Sunday’s edition of Florida Today features excerpts of an interview with Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL), including some discussion of space policy issues. Posey doesn’t break much new ground here, defending his vote on an appropriations bill that included language calling on NASA to immediately downselect to one or two commercial crew providers. He compares it to building a house on a $100,000 budget: “Do you hire one contractor to build your $100,000 house? Or do you hire four contractors and say, see how far you can go for $25,000 each?” (The language calling for that immediate downselect has been superseded, at least for now, by an agreement between NASA and key House appropriator Frank Wolf that will allow NASA to make “two and a half” awards using Space Act Agreements.)
Posey also reiterated hie belief that the Moon should be a space exploration goal, primarily because of perceived military implications. “The moon, first and primarily, is the military high ground,” he said. “We know the Russians want to colonize the moon. The Chinese are going to colonize the moon — they’ve said so.” In the excerpts, at least, he doesn’t elaborate on the military advantage of colonizing the Moon versus other space activities Earth orbit or elsewhere in cislunar space.
The above is a video posted by the account of Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO), dated June 29th but largely ignored until last night, when the congressman tweeted the link to it to a couple of people:
@badastronomer I gave shoe-shine letters 2 Reps Wolf & Schiff/their response youtu.be/CYwl3avGJD4 I’m a better Congressman than videographer
In the video Rep. Polis inteviews a couple of his colleagues, Reps. Frank Wolf (R-VA) and Adam Schiff (D-CA) about supporting efforts to reverse proposed cuts in NASA’s planetary sciences program in the administration’s FY13 budget. The video was apparently produced in response to letters collected during a “planetary science shoe shine” last month in Boulder, Colorado, part of a broader effort by planetary scientists (primarily using car washes and bake sales) to win attention to the funding threat those programs are facing.
The video is not high quality (“I’m a better Congressman than videographer,” he tweeted), but Polis gets a few brief comments from Wolf and Schiff. Wolf, who chairs the appropriations subcommittee whose oversight includes NASA, notes that “we have saved Mars, we saved Europa, we saved the planetary program” by adding some funding to the program in the House version of the FY13 appropriations bill. Schiff, who serves on the same subcommittee, thanks those who signed letters in support of the planetary program, saying “it was so helpful yo have your voices heard” on this issue.
Last week, after astronomers announced the discovery of a fifth moon orbiting the dwarf planet Pluto in images from the Hubble Space Telescope, the web site The Capitol Column openly pondered the effect that discovery would have on the NASA budget: “It may have taken the discovery of a new moon to finally get members of Congress to reconsider major funding cuts in NASA’s budget,” the article’s lede claimed, adding that “the discovery may be enough to save the Hubble Space Telescope’s successor, the James Webb Telescope.” The un-bylined article offered no evidence that members of Congress were reconsidering NASA’s funding levels in the wake of this finding, and such a development does seem implausible.
While an additional moon orbiting Pluto might not do much for NASA or its science programs, a key NASA official said this week that another upcoming event may play a big role. Speaking at the “NASA Night” portion of the Lunar Science Forum being held this week at NASA’s Ames Research Center (and also webcast), Jim Green, the planetary sciences division director within NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, suggested the landing of the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission on the night of August 5 could significantly affect the agency’s planetary sciences program and budget.
“It’s absolutely essential for everybody in this room to recognize that, whether you’ve been following this or not, this is going to have an enormous effect on you, personally,” he told a room filled primarily with lunar scientists. “Whether it’s successful or not successful, it will have an enormous effect on the planetary budget, and therefore, all of our careers.”
Green, confirming comments made Monday by MSL project officials at a NASA Headquarters press conference, said the spacecraft was doing well. “I think we have done everything humanly possible to give this mission the greatest chance of success,” he said. “The landing of MSL will be absolutely critical, and we really need to take note of what’s going to happen here.”
Green acknowledged that current “austere budget times” have adversely affected NASA’s planetary sciences program, forcing the agency to stretch out the time between calls for Discovery and New Frontiers missions. However, he said he remained committed to adhering to the overall framework for planetary exploration for the next decade outlined in the decadal survey released last year. “We cannot blink. The planetary decadal is a well-laid-out document,” he said, citing the “decision rules” in the report that specified what NASA should do if funding fell short of what was needed to carry out the missions prioritized in the study. “We can’t give that up. If we do, we will be lost, not for a few years, but for ten years.”
The coming years, he said, will see a closer relationship between the science and human spaceflight directorates of NASA in order to help support plans for future human missions to near Earth asteroids and Mars. “We always knew that science and human exploration would have to get closer together as exploration moves out form low Earth orbit,” he said. That’s already happening with cooperation on studies of future Mars missions in the 2018 and 2020 launch windows, replacing planned NASA contributions to ESA’s ExoMars missions. “And for Mars, we’re doing it sooner rather than later. As we look at potentially the next set of missions in the late decade, we will see, I believe, a lot closer tie with exploration.”
That changing relationship will impact some of the lunar scientists present, though. Green said that NASA is planning to “recharter” the NASA Lunar Science Institute, the Ames-based organization that supports several research teams on lunar science research and runs the Lunar Science Forum. The new organization will have a broader, more “flexible path” focus, that includes the Moon as well as Mars and asteroids.
While Green said the success (or failure) of MSL will have a major effect on the agency’s planetary science program, he said there was one other potential discovery that could have an even greater effect. “I want to be the director of the planetary science division when we find life beyond Earth,” he said to applause from the audience. “That indeed will change everything, I believe, in major ways about the importance of planetary science and maybe hasten the opportunities that are delineated in the decadal in many different ways, for which exploration of the Moon has got to be part of it, too.”
With all the debate in the presidential campaign to date about outsourcing jobs to other nations, it was only a matter of time before space policy got pulled in. Appearing on CNN on Monday, John H. Sununu, the former New Hampshire governor and national co-chairman of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, brought up the issue and argued that President Obama had indulged in it himself while in the White House:
There is a huge difference. In fact, we had an event yesterday that wasn’t well-reported. We launched a U.S. astronaut up to the space station. But you know how they were — he was launched? She was launched?
She was launched on a Russian spacecraft because President Obama has outsourced a major portion of the U.S. space program to the Russians. That’s national policy. Taxpayer money.
Sununu was referring to Saturday night’s launch of a Soyuz spacecraft to the ISS, whose crew included NASA astronaut Sunita Williams. And, in fact, Soyuz is the only means for NASA astronauts to access the ISS with the retirement last year of the Space Shuttle. However, as the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s FactCheck.org describes in great detail, that policy predates the Obama Administration, outlining the decisions made by the George W. Bush Administration and NASA leadership of the time to retire the shuttle and create a several-year gap in human spaceflight. The Obama Administration continued part of that policy—the retirement of the shuttle—but the origins of the “outsourced” human spaceflight program Sununu complained about predate the current administration.
As the campaign between President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney ramps up, the candidates are getting plenty of advice, solicited and unsolicited, about a wide range of issues. That includes space, with a couple of recent op-eds offering some proposals—although perhaps too vague or unrealistic to be acted upon.
Writing for NBCNews.com, reporter/commentator Jay Barbree wants space policy on the “presidential to-do list”. Doing what, exactly, isn’t clear yet (this essay was the first of a five-part series), but he clearly wants the US to restore its human spaceflight capability as soon as possible. To President Obama, he says that most “space veterans” approve of the goals of his policy, but that he should not “prop up the newcomers while giving short shrift to America’s most experienced aerospace companies”, citing specifically the funding SpaceX has received while ATK “is still trying to get in on the funding for space station resupply.”
Barbree also suggests to Gov. Romney that his proposals for a blue-ribbon panel to review the nation’s space policy are unnecessary: “Take it from a reporter who has covered NASA for every day of its five decades in existence: America’s space program does not need another busload of suits with untanned faces stabbing holes in the air, debating over things about which they know little.” (If tanned faces are indeed correlated with space expertise, perhaps the Romney campaign should consider ditching its current space policy team with the cast of Jersey Shore.)
While Barbree didn’t dwell on specifics about what the US space policy should be, Madhu Thangavelu of USC offers a specific proposal in a CNN essay: create a Cabinet-level “Department of Space”. The idea itself isn’t new, but in his essay, Thangavelu sees this department as coordinating public and private, domestic and international space efforts. He claims this department, which would appear to create another layer of bureaucracy on top of existing agencies, would instead “help NASA remove layers of bureaucratic burden” and also help companies “cut through government bureaucracies” ranging from FAA to OSHA. (Wouldn’t every industry love having a Cabinet-level department running interference on OSHA for them?) He suggests, for example, that such a department could resolve export control issues, although the current problem is that satellites and related components are explicitly placed on the US Munitions List by Congress, and thus Congress, and not an existing or proposed department, must act to at least allow the executive branch to remove them.
Thangavelu didn’t specifically direct this proposal at the Obama or Romney campaigns, but one item in there suggests that, if he did, the concept would likely be dead on arrival: he notes a USC study “presented a case that a Department of Space should operate at a budget level of $60 billion,” with a third of that going to NASA (how the rest would be spent isn’t mentioned.) A proposal to roughly triple civil space spending probably isn’t going to get much traction in the current political environment.
Dr. Mason Peck, Chief Technologist, National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Mr. George Beck, Chief Clinical and Technology Officer, Impact Instrumentation, Inc.
Mr. Brian Russell, Chief Executive Officer, Zephyr Technology
Mr. John Vilja, Vice President for Strategy, Innovation and Growth, Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne
Dr. Richard Aubrecht, Vice President, Moog Inc.
The purpose of the hearing, according to the hearing charter, is straightforward: to “examine the direct economic and societal benefits that investments in NASA have generated and highlight those areas where continued investments could help stimulate the pipeline for future economic growth.”
This story does have a happy ending of sorts, though. Earlier this week venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson, whose investments include SpaceX, posted a photo of a gift he was sending SpaceX founder Elon Musk: a picture of a Falcon 9 launch signed by nine Apollo astronauts. The astronauts offered congratulations to Musk and SpaceX for their recent achievement. “A real breakthrough – much success on many flights to come!” signed Fred Haise of Apollo 13 fame. Even Gene Cernan, who had been critical of commercial spaceflight providers in the past—he legendarily said in Senate testimony in 2010 that such companies “do not yet know what they don’t know”—offered his congratulations and advice to the company: “Congratulations on a job well done – now the challenge begins.”
Jurvetson writes that he originally sought to get Cernan to tour SpaceX’s facility, but had no luck. He finally approached Cernan about signing the photo after getting other astronauts to sign it, eventually winning over the astronaut with how SpaceX and Musk persevered through early failures to achieve their recent success. “As I told him these stories of heroic entrepreneurship, I could see his mind turning,” Jurvetson wrote. “He found a reconciliation: ‘I never read any of this in the news. Why doesn’t the press report on this?'”
Remember when members of Congress would lobby for shuttle orbiters to be located in the states or districts? Now that the locations for the orbiters have been settled (and the complaints from those who lost out have died down), some members are turning their attention to something a little different: the timing of when shuttle orbiters head to their ultimate destinations. The Orlando Sentinel reported Sunday that Sens. Bill Nelson (D-FL) and Marco Rubio (R-FL), as well as Reps. Sandy Adams (R-FL) and Bill Posey (R-FL), have asked NASA administrator Charles Bolden to time Endeavour’s departure from KSC so it coincides with the nearby Cocoa Beach Air Show. The airshow is slated to take place September 22-23, while current schedules call for Endeavour to leave for California on its 747 carrier aircraft on September 20. The air show’s promoters hope the inclusion of the shuttle will increase attendance—and ticket sales—“exponentially”, although the promoters add that most people who see the air show don’t buy tickets.
The Sentinel also reported this week that Congress seems willing to support, and fund, a new mission for a notorious grounded satellite. NOAA is seeking $23 million this year to help prepare the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) spacecraft for a launch as soon as 2014, and is getting support in Congress in large part because it carries a much-needed instrument to monitor solar weather conditions. DSCOVR started in 1998 as Triana, a spacecraft proposed by then-Vice President Al Gore to provide live full-disk images of the Earth from the earth-Sun L1 point. Derisively dubbed “Goresat” by critics, the spacecraft was stuck in storage for about a decade after its launch was blocked by Congressional critics skeptical of its scientific value. (DSCOVR has been proposed as a potential mission for “new entrants” to the Air Force’s EELV contract, such as SpaceX or ATK.)
Former astronaut Jose Hernandez is running for Congress, but on Monday he was doing a different kind of running: participating in the Olympic torch relay in England:
2day I’m proud to represent the Central Valley by carrying Olympic torch at 10 am in Bletchley. C it live at london2012.com/torch-relay
On Monday, the AIAA announced it was holding a “dialogue on deep space exploration” on Capitol Hill on July 24. “The panel will examine the next steps in deep space exploration for the United States, the medical barriers that must be overcome before increased exploration is possible, and the costs and benefits of relying on robotic rather than human exploration,” the release states, adding that the panel will also examine destinations for exploration missions, international cooperation in such missions, and even “possible fuel sources” for them.
Scheduled to speak at the event are Rep. Randy Hultgren (R-IL), a member of the House Science Committee; Scott Pace of the GWU’s Space Policy Institute; James Green, head of NASA HQ’s planetary sciences division; Brian Duffy, an ATK vice president; Jim Crocker, a Lockheed Martin vice president; Kris Lehnhardt,a physician and professor at GWU; and Ralph McNutt of Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Lab.
At first glance, that looks an an inocuous enough panel, with a mix of industry, academia, and government representatives. But the event has attracted some critical attention, in part because of the panel’s composition but also because of who is the current AIAA president: former NASA administrator Mike Griffin. NASA’s Alan Ladwig expressed his criticism of the panel’s composition in a tweet on Tuesday:
The AIAA forum lacks balance. A Romney rep, but none from Administration. Legacy companies, but no NewSpace. Griffin makes hi s mark.
Griffin, though, may not have helped his cause by including in the release his beliefs about the next destination for human space exploration. “The next stop on that frontier is the moon, and it is indeed still new. It is no longer enough to point to our past achievements; most of today’s world cannot recall the time when our astronauts could voyage to the moon. It is for us to resolve that they will do so again, and soon,” he stated. He warned that the US can still choose to lead the way, but “within a very few years, it will belong to others.”
While the recent Shenzhou-9 flight was a major accomplishment for China’s space program, featuring the first crewed docking by a Chinese spacecraft and also the first flight of a female Chinese astronaut, the flight did not get that much attention—or reaction—in the US, as previously noted here. Some, though, are finding ways to use the mission to make a point about US space policy, or to warn China not to follow in the footsteps of the US in human spaceflight.
They also played down the idea of space race between the two countries: “China is not racing with the United States, whether it’s manned space or unmanned space,” said Dean Cheng of The Heritage Foundation. “The Chinese have their own program, their own objectives, their own timeline.” One reason for a lack of a race is that Americans, including policymakers, have been treating the Chinese accomplishments with a “been-there, done-that” attitude. “For China to be considered a threat in Americans’ minds, they’re going to have to do something new, and not something new for China, but something new for the world,” said Leslee Gilbert, former staff director of the House Science Committee.
Not everyone shares that attitude, though. “[T]he humans who are now winning the space race come from the People’s Republic of China,” writes Douglas MacKinnon in an op-ed in the New York Times. “It is clear from their own propaganda that China means to replace us as the ‘world’s leading spacefaring nation.'”
MacKinnon, in his op-ed, seeks to elevate space policy in the 2012 campaign here in the US, using the growing capability—and, in his view, threat—posed by China’s human and other spaceflight programs as a catalyst. “As China launches military satellite after military satellite while declaring its intention to colonize the moon, maybe preeminence in space should be” an issue that President Obama and Governor Romney should discuss in the campaign, he argues. (Keep in mind that the Chinese government has not officially declared “its intention to colonize the Moon”, only that it is studying potential future human missions to the Moon.)
MacKinnon claims that during the transition period after the 2008 election, then President-elect Obama “contemplated combining the best of the space programs at the Pentagon and NASA to compete with the rapidly accelerating Chinese space program,” which he then abandoned. He cites as a source for that a Bloomberg News article from January 2009 that cites claims that the incoming administration would “probably tear down long-standing barriers between the U.S.’s civilian and military space programs” to counter Chinese capabilities. Exactly how that would have worked is unclear, but a couple of the specific plans cited in the article—canceling the Ares 1 rocket and making use of EELVs for human spaceflight—have actually happened, contrary to MacKinnon’s claims, with the Ares 1 scrapped as part of the Constellation cancellation and several companies making plans to use the Atlas 5 for commercial crewed vehicles.
Cheng also believes the US should rely more on its commercial space capabilities. “Space exploration arguably requires the government; the business of space exploitation, whether resupplying the ISS or promoting space tourism, does not,” he writes. He also cautions about cooperation in space exploration, especially with China, as well as engaging China in “new international covenants or codes of conduct regarding space.”
Meanwhile, Bob Davis of the Wall Street Journal has some advice for China about its human space ambitions: don’t do it! “If China goes on to repeat the [Apollo 11] mission 60 or so years after the original, it would prove what? To my mind, it would represent a poverty of imagination, not riches,” he argues. The piece is as much about his dislike for human spaceflight than it is about China’s program, however, beyond suggesting that China might be better off spending its money on terrestrial pursuits than on spaceflight. It seems unlikely China will heed his advice, based on its current activities.
