changes in S. 2772 into it. Confused? Me too, but so long as the legislation gets passed and signed into law I won’t complain…

Funding the exploration studies

By Jeff Foust on 2004 September 9 at 11:12 pm ET

Last week NASA awarded $27 million in concept studies for the Vision for Space Exploration, notably on the development of the Crew Exploration Vehicle and human missions to the Moon. One question the awards raised, though, is where the money was coming from: those studies weren’t in the original FY2004 budget, for obvious reasons, and Congress had rejected some earlier requests by NASA to reprogram FY04 funding to support new programs like Centennial Challenges. Writing for UPI, Frank Sietzen reports that NASA was able to persuade Rep. James Walsh (R-NY), chairman of the House appropriations subcommittee that oversees NASA, to agree to a request to reprogram $75 million in the FY04 budget to pay for the studies. (The article, unfortunately, doesn’t mention where the $75 million came from, or what else besides the concept studies will be funded by this reprogramming.) The article suggests that Walsh, whose subcommittee cut over $1 billion from NASA’s FY05 budget proposal in July, might be more open now to supporting the Vision. That remains to be seen, however, and since the Senate appears likely to make cuts of its own to NASA’s budget (although perhaps not to the same severe degree as the House has to date), the NASA budget saga is still far from over.

Senate hearing on the shuttle program

By Jeff Foust on 2004 September 8 at 8:59 pm ET

The full Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing Wednesday morning about the status of the space shuttle program. (There was little public notice for this hearing that I was aware of: when I checked the web site of the committee, as well as the Senate’s complete list of upcoming hearings, on Tuesday morning, there was no mention of this hearing.) Sean O’Keefe and Tom Stafford were the witnesses at the hearing, discussing how NASA’s return to flight activities were proceeding. A few notes from the news coverage of this hearing:

According to the AP, O’Keefe said the total cost of returning the shuttle to flight could reach $2.2 billion, a figure far higher than previously reported. (Interestingly, O’Keefe’s testimony includes costs that total only $1.1 billion.)
When asked by Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS) about the chance that cost could increase further, O’Keefe said they NASA was “getting a lot closer” to the final cost, and that they “don’t see any new unknowns coming down the road.” (Of course, if you could see them, then they wouldn’t be unknown. Perhaps O’Keefe was thinking of Rumsfeld’s “known unknowns” versus “unknown unknowns”.)
Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) blamed some of the damage Hurricane Frances caused at KSC on a lack of money NASA has spent on upkeep of those buildings. “NASA, to try to do everything it wants to do, takes away from… maintenance of facilities,” Reuters quoted him as saying.
Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS) didn’t sound very enthusiastic about the Vision for Space Exploration. “The idea of just going to Mars doesn’t frankly excite a lot of people in my state,” he said, according to Reuters. “They don’t care whether there’s water up there or not; they’d rather have asphalt on the roads.”

Space policy on The Space Show

By Jeff Foust on 2004 September 7 at 12:53 pm ET

Tonight’s episode of The Space Show radio program will feature an interview with space policy expert Jim Muncy. The topics of the interview weren’t mentioned in the announcement, but I assume there will be a fairly broad discussion of items such as the NASA budget and the prospects for HR3752/S.2772. The show starts at 10 pm EDT; check the web site to find out how to listen online.

CBO report on NASA exploration plan

By Jeff Foust on 2004 September 6 at 4:15 pm ET

Late last week, while most of official Washington was on vacation or at the RNC (or both), the Congressional Budget Office released its analysis of the proposed budget for the Vision for Space Exploration. This is a pretty extensive analysis of the costs reported by NASA for the vision through 2020, and how these costs might increase. I’ve only had time to skim through a report, but here are a few key points:

NASA’s own estimates for the vision calculate that returning humans to the Moon will cost $63.8 billion through 2020. This includes $24.7 billion for the CEV and $17.9 billion to develop a heavy-lift launch capability. Robotic missions to the Moon and Mars will cost an additional $29 billion through 2020.
Based on an analysis of historic cost growth in past NASA programs, the CBO estimates that the exploration program will cost $32 billion more than planned through 2020. A separate analysis, using costs of analogous programs, like Apollo, resulted in cost growth between $36-61 billion through 2020, depending on the complexity of the robotic precursor missions.
Using the “go as you can pay” approach, the CBO report examined what would happen if the projected budget was maintained and the schedule allowed to slip. The result was a delay of between three and seven years in the planned 2020 manned lunar landing.
Alternatively, the cost increases can be accommodated by cutting between 24-46 percent of the budget of all non-Moon/Mars science programs, or by cutting all Mars robotic missions and trimming 6-29 percent of other science programs.

One thing I did not notice the report address (and perhaps I overlooked it) is the size of the reserves in NASA’s proposed budgets. If the budget estimates already include significant margins for overruns, it would mitigate many of the problems the CBO report revealed, although I would be surprised if it completely eliminated all of them.

As Congress returns this week, this should make interesting fodder for the debates on NASA’s FY05 budget.

DeLay and Paul on NASA

By Jeff Foust on 2004 September 3 at 12:02 pm ET

The Clear Lake (TX) Citizen has a couple of articles this week about politics and space. One article discusses the visit last month of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay to the Univ. of Houston. DeLay apparently has high hopes for the NASA budget which don’t (as of yet) appear to be justified by events:

“We’re going to start with $17-18 billion and that’s just the beginning,” he said. “It will be an educational process and we’ll let the Congress decide.”

DeLay also went on to call phasing out the shuttle and completing the ISS as issues that are “minor in scope.” A separate article discussed another reception for Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), nominally a Republican but in reality more of a libertarian. Paul stated that events in Iraq have drained money away that could have been spent on NASA:

“If you had a space program in Baghdad, you could probably get money for it but Congress is cutting our space program budget…”

Paul, as some may remember, was the only member of the House to vote against HR3752 earlier this year.

Republican Party platform, 2004 edition

By Jeff Foust on 2004 September 1 at 1:41 am ET

The 2004 Republican Party platform is available (although, curiously, not on the GOP’s own web site). At 48,000 words, there is a little something for everyone in it, including space advocates:

The President’s support for NASA and vision for space exploration will also enhance scientific development and technological breakthroughs.

The bad news, though, is that this is all the platform says about space even though it is one of the longest party platforms written, and twice the size of the 2004 Democratic platform. It’s also considerably less than what the 2000 GOP platform had to say, and seems to couch its support for space exploration solely on its ability to provide technical spinoffs. (The sentence is at the end of a section titled “Research and Development” and is preceded by sentences on nanotechnology and fuel cell research.) For advocates, this has to be seen as a disappointing development.

Republican Party’s (old) platform on space

By Jeff Foust on 2004 August 31 at 11:40 am ET

There’s been some discussion about the Republican party’s platform which includes some discussion of space policy:

In addition, the Republican Party will remain committed to America’s leadership in space research and exploration. We will ensure that this Nation can expand our knowledge of the universe, and with the support of the American people, continue the exploration of Mars and the rest of the solar system. We consider space travel and space science a national priority with virtually unlimited benefits, in areas ranging from medicine to micro-machinery, for those on earth. Development of space will give us a growing economic resource and a source of new scientific discoveries.

There’s a problem, though: this is from the 2000 platform, not the 2004, as you can see here on C-SPAN. The 2004 platform has not been released yet, to the best of my knowledge, so we will have to see what’s changed between 2000 and 2004.

Administrivia: a request for comment civility

By Jeff Foust on 2004 August 31 at 11:21 am ET

While I appreciate a spirited debate on space policy topics as much as anyone, the exchange of comments in a few recent posts has taken on a more negative tone among several participants. Please, folks, discuss and debate the topics, not level attacks on one another. Let’s at least act like adults…

Debating Aldridge

By Jeff Foust on 2004 August 30 at 11:44 pm ET

Virtually all the public comments made by space advocacy groups after the release of the Aldridge Commission’s final report were overwhelming positive. However, as I note in an article in The Space Review, the Mars Society and its leader, Robert Zubrin, are actually quite negative about the report. The article goes into the details of Zubrin’s opposition to the report, as well as his claim that the report has been “instantly forgotten”. That assessment may be premature—it’s been only two and a half months since the report’s release, and progress implementing the report’s recommendations was bound to be slow, particularly this time of year—but it does raise the question of just how effective the report will be in the long run.