By Jeff Foust on 2004 March 17 at 8:37 pm ET The House Science Committee issued a “media advisory” late Wednesday regarding the space subcommittee’s hearing Thursday on DOD/NASA cooperation on space transportation issues. The extensively-revised list of witnesses now reads as follows:
- Rear Admiral (Ret.) Craig Steidle, NASA Associate Administrator for the Office of Exploration Systems
- Major General (Ret.) Robert Dickman, Deputy for Military Space in the Office of the Under Secretary of the Air Force, Department of Defense
- The Honorable Ron Sega, Director of Defense Research & Engineering, Department of Defense
- Mr. Elon Musk, Chief Executive Officer of Space Exploration Technologies or SpaceX
The hearing is scheduled for 1pm Thursday in Rayburn 2318, and will also be webcast on the committee’s web site.
By Jeff Foust on 2004 March 17 at 7:36 am ET There are few stauncher proponents of space exploration in the House than Rep. Nick Lampson (D-TX). The congressman, whose district includes the Johnson Space Center, introduced the Space Exploration Act in both this Congress and the previous one. The bill (HR 3057) would set a series of ambitious space exploration goals for NASA. You would think, then, that he would be a strong supporter of the new space initiative introduced by Bush two months ago. While he was “pleased” by the announcement, he told attendees of a luncheon at the Goddard Memorial Symposium on Tuesday that a set of “less than auspicious circumstances” pose serious problems for the plan:
- The plan has been introduced during an election year, with all the politics associated with it;
- There are growing concerns among both Republicans and Democrats in Congress regarding the size of the budget deficit (he said that there is “serious talk” within Congress about a year-long freeze of all discretionary spending programs except defense and homeland security);
- The plan is seen as the President’s initiative, not the nation’s (a point made by several other speakers at the symposium). Worse, the president has said nothing about the plan since his January 14 speech;
- There has a been a lack of details about the plan, which Lampson said has made some people uneasy;
- The plan leaves some NASA programs with “an empty wallet”, notably some earth and space science efforts;
- The plan is based on some other policy decisions that are questionable, such as shutting down the shuttle program before the CEV comes online.
In short, he said, he has “serious concerns regarding how to implement the space initiative” but later said “I’m going to vote for it regardless.” He added that he planned to talk with John Kerry in the near future about space issues.
By Jeff Foust on 2004 March 16 at 9:59 pm ET Congressman Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY), the chair of the House Science Committee, delivered a speech Monday at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. While most of the speech focused on the physics research performed there, he did have a few things to say about NASA, primarily funding for the new exploration initiative and the competition for funding between NASA and the National Science Foundation:
We in the Congress will still have our duty to choose among competing priorities. The budget is always a constraint, and it’s more constraining now that it has been in a long time.
Right now, for example, as Science chairman, I especially have to wrestle with the President’s proposed space exploration initiative. It’s a thoughtful proposal, and no doubt would be worthy of immediate funding in a universe in which money was no object. But we don’t live in that universe, and we’re not likely to find one like it in the future.
So I have to weigh that proposal against other priorities, and get more information about its costs and its benefits and its timing before I can make a decision on how I think we should proceed.
As part of my decision-making, one matter I have to weigh is the relative merit of additional funding for NASA versus additional funding for other federal science agencies, particularly NSF, which competes head-to-head for funding with NASA because they’re in the same appropriations bill. Believe me, this isn’t an easy task.
By Jeff Foust on 2004 March 15 at 12:58 pm ET The space and aeronautics subcommittee of the House Science Committee has scheduled a hearing this Thursday at 1pm to discuss “NASA-Department of Defense Cooperation in Space Transportation”. According to SpaceRef, the list of witnesses includes John Schumacher (NASA Chief of Staff), “Dr. Johnson-Freese” (probably Joan Johnson-Freese, a professor at the Naval War College who has focused on military space policy issues), Ron Sega (Director of Defense for Research and Engineering and head of the National Aerospace Initiative), and Tom Young (former Lockheed Martin executive who has chaired a number of reviews into NASA and DOD space programs.)
By Jeff Foust on 2004 March 15 at 12:43 pm ET Over at The Space Review I have an article about a talk on Saturday by Neil deGrasse Tyson, one of the members of the President’s Commission on Moon, Mars and Beyond (aka the Aldridge Commission). Tyson offered several interesting tidbits about the commission and its work, and he hinted that he also played a small role in shaping the policy itself by helping Sean O’Keefe draft a presentation for the president on the proposed policy. During his talk Tyson stressed the need for the new initiative to be as bipartisan as possible, because “space initiatives have longer baselines than political cycles.” He also noted that the commission considered inviting Sen. John Kerry to testify at a public hearing, but dropped those plans out of concerns that the remaining Democratic candidates might demand equal time. Still, he said the commission is planning to have some “powerful Democrats” appear at the commission’s final public hearing in New York in early May.
By Jeff Foust on 2004 March 14 at 3:01 pm ET A couple of, well, curious articles appeared online Sunday regarding space policy. One, in a publication called Dollars & Sense (“The Magazine of Economic Justice”), features an interview with anti-nuclear activist Bruce Gagnon. Gagnon, one of the most visible opponents of space nuclear power, says a number of things that are at least a little strange, such as:
- “Helium-3 is one of the reasons the United States never signed the 1979 U.N. moon treaty, which says no one can claim ownership of the moon or have bases there.” (The Moon Treaty does not forbid bases in general, and claiming ownership of the Moon was actually addressed in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, of which the US is a signatory.)
- The Mars Exploration Rovers are part of an effort to exploit Mars for its mineral resources, notably magnesium, cobalt, and uranium; “NASA has said it hopes to have mining colonies established on Mars by 2025.” (I doubt NASA has ever said such a thing since the von Braun days, if ever.)
- “The rovers already on Mars are themselves also powered in part by plutonium.” (The rovers do have radioisotope heating units that contain a tiny amount—a couple of grams each—of plutonium, but are used to heat, not power, the rovers.)
Meanwhile, Brainbox Magazine, which calls itself “an outlet for radical political thought”, has published an un-bylined commentary on space exploration. While it starts off rationally enough, but starts going astray right around this statement: “It has been well-established, most effectively by Noam Chomsky, that the primary role of military expenditures, of which space travel is a integral part, is to channel massive subsidies into high-tech industry.” After some diversions on topics from helium-3 to Halliburton, the article notes “In the long term, the massive defense budget, of which NASA is a part, will be a bill passed on from the current generation to the future.” This repeated incorporation of NASA within the DoD suggests that the writers and editors of Brainbox had their brains in a box (and not in use in their heads) when working on this article.
By Jeff Foust on 2004 March 14 at 2:33 pm ET The National Space Society emailed a “legislative alert” to its members on Friday, calling on them to contact their Congressional representatives to urge them to support the new space initiative. Here’s a key paragraph from the message:
The new human space exploration initiative has run into serious opposition in Congress. Many Senators and Congressmen are convinced the new plan will cost too much — after passing large increases in nearly every other category of the federal budget. The fact that the President failed to mention the new initiative in his State of the Union address is disturbing; he may be leaving his options open to back away from support for the program before it even passes its first budget hurdles. If we don’t stand up now in loud support of this initiative, we’ll be stuck in low earth orbit for another 30 years.
It should be noted that while other federal programs have received “large increases” in past years, in the FY05 budget proposal NASA is one of the few agencies getting more than a token increase. That, of course, has made it a target of Congressmen who have become more budget conscious in this election year and who may be skeptical of the new initiative in any event because of a lack of specifics.
By Jeff Foust on 2004 March 13 at 8:07 am ET The full Senate has restored $600 million in funding to NASA’s proposed FY2005 budget. The six senators who represent Alabama (Sessions and Shelby), Florida (Graham and Nelson), and Texas (Cornyn and Hutchison) introduced an amendment during floor debate on S. Con. Res. 95 to “provide full funding for NASA’s FY 2005 space exploration initiatives”. The amendment performed this by taking $600 million from the “General Government” account and adding it to the “General Science, Space, and Technology” account. Jeff Sessions, the lead sponsor on the amendment, explained to the Huntsville Times that the General Government account, which covers government buildings upkeep and federal payrolls, had “considerable fat” that could be trimmed. The amendment passed on a voice vote and the overall budget resolution passed on a 51-46 vote. While this is a victory for NASA, it’s only a first step: House and Senate appropriators have only begun their work on the details of the NASA budget, and NASA’s $16.2-billion budget could still change significantly between now and this fall.
By Jeff Foust on 2004 March 12 at 1:08 pm ET A few tidbits this week about Hubble and yesterday’s Senate hearing that focused in part on the SM4 cancellation decision:
- NASA has finally published a detailed white paper outlining the reasons behind the cancellation decision. It also notes that the agency is “aggressively investigating innovative ways” to extend the life of Hubble without a shuttle mission, including “robotic servicing to provide extension of power storage.” It’s a good paper, but really something that NASA should have published back in January when the cancellation decision was made.
- NASA will apparently go ahead with plans to ask the National Academy of Sciences to review the risks and benefits of a shuttle servicing mission, according to reports from the New York Times and the Rocky Mountain News (see also my roundup at spacetoday.net.) However, as the Baltimore Sun notes, O’Keefe said it would be “fundamentally irresponsible” of him to reverse his original decision to cancel SM4.
- Rep. Mark Udall (D-CO), who introduced H. Res. 550, said in a statement that, not surprisingly, he agrees with his Senate colleagues who want an independent study of the decision.
- While The Mars Society has been at the forefront of efforts to get the Hubble servicing mission restored, there are some other sites of interest, including Save the Hubble (with a petition approaching 30,000 “signatures”), Save Hubble (with a pre-written letter one can personalize and send to the President and O’Keefe) and SaveTheHubble.com (with a more international bent).
By Jeff Foust on 2004 March 12 at 12:47 pm ET While space policy in the US this week has been dominated by Hubble and the new exploration initiative, there have been some significant changes within the Russian space agency. On Tuesday, as part of a larger government reorganization, the Russian Aviation and Space Agency, or Rosaviakosmos, was renamed the Federal Space Agency, according to Itar-Tass. It was also stripped of its oversight of the Russian aviation industry, which had been added to the original Russian Space Agency back in 1999. Late Thursday the Russian news service RIA Novosti reported that the head of the space agency, Yuri Koptev, would be retiring. His successor will be Anatoly Perminov, head of the Russian Space Forces, a branch of the Russian military. The change isn’t official yet, and there’s no indication whether Koptev, who turns 64 on Saturday, was leaving on his own or was forced out.
|
|
