By Jeff Foust on 2004 January 28 at 7:53 pm ET Congressman Nick Lampson (D-TX) has been named the ranking minority member of the House Science Committee’s Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics. Lampson succeeds Rep. Bart Gordon (D-TN), who became ranking minority member of the full committee after Texas Congressman Ralph Hall switched from the Democratic to the Republican party. Lampson, whose district includes JSC, is perhaps best known for his Space Exploration Act (HR 3057), a bill designed to set a series of exploration goals for NASA—legislation that has been largely superceded by the President’s own space initiative.
By Jeff Foust on 2004 January 28 at 7:39 pm ET First it was Sen. Mukulski, now it’s the rest of the state’s Congressional representatives. The AP reports that all ten members of the state’s Congressional delegation—Mukulski, fellow senator Paul Sarbanes, and all eight House members—have signed a letter sent to NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe asking him to reconsider his decision to cancel the SM4 Hubble servicing mission. Mikulski had previously contacted O’Keefe herself, but has found support from her colleagues (remember that the Space Telescope Science Institute and NASA Goddard, where Hubble flight control is located, are both in Maryland.) The letter notes that $200 million has been spent to date on instruments that would have been installed on Hubble duing SM4, and a robotic Hubble deorbiting mission may cost an additional $300 million. “In light of these costs… as well as the several decades of funding already devoted to Hubble, a decision to cancel the Hubble program several years shy of its goal appears to make little economic sense,” the letter notes. (Of course, money will have to be spent at some point to deorbit Hubble, whether it’s by a robotic mission or installing a deorbit propulsion module on SM4.)
By Jeff Foust on 2004 January 27 at 10:43 am ET The first, but certainly not the last, hearing on the president’s new space initiative is scheduled for Wednesday morning, when the full Senate Commerce Committee will hold a hearing on “National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Future Space Mission”. The usual cast of characters will be present: besides NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe, a separate panel of witnesses will include Lou Friedman (Planetary Society), Neal Lane (former presidential science advisor and NSF director), Howard McCurdy (American Univ.), and Rick Tumlinson (Space Frontier Foundation). The hearing will be webcast live starting at 9:30 AM Eastern time.
By Jeff Foust on 2004 January 27 at 10:37 am ET As has been widely noted, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and his wife, Maria Shriver, were in the control room at JPL during the landing of Opportunity. (We trust that controllers followed the advice of a recent Opus cartoon and made sure the governor stayed away from the controls.) Also present were former Vice-President Al Gore and former California governor and US senator Pete Wilson. One wonders if they would have been there had the Spirit landing failed, raising doubts about the success of Opportunity?
By Jeff Foust on 2004 January 26 at 3:46 pm ET Presidential candidate John Edwards offered perhaps the strongest Democratic endorsement of Bush’s space initiative on Sunday. During an interview on CNN Late Edition (scroll about one-third the way down the page), Wolf Blitzer asked Edwards about the plan:
BLITZER: Do you support the president’s decision to send a person back to the moon and perhaps beyond, to Mars?
EDWARDS: Well, I think it makes sense. Space exploration makes sense. I think that we saw what happened during the Kennedy administration and thereafter, how it inspired lots of generations of young people to be interested in science, math, technology, which I think is important.
But the president has to be able to do two things at once. And what he’s doing is diverting attention from the problems that we have here at home.
Edwards then went on to talk about health care, and never came back to the issue of the Bush space plan before the interview ended. While not exactly a ringing endorsement, it is a stronger response than the “I support space exploration, but…” response from most other Democrats. It’s also a more coherent response than what Edwards said a week earlier on Face the Nation.
By Jeff Foust on 2004 January 25 at 7:27 pm ET Sunday’s Albany Times-Union published an article based on a poll of people who live in the “Capital Region” of New York state. That poll showed considerable skepticism about Bush’s space initiative: 48% oppose the plan compared to 40% in favor. Moreover, 52% said that Bush was pushing this new plan primarily for political reasons; 21% said it was for scientific reasons and 17% said it was for both reasons. (The newspaper, to its credit, published the complete poll results in Excel format, including how the poll results break down based on sex, age, income, party affiliation, and religious interest.)
The poll also reveals an interesting contradiction among the public: 63% said the US should continue to send people into space, but 53% thought it was better to spend money on priorities other than space research. “The public likes the concept of manned space exploration,” said Frank Newport, editor in chief of the Gallup Poll. “They did in the 1960s and they do now. They’re just worried about the cost.
By Jeff Foust on 2004 January 24 at 5:46 pm ET After reading this CounterPunch.org article, you have to wonder if some people are actually hoping Spirit won’t be revived, for no reason other than blunt the president’s new space initiative…
By Jeff Foust on 2004 January 24 at 9:03 am ET NASA’s decision last Friday to scrap the last shuttle mission to the Hubble Space Telescope has generated its fair share of controversy, and now a degree of political attention. On Wednesday Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) sent a letter to NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe, asking him to appoint an independent panel to review his decision to cancel the servicing mission, SPACE.com reported. (While Mikulski is a staunch supporter of NASA, she has some practical interests here: Hubble is controlled by the Goddard Space Flight Center with scientific operations based out of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), both located in Maryland.) She also plans to meet Monday with the staff of STScI in Baltimore.
Even the White House has been dragged into the controversy about the decision. In a press briefing Friday, White House press secretary Scott McClellan was asked why NASA had cancelled the SM4 servicing mission. “I think NASA can probably address those matters… I think NASA can talk to you more about some of the specific details within that,” he answered, unwilling or (more likely) simply unable to provide specific information.
Hubble supporters aren’t giving up, but in an effort to come up with alternatives to keep the telescope operating they do appear to be grasping at straws. SPACE.com reported that STScI officials are looking at everything from working with Russia on a Soyuz-based servicing mission to accepting donations to pay for a servicing mission. It would seem very difficult—and thus expensive, even for Russia—to adapt a Soyuz to perform a servicing mission on a spacecraft designed to be worked on only by the shuttle. Moreover, donations by private citizens can’t be transferred into federal coffers for specific programs. Sky & Telescope does have some useful suggestions for what the public can do, including writing their members of Congress. At the very least you can also sign an online petition, although the effectiveness of such a step may be limited, at best.
By Jeff Foust on 2004 January 24 at 8:43 am ET In the last few days some details have emerged about what NASA’s FY05 budget—scheduled to be released on February 2—will look like. NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe told reporters this week that the agency will get $16.2 billion in ’05, an increase in line with what the President announced this week. He didn’t, however, offer details about what programs would see more—or less—funding in the budget for 05.
O’Keefe, though, has offered more details about the longer term. About $6 billion of the $11 billion that will be transferred from other programs to the new exploration initiative will come from the Orbital Space Plane and Next Generation Launch Technology programs, which will be killed off as a result. Since the Crew Exploration Vehicle development programs is much slower paced than what OSP was planned, this means that there won’t be an ISS “lifeboat” other than Soyuz for about 10 years instead of 4-6, and develop of RLV technologies within NASA will also grind to a halt. (Although the X-37 program will continue at least through the drop test phase according to the New York Times.) However, the agency plans to maintain unmanned space exploration as much as possible, according to MSNBC, conducting “robotic exploration across the solar system for scientific purposes and to support human exploration.” We shall see…
By Jeff Foust on 2004 January 22 at 5:45 pm ET Both Reuters and the San Francisco Chronicle report that one possibility why President Bush left his new space initiative out of the State of the Union address Tuesday is because of conservative opposition to expensive projects. “Critics said the mere mention of the program would have drawn groans from some members of both parties,” write the SFChron’s Zachary Coile.
This could be an interesting development. The Reuters article cites conservatives who claim that the omission is “a sign… that he [Bush] may be having second thoughts.” That seems unlikely, given that the program will cost NASA only an additional $1 billion beyond what was already planned for the agency through 2009 (the final year of a 2nd Bush term). Even afterwards, according to NASA documents, NASA’s budget would raisely largely at the same pace as inflation through 2020. The lack of a single price, though, has annoyed some. “There’s no other program of this magnitude that Congress has ever endorsed where they didn’t have at least an estimate for the price tag,” former Congressman Dick Zimmer, a Republican, told Knight Ridder. What sort of pressure this puts on NASA and the administration remains to be seen.
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