Space Politics

“Space for Progress” forum

By Jeff Foust on 2004 July 13 at 8:55 am ET

I received the following press release yesterday about an event on Capitol Hill next week on a fairly generic topic: American leadership in space. It has a rather eclectic mix of speakers, including Pete Worden; the press release also uses phrases like “Humanistic Dialog” that, at the very least, start raising eyebrows. I probably won’t have the time to go myself, but perhaps some readers’ curiosities will be piqued enough to attend:
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SEI versus VSE

By Jeff Foust on 2004 July 12 at 12:45 pm ET

In this week’s issue of The Space Review, Dwayne Day has an interesting article comparing the rollout of the Space Exploration Initiative 15 years ago this month with the rollout of the Vision for Space Exploration six months ago. The brief summary of the article is that while NASA and the Bush Administration learned some lessons from the failure of SEI, they have still stumbled in several areas, including cost and budget credibility and various issues with the rollout itself (such as not giving the new policy an official name until several months after its announcement.) A noteworthy quote about the plan’s future: “One gets the distinct sense that Republicans, Democrats and America’s potential international space partners are all marking time, waiting for the election, before they will invest much energy into the new policy.”

AIA’s letters to the candidates

By Jeff Foust on 2004 July 11 at 12:07 pm ET

The Aerospace Industries Association issued a press release several days ago that it has sent out letters to the two major Presidential candidates, President Bush and Senator Kerry, asking them to support full funding of NASA. The letters are fairly straightforward, but there are notable differences between the two versions. The letter sent to Bush is largely congratulatory, thanking Bush for proposing the Vision for Space Exploration and encouraging “your sustained support” for the FY05 NASA budget. The letter sent to Kerry, on the other hand, notes that “you support increased funding for NASA, but find its new vision lacking.” The letter adds that the AIA is working with the Kerry campaign to “to better understand your vision for America’s future role in space exploration and NASA’s important role in aeronautics research.”

America’s Priorities have changed

By Jeff Foust on 2004 July 10 at 8:59 am ET

You may remember a couple months ago that the AFL-CIO published a web site, “America’s Priorities”, to accompany a 30-second commercial that suggested that President Bush, by promoting a new space exploration vision, was out of touch with what ordinary Americans thought was important. (You can refresh your memories by reading the original post on this topic and a follow-up from a week later.) I checked the web site yesterday and noticed that the site has been revamped, eliminating anything on the site that mentioned, directly or otherwise, the exploration plan. They have also removed the link to the commercial, although it is still available here.

(Checking the site was prompted by a conversation with someone in the Cleveland area, who noted that the site appeared to have changed. Apparently when the ad first came out, the AFL-CIO aired it on TV stations there for a few days, until unions representing employees at NASA Glenn protested.)

AIAA Commercial Space Roundtable update

By Jeff Foust on 2004 July 9 at 12:51 pm ET

The AIAA has updated slightly its planned Commercial Space Rountable on Capitol Hill on July 13. The notable changes are the removal of Sens. Brownback and Nelson from the program and the addition of Rep. Boehlert in their place. Buzz Aldrin has also been added to the program to provide closing remarks. Even with a slightly slimmer list of participants, it is going to be a challenge to fit this all in to two and a half hours.

HR3752 deadline?

By Jeff Foust on 2004 July 9 at 12:32 pm ET

Clark Lindsey reports at HobbySpace RLV News today that for HR3752 to be enacted this year, the Senate needs to pass it by July 20; after that the legislative calendar becomes too crowded with other issues to devote any time to it. I have not heard the July 20 deadline before, but it makes some sense, given the limited time Congress is in session through the election. To the best of my knowledge the bill is still trapped in a dispute over the definition of a suborbital vehicle; reports several weeks ago that a solution was in the works appear to have been false. Given the momentum that the suborbital industry has built up in recent months, particularly with the successes of SpaceShipOne, it would be a shame to let this bill die in the Senate.

More notes from the STA breakfast

By Jeff Foust on 2004 July 9 at 9:43 am ET

In his speech, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay mentioned that the House Appropriations Committee plans to mark up the NASA budget bill before it leaves for August recess in a couple weeks. His comments suggested that the committee might not give NASA the budget increase that the Bush Administration requested: “I encourage you to work hard and not be discouraged,” he said, “because, as always, the final bill is going to be written in the conference committee.”
George Whitesides of the NSS noted that about 60 people have signed up to participate in the Moon-Mars Blitz next week.
In some introductory comments, Rep. Ken Calvert (R-CA) had this to say: “Sell this thing, sell it across America, and start in upstate New York.” This is an apparent reference to Reps. Sherwood Boehlert, chair of the House Science Committee, and/or James Walsh, chair of the subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee that deals with NASA. The two, who represent adjacent districts in central New York, have been at least mildly critical of some aspects of the proposed exploration plan.

NASA authorization pessimism

By Jeff Foust on 2004 July 8 at 11:54 pm ET

In comments at a Space Transportation Association breakfast on Thursday, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said it was unlikely that Congress would pass an authorization bill for NASA this year. “To be honest with you, we’re running out of time,” he said. There are only two weeks in the legislative calendar after this week before the August recess, and only three weeks after that before Congress is set to adjourn for the elections, although work on appropriations bills may keep Congress in session until the first or second week of October. With such a limited schedule, “that’s very difficult to get a reauthorization bill to the President by then.” Instead, he wants to focus attention on appropriations legislation.

DeLay said, though, that the House won’t give up working on the legislation, either to lay the groundwork for getting the bill passed next year or in case “lightning strikes” this year. Responsibility for the legislation in the House apparently still rests with Science Committee chairman Sherwood Boehlert, although there are apparently some differences of opinion between Boehlert and DeLay about the specifics of the legislation. “Chairman Boehlert assures me he is working on something, and we have had several discussions” about the details of the bill, he said. “Boehlert said he supports the parameters of the President’s vision, but not all the specifics, like cost and timeframe, which in my mind are critical components.” DeLay didn’t indicate when he believed the legislation would be introduced in the House. The Senate introduced an authorization bill for NASA last month.

Milspace budget issues

By Jeff Foust on 2004 July 8 at 11:36 pm ET

This week’s print edition of Space News has a couple of interesting articles about some budget problems that some military space programs are facing:

The Defense Department has asked Congress for permission to reprogram $102 million of the $271 million that had been appropriated for FY2004 for the Mobile User Objective System (MUOS), a satellite communications system. The Pentagon wants to use the money instead to cover costs associated with Iraq “and on terrorism in general”, according to the report. In addition, House and Senate appropriators have trimmed the Pentagon’s FY2005 budget request of $571 million for MUOS by $100-110 million. The combination likely means that MUOS will be delayed at least a year, pushing out the first satellite launch to 2010 or beyond. The reprogramming request is particularly ironic, the article notes, because MUOS is designed to provide battlefield forces with much greater bandwidth, something the Iraq war proved was desperately needed.
Senate appropriators have also zeroed out funding for the Operationally Responsive Spacelift effort, a program to develop a small launch vehicle (SLV) that could launch on short notice, as well as a common aero vehicle (CAV) payload for the launchers. No reason was given for the cut. House appropriators, in contrast, added money to both programs, increasing the $35-million SLV budget by $5 million and the $21.6-million CAV budget by $10 million.

These issues, as well as other military space efforts like Space Based Radar and Transformational Communications, are being worked on by conferees this week as they try to reconcile the House and Senate versions of the Defense Department budget.

Kids say the darnedest things

By Jeff Foust on 2004 July 7 at 7:12 pm ET

The comments section of a previous post has been taken over by a discussion of an unrelated article on space commercialization that appeared in Wednesday’s issue of the Springfield (Mass.) Republican. The article reads something like a high school essay, perhaps because it was, apparently, written by a high school student. Alex Dalsey gets credit for mentioning HR 3752 in his essay, but otherwise this is a pedestrian essay about how “Capitalism” (as Dalsey calls it) could work for good or evil in space. I think the problem of unbridled capitalism running rampant in space is something most space commercialization advocates would love to have. In the end Dalsey calls for “an environment of controlled capitalism, with restrictions on pure ownership of property, and protection of natural order systems.” I’m not sure what exactly that means, and I’m not sure the author does, either.