By Jeff Foust on 2004 March 11 at 5:17 pm ET The office of Senator Mikulski has posted a copy of the letter from Admiral Gehman to Mikulski offering his review of NASA’s decision to cancel the SM4 Hubble servicing mission. (Although O’Keefe said he had requested Gehman carry out the review, the report was actually delivered directly to Mikulski, and not to NASA.) The gist of the report, dated March 5 and about four and a half pages long, is that non-ISS shuttle missions like SM4 “may be slightly more risky” than those to ISS. However, he adds that “only a deep and rich study of the entire gain/risk equation can answer the question of whether an extension of the life of the wonderful Hubble telescope is worth the risks involved”. Mikulski has also issued a press release with her take on Thursday’s hearing, along with the letter that she and Sen. Bond sent to O’Keefe asking him to request the National Academy of Sciences undertake its own comprehensive review of the risk of the SM4 mission.
By Jeff Foust on 2004 March 11 at 1:09 pm ET The Mars Society (which, for rather unclear reasons, has been leading the push to save Hubble), sent out a statement yesterday claiming that the number of cosponsors for H. Res. 550, the resolution calling on NASA to review the SM4 cancellation decision, had grown to 21. However, the official list of cosponsors remains at the same seven as when the resolution was introduced last week. I don’t know if there is some kind of lag built into the system (which normally updates the status of legislation very quickly), or if there is some other issue with this. I may look into this further to see what’s going on. In any event, here’s the latest list of cosponsors, according to the Mars Society:
Mark Udall (D-CO), Todd Akin (R-MO), Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD), Bart Gordon (D-TN), Steny Hoyer (D-MD), Nick Lampson (D-TX), Jim McDermott (D-WA), C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-MD), Vernon Ehlers (R-MI), Jay Inslee (D-WA), Ed Markey (D-MA), Elijah Cummings (D-MD), James Moran (D-VA), Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), Martin Frost (D-TX), Adam Schiff (D-CA), Rush Holt (D-NJ), Barney Frank (D-MA), Jim Matheson (D-UT), Michael McNulty (R-NY), Neil Abercrombie (D-HI)
It’s worth noting that Rep. Schiff’s district includes JPL, while Rep. Holt holds a Ph.D. in physics and was assistant director of Princeton’s Plasma Physics Laboratory before running for Congress in 1998 (not to mention a five-time Jeopardy champion).
Meanwhile, SPACE.com reports that the Senators Christopher Bond (R-MO) and Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), the chair and ranking members, respectively, of the Senate Appropriations Committee subcommittee that oversees NASA, have asked the GAO to review the decision to cancel the SM4 mission. They’ve also asked NASA to have the National Academy of Sciences review the decision as well. The article also indicates that Admiral Harold Gehman has completed his own review of the risks of the shuttle mission to Hubble, saying it “may be slightly more risky” that an ISS shuttle mission. The article offers few other details, though, and NASA has not yet released the report on its web site yet.
By Jeff Foust on 2004 March 11 at 12:53 pm ET As previously noted, a number of people are growing concerned that the new space initiative might not be able to start on schedule because of the perceived difficulty of getting the NASA budget increase the President called for in FY2005. It looks like even officials within NASA think the planned increase is unlikely. The Huntsville Times reported that Steve Isakowitz, the NASA comptroller, told a meeting of the NASA Advisory Council that “domestic needs and wartime spending” might keep NASA from getting more than a modest budget increase in FY05. “It doesn’t look like we are going to get the 5.6 percent increase,” the Times quoted Isakowitz as saying. As one committee member, Huntsville lawyer Mark McDaniel said, NASA is “going to have to sell this better to Congress and the American people.” Given the lack of detailed information NASA has provided Congress to date, which has led some key Congressmen to withhold their support for the plan, the agency may have its work cut out for it.
By Jeff Foust on 2004 March 10 at 2:00 pm ET Over at the Transterrestrial Musings weblog, Jim McDade comments on whether Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry is NASA’s “friend or enemy”. The commentary takes some odd turns, but the gist of his comment is that Kerry does not take NASA very seriously because he lumps it under his “agenda for urban America” on his campaign web site. In fact, if you read it, you’ll see that he argues for increasing the research funding for NASA (along with the Energy Department and NSF) as a way to revitalize the high-technology sector. McDade also takes the Kerry campaign to task for not listing space among the 28 different policy topics on his web site. I think it would be very difficult to make the argument that space policy is among the top 28 topics in this presidential campaign.
There’s also one thing McDade missed in his commentary. If you use the comment form on Kerry’s campaign web site, you’re asked to file your comment under one of about 30 different categories, most of which are various policy issues. One of those categories is “Space budget and NASA”. This would seem to indicate that either the campaign is getting enough messages on this topic to warrant its own category, or that they anticipate getting a lot of messages on the topic. Stay tuned: November is a long way away…
By Jeff Foust on 2004 March 9 at 1:32 pm ET The Mars Society emailed a statement Monday (not available on its web site) claiming that the number of cosponsors for H.Res. 550, a resolution calling for NASA to independently review its decision to cancel the last Hubble servicing mission, had risen to 13. However, the official list of cosponsors, as of midday Tuesday, remained at the same seven who originally cosponsored the resolution when it was introduced last week. The additional cosponsors, according to the society, include a few well-known members, including Vernon Ehlers (R-MI), a former physicist; and Ed Markey (D-MA), a veteran Congressman from the Boston suburbs. Another member of the Maryland delegation, Elijah Cummings (D-MD), has also signed on, as well as James Moran (D-VA), who represents some of the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington DC.
By Jeff Foust on 2004 March 9 at 1:01 pm ET There’s been a frisson of interest in Dennis Kucinich, the Ohio Congressman who is continuing his quixotic quest for the Democratic presidential nomination, based on a press release his campaign issued over the weekend on space policy. In the release Kucinich calls for tripling NASA’s budget, although he is vague regarding how he would spend this money other than to support the goals of the Space Exploration Act (HR 3057). While some have treated this as a new announcement, it’s not: Kucinich has made several statements in the past calling for large increases in NASA’s budget. Back in December his campaign contacted me for a Space Review article, providing statements about the candidate’s positions on space policy issues using language identical to that in the press release. Of course, it’s a moot point, as the odds of NASA getting its budget tripled are roughly in the same range of improbability as the odds Kucinich winning the nomination…
By Jeff Foust on 2004 March 8 at 7:22 pm ET This week features three Congressional hearings by three different committees on various aspects of space policy:
- At 10am Wednesday the full House Science Committee is scheduled to meet on the topic of “Perspectives on the President’s Vision for Space Exploration.” The committee’s web site doesn’t offer many details about the hearing, but according to SpaceRef.com the scheduled witnesses include Norman Augustine, Lennard Fisk, Donna Shirley, and Larry Young.
- At 2:30 pm Wednesday the Science, Technology, and Space subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee is scheduled to hold a hearing on NASA’s Mars exploration efforts. No witnesses have yet been announced according to the hearing listing on the committee’s web site. This is likely the same hearing that was scheduled for last month but postponed after a ricin scare closed down the three Senate office buildings for several days.
- At 10am Thursday the VA-HUD and Independent Agencies subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee is scheduled to discuss NASA’s budget. The sole witness announced is NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe.
The first two hearings will be webcast live, according to the web sites of the appropriate committees. There’s no webcast information for the Senate Appropriations Committee hearing, but the audio of many Senate hearings is available live on CapitolHearings.org.
By Jeff Foust on 2004 March 8 at 1:26 pm ET That’s the suggestion of an Orlando Sentinel article, which argues that neither NASA nor the Bush Administration have done much since the initial announcement of the new space initiative in January to curry favor with members of Congress. The lack of specifics on the long-term cost of the initiative (recall the back-and-forth debate at a House Science Committee hearing last month between Sean O’Keefe and Congressman Bart Gordon (D-TN) on what that cost was and whether that number was given to Bush), as well as questions about the effects of the plan on other NASA programs, have led very few members to stand up in favor of the plan. The article notes in particular the neutral stance of Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY), the House Science Committee chairman, who says he needs more information from NASA before deciding whether to support the plan. More worrisome is the comment made by Sam Brownback (R-KS), chair of the space subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee, who said that because of the larger debate about the budget, “NASA’s typically not been a partisan issue, but it may be seen that way this year.”
A related note on this subject comes from NASA Watch, which claims that Democrats in both the House and Senate want to put off the President’s plan for a year (hoping, perhaps, that by next year there will be a different occupant of the White House.) While Republicans appear to be more supportive of the plan, there are some who are not fond of any major spending increases given the current large budget deficits.
By Jeff Foust on 2004 March 7 at 1:22 pm ET An article by the Scripps Howard News Service on Friday, essentially a grab bag of Washington-related news, offers what at first glance appears to be a scoop about the fate of the Hubble Space Telescope:
Don’t expect much from a NASA review of its decision to shutter the Hubble telescope. Astronomers and some politicians want NASA to reconsider scrapping a shuttle mission to install new batteries on the device, but the agency needs the money for the Mars mission and a successor telescope.
The problem with this analysis is that canceling the SM4 servicing mission will save very little money. A significant fraction of the cost of the mission has already been spent in the development of the two new instruments to have been installed during the mission, equipment that has already been completed. In addition, the oft-quoted estimated price of a shuttle mission, $500 million, will not go very far towards “the Mars mission” (which appears to be a vague reference to the overall exploration initiative). There’s also the problem of transferring the money out of the shuttle program into either the space science program (for Hubble’s successor, the James Webb Space Telescope), or the new exploration office. If one instead uses the incremental cost of an additional shuttle mission—$100 million or less—the savings become almost insignificantly small.
Any decision to cancel the SM4 servicing mission will be made primarily, if not totally, on the basis of safety, not cost. (One can argue whether how legitimate those safety issues are, but throughout the debate cost has not been an issue.) This is something the author of this (unbylined) piece misses totally.
By Jeff Foust on 2004 March 7 at 1:04 pm ET On Saturday the Associated Press issued an article regarding criticism of current and proposed Mars exploration efforts. The article starts off by quoting a couple of experts—Amitai Etzioni, a George Washington University sociologist and former White House advisor; and Sylvia Earle, a marine biologst—who appear to be opposed, to some degree, to sending missions, robotic or human, to the Red Planet. Read a little deeper, though, and you’ll notice something interesting: while Earle wants to spend more money on ocean research, she also says, “I don’t want to cut a penny from space.” Moreover, despite the bluster from Etzioni at the beginning of the article, he is not heard again for the remainder of the article.
The author of the AP article, Joseph Verrengia, makes some other questionable statements. He writes that the president “wants to return to the moon and eventually send astronauts to Mars, perhaps by 2035,” but nothing in any official White House or NASA document has given any timeline for a human Mars mission, other than at some point beyond 2020. Saying “perhaps by 2035″ gives some official imprimatur that doesn’t really exist: Verrengia could have said “by 2025″ or “by 2045″ or even “by 12:17 am EDT on July 4, 2031″ with an equal level of accuracy. Verrengia also writes that “the current thinking is that robots and computers can do a cheaper, safer job in a hostile environment” like Mars. This implies a degree of consensus that doesn’t exist in the scientific community: many (although not necessarily all) Mars experts argue that while robotic missions can and will continue to do a good job, a human presence on the planet will ultimately be required to perform some necessary research. (The role of humans vs. robots was discussed at length in a recent debate between Robert Park and Robert Zubrin.)
In the end, Verrengia appears to be creating another false dichotomy: we can either spend money looking for water on Mars or studying the oceans here on Earth. Fortunately Earle was smart enough to reject this argument. One wonders if Verrengia’s editors should have done the same.
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