By Jeff Foust on 2004 May 14 at 8:41 pm ET As noted here last week, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, a Houston-area Republican, plans to take a prominent role in supporting the Vision for Space Exploration by introducing a version of a NASA authorization bill that includes the President’s plan. DeLay is also speaking out more in support of the plan. Last week on Capitol Hill he addressed that “National Keep It Sold” advocacy group, which was spending the week in Washington visiting Congressional offices to drum up support for the plan. His remarks were strong on rhetoric but light on details. He called the plan “a vision of singular courage and clarity” that was “driving America toward a single red dot in the night sky, 50 million miles from earth.” He also discussed the opposition to the plan: “Critics question the president’s timing. They question his budget numbers, his priorities, and his public support. When they question him, ladies and gentlemen, they question us.” According to the Clear Lake (TX) Citizen, he gave a similar speech a Rotary meeting back in Texas last Friday.
By Jeff Foust on 2004 May 13 at 11:39 pm ET In a column published earlier this week by the Naples (Fla.) Daily News, Ben Bova suggests that extending the life of the Hubble Space Telescope could pose a political threat to its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope:
NASA’s plans call for a bigger and better space telescope to be sent into orbit before this decade is over, or soon after 2010. If the Hubble is still performing well at that time, might not some politicians try to kill the new telescope, or at least delay it for another decade or so? Politics is not restricted to the politicians, and the politics inside the space agency can be just as tricky and fierce as those in the Senate.
While Bova goes on to call NASA “a collection of fiefdoms”, a description that many people would agree with, he forgets that both Hubble and Webb fall in the domain of the same fiefdom, namely, NASA Goddard. I don’t think that Goddard, or its backers in Congress, notably Sen. Barbara Mikulski, are willing to sacrifice Webb to keep Hubble alive.
By Jeff Foust on 2004 May 12 at 1:03 pm ET A few small updates about the Space Exploration Alliance:
- As noted in the comments of the previous posting on this, some organizations, including the NSS and The Mars Society, have posted press releases about the new alliance, although there’s not much in the way of additional details.
- NASA Watch notes that both the Space Foundation and the Space Transportation Association were asked to join the alliance but declined. I can imagine why the foundation said no (they have their own group, the Coalition for Space Exploration); the STA also has ties to the coalition as well.
- Apparently one of the people in attendance at the SEA announcement was Robert Park, who wrote a short blurb about it in Friday’s edition of What’s New. He commented about the lack of press present at the event (understandable, since such events have narrow appeal, and I’m not sure this particular event was widely publicized: I never got a notice about it, and I know several of the people involved in the formation of the alliance!) Park can’t resist adding a tasteless zinger at the end of his blurb: “One thing was clear, if travelers to Mars are the same size as the industry reps at the press conference, they’re gonna need a big launch vehicle.” Thanks for the insightful commentary, Dr. Park…
By Jeff Foust on 2004 May 11 at 1:02 pm ET That’s the claim of a UPI article by Frank Sietzen published Monday. Sietzen writes that, according to a “senior administration source”, Bush will make an address about his new space policy in early summer, which would be his first public statement on the policy since his January 14 speech announcing it (assuming he doesn’t say anything in the interim.) The source doesn’t provide many details about what Bush would say other than that it would “reiterate Bush’s call for advanced human exploration of space.” A few other interesting items in the article:
- Bush’s speech will be timed to coincide with the release of the Aldridge Commission’s final report, which the article claims will be released in July. This is later than other reports, like this SPACE.com article published Tuesday, which cite an early June date for the report’s publication.
- A plan to reorganize NASA is still in the works and may not be done by the time the Aldridge Commission’s report is released. The reorganization will be the “most far-reaching revamping” of NASA since its creation, but it will not involve closing any field centers. A Space News article this week noted that one aspect of the reorganization will be the merging of the Earth Science and Space Science divisions within NASA, a decision bound to create some controversy in the scientific community.
- NASA is weighing whether to move up the date of the launch of Japan’s Kibo module for the ISS, concerned that further delays could prompt Japan to cancel its participation in the project and put Kibo “in a science museum.”
One caveat with the article: it relies entirely on anonymous sources, apparently within both the White House and NASA. Not knowing who those sources are, and their motivations for speaking, means that their statements should be taken with at least a grain of salt.
By Jeff Foust on 2004 May 7 at 9:40 pm ET As expected, a group of space advocacy organizations announced today that they have joined forces in a loose alliance to promote the new space exploration initiative (read the coverage by SPACE.com and the AP.) The alliance was announced today in Washington at the National Press Club. They have assembled a wide range of participating organizations, ranging from rather mainstream industry associations to some rather, ah, strident advocacy organizations:
- Aerospace Industries Association
- Aerospace States Association
- American Astronautical Society
- American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
- California Space Authority
- Florida Space Authority
- The Mars Society
- National Coalition of Spaceport States
- National Space Society
- The Planetary Society
- ProSpace
- Space Access Society
- Space Frontier Foundation
Interestingly, I checked the web sites of a number of these groups as of late Friday and didn’t see any press releases or any other information about this alliance.
By Jeff Foust on 2004 May 6 at 12:58 pm ET A blurb in this week’s Aviation Week (not online) notes that Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX), the House majority leader, has taken over work on introducing a NASA authorization bill that would support the President’s space exploration plan. House Science Committee chairman Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY), had planned to introduce the President’s version of the NASA authorization “as a courtesy” while working on his own version of the legislation, which he apparently plans to continue. With both DeLay’s influence as well as his interest in the plan—he is one of the few Congressional leaders to broadly praise the plan, and his district now includes JSC—this move would seem to raise the odds that the President’s plan will make it through the House, at least in an authorization bill.
By Jeff Foust on 2004 May 5 at 9:40 am ET During his testimony before the Aldridge Commission on Monday afternoon, George Whitesides, the new executive director of the National Space Society, noted that there would be an announcement on Friday about a new coalition of advocacy organizations that will work together to support the new exploration initiative. He didn’t offer any additional details, but it sounds like this effort I noted here last month. As the comments to that post note, the Planetary Society kicked off its own “Aim for Mars” public outreach/activism effort earlier this week, although it’s not clear this effort, or the society itself, will be part of this broader coalition.
Meanwhile, the National Keep It Sold organization is in Washington this week to lobby to support human space programs in general and the new exploration initiative in particular. This organization has been around for more than a decade, and is most active around the NASA field centers most closely linked to spaceflight (KSC, JSC, MSFC, and Stennis). It also has one of the quirkiest names—keep what sold, exactly? Florida Today reports the organization is going to change that by unveiling a new name this week: Citizens for Space Exploration.
By Jeff Foust on 2004 May 4 at 1:48 pm ET An article in Aerospace Daily today (not available online) discusses John Kerry’s views on NASA and the Bush space plan, based primarily on an interview with Jason Furman, the candidate’s economic policy director. Furman told Aerospace Daily that Kerry doesn’t support the new exploration plan “mainly because he thinks it would cost too much.” (The article doesn’t mention how much is too much for Kerry or Furman.) Furman did add that Kerry “supports human space flight in general, but thinks it should be done with the best science and in a way that is affordable,” two key criteria Kerry believes the current plan doesn’t meet. Kerry doesn’t have a specific plan, according to Furman, but “that is something he would work with the best scientists—if he were elected president—to figure out, what the goals of NASA should be and how it should be oriented.” While it’s no surprise that Kerry is against the new space initiative, given that it is a Bush Administration project, this is one of the strongest statements to that effect to date.
By Jeff Foust on 2004 May 3 at 1:06 pm ET To most, the new space exploration initiative announced by President Bush in January is the new national space policy. In fact, a phased review of overall national space policy, started in June 2002, is still ongoing. At the International Policy Seminar, part of the AIAA’s Air and Space Symposium late last month, Brett Alexander of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy outlined the status of that policy review (see his PowerPoint slides). To date the review has produced only two documents: the Commercial Remote Sensing Space Policy in April 2003 and the Space Exploration Policy in January 2004. Several other policies are still under review:
- Space-Based Positioning, Navigation, and Timing Policy, better known as GPS policy. This policy covers the civilian and military roles in the GPS system, as well as cooperation between GPS and Europe’s Galileo system. Alexander said they are neading the end of the review of this policy, but offered no specific date when it would be published.
- Space Transportation Policy. This review was in progress and, according to various sources, 90-95% complete around the time of the Columbia accident. The review was then put on hold but has since resumed. Alexander said he hoped to have this policy completed in the next couple of months.
- National Space Policy. This would be an “overarching” national space policy designed to establish goals and priorities for the civil, commercial, and military use of space by the US. This review is scheduled to start soon, and Alexander said it should be wrapped up by the end of the year.
By Jeff Foust on 2004 May 3 at 12:28 pm ET Most people in the space industry recognize HR 3752, the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act of 2004, as the bill that codifies into law the definitions of suborbital rocket and suborbital trajectory, and ensures vehicles that fall under those definitions are regulated by the FAA’s space transportation division and not its aviation division. (Those definitions were formally adopted by the FAA and published in the Federal Register last fall, but by putting them into the bill it makes it much harder to change them in the future.) However, as I point out in an article today in The Space Review, there are other aspects of this bill that could prove equally useful, if not more so, for the suborbital RLV industry. This includes waivers of second-party (i.e., passenger) liability, which will ease the insurance burden these companies face. In addition, the bill establishes an experimental permit regime similar to experimental certificates in aviation that will (or at least should) be easier to obtain. The House overwhelmingly passed the bill two months ago, but the Senate has yet to take action on it, but then, the Senate is taking very little action on any legislation these days.
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