By Jeff Foust on 2004 April 1 at 7:56 pm ET An article Thursday in the Times Ledger family of neighborhood newspapers that serve the New York City borough of Queens reports that Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) has introduced legislation to provide additional funding for near Earth asteroid searches:
A Queens congressman made a move in the House of Representatives last Thursday to stop Armageddon.
U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-Kew Gardens) introduced the Space act, which would channel $4 million into NASA coffers next year to underwrite the cost of sharing four Department of Defense telescopes to help track and catalog dangerous, near-Earth asteroids.
Curiously, a check of Thomas failed to turn up any mention of the bill. The article states that although Weiner introduced the bill last Thursday it “had not been referred to the committee” as of press time. However, according to this list Weiner introduced another bill the same day as well as one four days later; both have been referred to committees. Another question is why Weiner simply doesn’t cosponsor HR 3813, the “George R. Brown Near-Earth Object Survey Act” introduced in February by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA). That bill—which as yet has no cosponsors—would provide five times the funding for asteroid searches as Weiner’s bill provides.
By Jeff Foust on 2004 April 1 at 1:18 pm ET That’s the question asked this week by the Coalition for Space Exploration, which has been running ads on SPACE.com that link to this form. It asks readers to “register your support for the nation’s Vision for Space Exploration” by filing out the contact information (name, postal address, email address) that will be apparently forwarded to “our Nation’s Leaders” (presumably the President and members of Congress, although that’s not specified.)
The petition itself seems innocuous enough, although I am mildly concerned by the fact that it’s hosted on the SPACE.com web site. Because SPACE.com is generally associated with space news, hosting this petition might raise some concerns regarding how biased the site, and its coverage, might be in favor of the plan. To be fair, the SPACE.com logo does not appear on the page (instead it uses the logo of its parent company, Space Holdings), and there’s more to SPACE.com than news. I’d also be surprised if the editorial staff of SPACE.com or Space News was swayed one way or another in their reporting based on this, or their parent company’s membership in the coalition. Still, it would seem odd if you saw something like this on the web site of another publication that covers space news, like Florida Today or the Houston Chronicle.
By Jeff Foust on 2004 March 31 at 2:17 pm ET Al Franken is the latest to comment on the omission of the new space exploration plan from the President’s State of the Union address, in a commentary in Wednesday’s Los Angeles Times. “Unveiling a mission to Mars and then not mentioning it less than a week later in the State of the Union address suggests a certain casualness in our president’s approach to governing the world’s only remaining superpower,” he claims. He also thinks the media hasn’t taken Bush to task for the silence since then, arguing that if a Democratic President had done the same thing, he would have been constantly ridiculed by the “right-wing media”. It’s an interesting suggestion, but the President has been criticized to some degree for his silence regarding the plan since he announced it in mid-January. The lack of a greater furor in the media likely has more to do with the relative importance of space versus the economy, terrorism, Iraq, and the like. Those other topics will provide far more fodder for Franken’s radio show on the new Air America network—which Franken plugs in the second half of the commentary—than space ever will.
By Jeff Foust on 2004 March 31 at 2:03 pm ET The Orlando Sentinel reported Tuesday that Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS), chairman of the space subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee, wants to hold a hearing in the near future regarding whether the shuttle should be phased out earlier than the currently scheduled date of 2010. An earlier retirement of the shuttle, he argues, would save money that could then be used by the exploration initiative, including accelerating development of the Crew Exploration Vehicle. This hearing would take place in the next couple months outside Washington, “in a community where the shuttle is a part of the local economy.” The article is based on a statement issued Monday by Brownback’s office, although that statement is not available on his web site (indeed, there has no press releases added to his site since early March, and it’s difficult to imagine any politician staying quiet that long…)
By Jeff Foust on 2004 March 30 at 5:14 pm ET The President’s Commission on Moon, Mars, and Beyond (better known as the Aldridge Commission) has announced that its next public hearing, scheduled for April 15-16 in San Francisco, will take place at a local high school, the Galileo Academy of Science and Technology. The list of speakers or topics for the hearing haven’t been announced yet, but the location and the comments made by Aldridge in the press release suggest that education will be a major topic.
By Jeff Foust on 2004 March 30 at 5:07 pm ET The space subcommittee of the House Science Committee has scheduled a hearing for Thursday, April 1, at 1 pm to discuss “Lunar Science and Resources: Future Options”. The witnesses for the hearing haven’t been formally announced by the committee on its web site, but according to a University of Arizona press release the current list of speakers is:
- Donald Campbell, Cornell University
- Dan Lester, University of Texas
- John Lewis, University of Arizona
- Paul Spudis, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
- Tim Swindle, University of Arizona
Spudis is also one of the members of the Aldridge Commission. The timing of this hearing is unfortunate, as that same afternoon the space subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee is holding a hearing on the NASA budget, with Sean O’Keefe scheduled to appear. The two hearings don’t completely overlap (the Senate hearing starts 90 minutes after the House one), but they are close enough together in time and far enough apart in space to make it difficult to attend both without missing substantial portions of one.
By Jeff Foust on 2004 March 29 at 10:14 am ET This Thursday—April 1, April Fool’s Day—the space subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee is scheduled to hold a hearing on NASA’s proposed FY2005 budget. NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe is the only announced witness. Given that Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS), who chairs the subcommittee, is also a co-sponsor of the Senate version of the Hubble resolution (S. Res. 324), one can expect the topic to come up during the hearing. The hearing will be at 2:30 pm in Russell 253, and will be webcast on the committee’s web site.
By Jeff Foust on 2004 March 28 at 12:55 pm ET Much has been made of the omission of the President’s new space initiative from his State of the Union address in January. On at least one occasion NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe defended the omission because the President had devoted an entire speech to the plan less than a week earlier and because the address is not a “tick list” of all the President’s initiatives. However, the New York Times reports Sunday that any mention of the plan in the speech may have been removed at the behest of Karen Hughes, the former White House communications director who still serves as an advisor to the President:
Ms. Hughes also advocated dropping from the State of the Union address any mention of the president’s ambitious proposal to send humans to Mars, which was attacked by members of his own party as extravagant folly. “At some level the policy gesture didn’t pass the communications straight-face test,” the Bush adviser said.
(The advisor quoted above is an unnamed Bush advisor that the article says earlier “asked not to be named because he did not want to be seen as criticizing Mr. [Karl] Rove,” who reportedly had a less-than-cordial relationship with Hughes when both worked in the White House.) Given that the proposal didn’t “pass the communications straight-face test” less than a week after its introduction, one wonders when—if ever—it will.
By Jeff Foust on 2004 March 27 at 9:39 am ET The National Capital Section of the AIAA has scheduled a luncheon on April 22 with Bill Adkins, staff director of the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee, as the speaker. Adkins will “share his views on the Nation’s space exploration vision, and discuss the Committee’s plans for a NASA authorization bill this year,” according to the meeting announcement. (Go to the calendar section of the web site for the full meeting details, including location and cost.) While it looks interesting, I won’t be able to go since I will be on travel that day.
By Jeff Foust on 2004 March 26 at 12:04 pm ET The Senate resolution calling for an independent study of the SM4 cancellation decision, introduced Thursday afternoon, is now available as S. Res. 324. A quick comparison of it with the House version, H. Res. 550, shows what appear to be, primarily, only cosmetic differences. One interesting difference is that clause two of the Senate version includes the language “and assess alternative servicing methods” that is not present in the House version.
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