By Jeff Foust on 2012 November 1 at 8:45 pm ET Last night the Obama campaign posted (and emailed to its vast distribution list) a list of 39 accomplishments (“Just a couple”, the campaign noted at the beginning of the list) that the president had made in his first term. There’s a lot of predictable big-ticket issues listed, but tucked in at number 34, between entries for naturalizing servicemembers and promoting tourism, space gets a cameo:
34. President Obama set a bold new plan for the future of NASA space exploration, using the skill and ability of the private sector for short trips to the International Space Station, while building a new vehicle for exploration of distant space, and doing everything in his power to support the economy on Florida’s Space Coast.
Of course, that “new vehicle for exploration of distant space”—a reference, presumably to the Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System launch vehicle—hasn’t been built yet, and that choice of words—“distant spaceâ€â€”sounds off, as if someone in Chicago perhaps confused it with the more commonly used “deep space.” And those on the Space Coast might be wishing the president had done more, and/or different things, to help their economy. But it’s interesting space even made the list at all.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 November 1 at 5:51 am ET With less than a week until the election, the presidential campaigns, and their supporters, are making their final cases—even in the realm of space policy. In the Orlando Sentinel on Wednesday, former astronaut Gene Cernan criticized the Obama Administration’s space policy and said Mitt Romney would do a better job on space issues. And, in today’s Florida Today, another former astronaut, Mark Kelly, says President Obama is the “clear choice” on space issues.
Neither op-ed breaks new ground, largely reiterating past arguments for and against the Obama Administration’s space policies. Cernan argues that Obama broke a promise from the 2008 campaign to fund Constellation, resulting in thousands of lost jobs at the Kennedy Space Center. “Not only is he willing to sacrifice the United States’ pre-eminence in space exploration, but he seems unconcerned that our economic and national security might falter as well,” Cernan writes of Obama. Romney would make sure the US “continues to lead the world” in space exploration, making points taken directly from the campaign’s space policy white paper (Cernan serves on the campaign’s space policy advisory group.)
“The president has been criticized for not being clear about his priorities when it comes to space policy, but I see things differently,” Kelly counters in his piece, saying that the president has made “clear decisions” on space issues, including some that benefit those on the Space Coast. He cites in particular the decision to continue development of Orion and build the Space Launch System, as well as commercial cargo and crew efforts, specifically mentioning SpaceX’s recent accomplishments. Kelly previously made the case for the administration’s space policy in a Sentinel op-ed in May, where he described how he became a covert to that policy after initially being skeptical of the plan to cancel Constellation.
Op-eds like these raise a question: are they really that useful? At this late stage of the campaign, it’s hard to imagine that there are that many undecided voters, let alone those who would be swayed by commentaries on space policy, even in a region like the Space Coast. These pieces appear, at best, to reinforce existing views in favor of or against a candidate (the handful of comments that Cernan’s Sentinel piece has attracted in the day since its publication have largely been critical of it); at worst, they devolve to “my astronaut is better than your astronaut” arguments.
There’s also a related question of just how much weight people should give to the views of former astronauts, who, after all, made the names as astronauts based on their ability to fly and operate spacecraft, and not on their policy expertise. Both commentaries focus almost exclusively on human spaceflight topics (Cernan mentions national security as well as science missions, but only in passing, using the campaign’s language): understandable given their experiences, and the audiences in and around Kennedy Space Center, but incomplete from a broader policy perspective.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 October 30 at 7:32 pm ET  Bill Richardson (right) with Sir Richard Branson at Spaceport America in New Mexico in October 2010, near the end of Richardson’s second and final term as governor of the state. (credit: J. Foust) The Albuquerque Journal reported today that former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, who helped push through development of that state’s new commercial spaceport, is going to be supporting the interests of another facility. Richardson will be hired by the Mojave Air and Space Port in California to help build support for an expanded version of an “informed consent” law that the California legislature passed, and Governor Jerry Brown signed into law, earlier this year. The bill is similar to legislation in several other states that indemnifies spaceflight operators from legal actions over accidents that injure or kill spaceflight participants (except in the case of negligence or intentional harm), provided the customers sign an “informed consent” waiver.
The move has understandably raised some eyebrows in New Mexico, as noted in the Journal article. Officials with both Mojave and New Mexico’s Spaceport America say they are not direct competitors with each other: Mojave sees itself as more of an R&D facility while Spaceport America plans to be an operational spaceport with Virgin Galactic as its anchor customer.
However, Richardson has already done some work for the Mojave spaceport. At the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight earlier this month in Las Cruces, New Mexico, Mojave Air and Space Port general Manager Stu Witt said he hired Richardson earlier this year to convince Brown to sign the original version of the informed consent law when it appeared that the governor wouldn’t act on it. “Mr. Richardson had asked for my help many times in the past, has been to my office a number of times,” Witt said during a conference session. “We were in this for the development of the industry.”
Witt mentioned that he also called upon a number of others in the industry for help in persuading Brown to sign the bill, from Paul Allen to Sir Richard Branson to Elon Musk. The lobbying effort worked: not only did Brown sign the bill last month, he did so in a signing ceremony timed to the flyover of the state capitol by the 747 carrying the shuttle Endeavour, bound for Los Angeles.
As it turns out, both states are now in similar positions: while they have informed consent laws on the books, representatives of the space industry in both are seeking to amend those laws to make them more comprehensive so they also include vehicle suppliers. “You can’t amend a law until you have a law,” Witt said at the ISPCS session. Efforts to amend the California legislation, with the support of Richardson, will begin next year. “We have momentum on our side. We captured the attention of the governor.”
In New Mexico, spaceport supporters, including Richarson’s successor, Susana Martinez, will make a second attempt next year to amend that state’s informed consent law to include suppliers. An effort earlier this year to amend the law died in the state legislature because of opposition from trial lawyers.
Update 11/1: Parabolic Arc reports that, contrary to the Albuquerque Journal article, the Mojave Air and Space Port has no plans to hire Richardson. Witt did confirm that he hired Richardson in the summer to support efforts to get the original bill passed, paying the former governor $10,000. There are no plans, though, Witt told the airport’s board of directors, to hire Richardson again.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 October 29 at 3:36 pm ET There’s nothing that focusing the mind quite like a deadline—in this case, the impending arrival of Hurricane Sandy and likely power outages in the Washington, DC area that will ensue. With that in mind, I’ve pushed out a long-overdue redesign. Feel free to pass along any comments here or by email (jeff AT spacepolitics DOT com). Space policy posts will resume as weather/power/Internet connectivity permits…
By Jeff Foust on 2012 October 28 at 10:44 am ET Florida Today, the newspaper that serves the Space Coast region of Florida, ised a series of endorsements for key races on Sunday, including Mitt Romney for president. The space policy positions of Romney versus those of President Obama didn’t play that much of a role: the four members of the newspaper’s editorial board split their votes two to two on the position of “space”. The newspaper did appear encourages that a Romney Administration would continue one of the key elements of the Obama Administration’s policy, that of greater reliance on commercial providers:
In a line that bodes well for the Space Coast, he writes: “Government is generally not the source of new ideas, although innovations from NASA and the military have provided frequent exceptions.â€
On space, Romney’s views match Obama’s plan for privatizing flights to the International Space Station and refocusing NASA on interplanetary missions. That approach led to a painful downsizing at Kennedy Space Center, but it also prodded our local space industry to become more competitive and productive.
Later in the editorial, though, the newspaper appeared disappointed that Obama had not carried out some of the promises he made in the 2008 campaign that led the paper to endorse him them, including one to “continue NASA’s moon-exploration program.”
In the Florida Senate race, where Sen. Bill Nelson (D) is running for reelection against Rep. Connie Mack IV (R), Florida Today endorses Nelson, citing in part his record on space in the last few years, including lobbying for passage of the 2010 NASA Authorization Act:
For the Space Coast, Nelson successfully fought to reinstate a major rocket program for missions to the moon and Mars after the White House unceremoniously killed the Constellation program. Nelson practically designed the Space Launch System rocket himself, found the money for it and took the unusual step of visiting the U.S. House to twist arms and win passage.
Nelson got all four votes of the paper’s editorial board on the topic of space.
And in the House race for the district that now covers most of the Space Coast, Florida Today endorsed incumbent Rep. Bill Posey (R) over Shannon Roberts (D) and Richard Gillmor (I). The paper noted Posey’s work on legislation “that could benefit NASA and Brevard’s space industry”:
For example, Posey passed legislation that will open military launch sites to private space contractors the same way Kennedy Space Center has opened to SpaceX and others. He has introduced a bill that would begin stable, multiyear contracts for NASA and shield its director from politics. And he and his staff regularly visit representatives from other parts of the country to pitch the commercial and security value of the U.S. space program.
However, the paper actually preferred Roberts’s position on space, “which she considers an investment in science and technical innovation — not pursuit of the “military high ground,†as Posey sees it,” the paper noted. “Roberts, a retired NASA manager, expressed stronger support for commercializing flights to low Earth orbit, a strategy already making Brevard’s economy more resilient.” Posey and Roberts split the four votes of the paper’s editorial board.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 October 25 at 6:15 am ET This week’s issue of Space News features a pair of commentaries from the campaigns of the two major presidential candidates, largely reiterating points previously made during the campaign. Representing the Obama campaign, former science and technology advisor Jim Kohlenberger first lays out the various accomplishments of the Obama Administration during its first term. (That includes trumpeting the successful landing of the Mars rover Curiosity, a program that predates the administration, without mentioning the proposed planetary science budget cuts that have put the future of NASA’s Mars exploration program into disarray.) “The president’s plan, passed with bipartisan support in Congress, builds on America’s unrivaled space leadership to take us farther, faster and deeper into space than humans have ever gone before,” he states.
Kohlenberger then criticizes the rhetoric and plans (or, he argues, lack thereof) from the Romney campaign. “Romney’s central point seems to be an echo of the erroneous claim that NASA and America’s space program are adrift with no clear strategy or goals,” he writes. The Romney campaign’s “rather petite space plan”, he notes, claims the US doesn’t have any plans for putting astronauts into orbit “but then goes on to embrace the president’s own plans for partnering with U.S. industry to do just that,” a reference to the language in support of commercialization in the Romney space white paper.
Not so fast, counter Scott Pace and Eric Anderson in their own op-ed. The two, members of Romney’s space policy advisory group, repeat many of the points made in last month’s white paper. “President Barack Obama has put us on a path that cedes our global position as the unequivocal leader in space,” they claim. After reviewing the key points of the Romney white paper, they conclude, “Mitt Romney will ensure that we have a space program worthy of a great nation.”
One change in the op-ed versus the white paper is the latter’s claim, highlighted by Kohlenberger, that “For the first time since the dawn of the Space Age, the United States has no clear plan for putting its own astronauts into space.” Instead, Pace and Anderson write, “For the first time since the dawn of the Space Age, America has chosen to forgo its own capabilities for putting astronauts into space and instead relies on the Russians.” They argue that while shuttle’s impending retirement was known when Obama took office, “the earliest that Americans will again ride American rockets into space is 2016 — a stretch longer than the one between President John F. Kennedy’s famous speech and the first steps on the Moon.”
If, in fact, commercial providers start crewed launches in 2016 (which may be a stretch goal, as NASA is planning on having such vehicles available in 2017), the time between Obama’s 2009 inauguration and that first flight would be less than eight years, compared to slightly more than eight years between JFK’s May 1961 speech Apollo 11’s July 1969 landing. However, the actual gap in US human spaceflight access, measured from the final shuttle mission in July 2011, would be on the order of five years, less than the gap between Apollo-Soyuz and STS-1.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 October 25 at 5:42 am ET Sen. John Mccain (R-AZ), who lost to Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election, was campaigning in Florida yesterday in support of President Obama’s 2012 opponent, Mitt Romney, including a stop on Florida’s Space Coast. While there, he briefly offered his thoughts on the US should be doing in space, specifically, the need for a single major project that can win the support of the American public. “Let’s focus on putting a man or a woman on Mars. Let’s focus on that,” he said, Florida Today reported.
That single-minded focus on Mars is a departure from his 2008 campaign, which didn’t explicitly call out human exploration of Mars as a top goal in its space policy white paper, focusing instead on continuing Constellation, maximizing utilization of the ISS, and ensuring “that space exploration is top priority and that the U.S. remains a leader”. The Romney campaign has also not formally endorsed a human mission to Mars in its campaign statements to date. President Obama, though, did make sending human to Mars (or, at least, in orbit around Mars) by the mid-2030s once of his goals for NASA in his April 2010 speech at the Kennedy Space Center.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 October 22 at 5:41 am ET The Orlando Sentinel endorsed Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) for reelection on Sunday over his Republican challenger, Connie Mack IV. The editorial cited Nelson’s role as “a champion for NASA and Florida’s role in the U.S. space program” in its decision. “A law he co-authored in 2010 wisely extended the life of the International Space Station and supported the development of commercial spacecraft, both positive developments for Florida and the space program as a whole,” the endorsement stated, a reference to the NASA Authorization Act of 2010.
Bill Nye, aka “The Science Guy,” will be supporting the Obama reelection campaign Monday night on Florida’s Space Coast. Nye is slated to appear at a watch party in Cocoa, Florida, for the third and final presidential debate. Nye, the CEO of The Planetary Society, is also scheduled to appear Tuesday morning at a roundtable about STEM education at Florida Tech. The roundtable is not an official Obama campaign event, according to a release by the campaign’s Florida staff, but “it is part of Mr. Nye’s trip in support of the campaign.”
By Jeff Foust on 2012 October 21 at 12:19 pm ET On Sunday, the Houston Chronicle formally endorsed Mitt Romney for president, four years after the paper had endorsed Barack Obama. The Chronicle’s editorial focused on a few major issues, including its disappointment with the Obama Administration’s approach to space:
It has been an insult to the memory of American heroes like Neil Armstrong and Sally Ride to allow manned spaceflight to languish in the country that put men on the moon. The notion of paying $50 million a seat to Russia for commercial taxi service to the International Space Station is galling.
Obama has failed to articulate a bold vision of his own for the agency. That failure forsakes a legacy of scientific achievement that has showered benefits on the nation. This approach to NASA has abandoned the American imperative of lighting out for the territory and exploring new worlds. NASA’s legacy must be reclaimed.
In recent days we have seen a welcome return of popular enthusiasm for space exploration, thanks to the success of the Mars rover Curiosity. When NASA stuck the landing in a tour de force of technical precision, the international excitement was palpable. Let’s seize upon it.
That will require more effective presidential leadership.
The editorial follows on the criticism in recent days by Republican candidates like Reps. Paul Ryan, running for vice president, and Connie Mack, running for the Senate in Florida, that the administration has no plan for NASA. And, like Ryan and Mack’s earlier comments, some of the criticism of the Obama Administration’s policies levied in the endorsement, most notably the reliance on Russian vehicles to transport American astronauts to and from the ISS, dates back to policies of the Bush Administration and the original rollout of the Vision for Space Exploration.
Most curious, though, is the passage that it is “an insult to the memory of American heroes like Neil Armstrong and Sally Ride to allow manned spaceflight to languish” in the US. Armstrong was a critic of the administration’s plans, to be certain, as he did in testimony before the House Science Committee in September 2011. Ride, though, was not a critic of the Obama Administration’s approach: she served on the Augustine Committee in 2009 that studied NASA’s human spaceflight programs and developed several options, including the “Flexible Path” approach the administration adopted. As presidential science advisor John Holdren noted in May 2010, Ride was included in a “large array” of astronauts who supported the Obama Administration’s policy. Ride also endorsed Obama in 2008.
Beyond “more effective presidential leadership,” the Chronicle endorsement doesn’t explain what it thinks a Romney Administration would do differently so that “NASA’s legacy,” is it puts it, is “reclaimed.”
By Jeff Foust on 2012 October 20 at 10:06 am ET A day after Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan claimed “we have effectively no plan” for NASA under the Obama Administration, a Republican candidate for the Senate in Florida offered similar criticism of current national space policy.
Speaking to reporters in Titusville, Florida, after a closed-door meeting with the Economic Development Commission of Florida’s Space Coast, Rep. Connie Mack IV (R-FL) said President Obama as well as Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL), who Mack is running against, had not done enough for space. “They continue to change the mission, and when you change the mission, it’s a floundering program,†Mack said, as reported by Florida Today. “The president and Senator Nelson have done nothing to set a long-term plan and mission for NASA.â€
That criticism is similar to what Ryan said Thursday in Ocala, Florida: “The Obama administration came in and they inherited a plan for NASA from the Bush administration. They had a plan for space. They jettisoned that plan,” Ryan said. The Obama Administration, though, has established some long-term goals for NASA’s human spaceflight program, including a mission to a near Earth asteroid by 2025 and one to orbit Mars by the mid-2030, as outlined by the president himself in a speech at the Kennedy Space Center two and a half years ago.
So if Mack doesn’t like the administration’s plans, or perceived lack of them, what does he propose? Mack was vague on any details in his conversation with reporters on Friday. “We need to be bold,” he said, the Orlando Sentinel reported, but, the article added, Mack “was non-committal about increasing or even sustaining funding for NASA.” Mack did endorse the Space Leadership Act, legislation introduced last month that would give the NASA administrator a ten-year term and establish a board of directors (a majority of whom would be appointed by Congress) to provide oversight to the agency. Mack is one of the 16 cosponsors of the bill, HR 6491.
After Mack’s comments, the Nelson campaign responded, noting the work he and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) did in 2010 to develop a NASA authorization act. “[H]is and Sen. Hutchison’s plan keeps the U.S. the leader in science and technology for defense and national security reasons,” a Nelson spokesman said, adding that Mack was the only member of the Florida House delegation to vote against the bill in 2010.
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