By Jeff Foust on 2012 July 1 at 3:38 pm ET The Florida campaign for President Barack Obama announced Sunday that former astronaut Mae Jemison, the first African-American woman in space, will campaign for the president’s reelection on Florida’s Space Coast on Monday. Jemison, according to the media advisory, will tour Advanced Magnet Lab, a small business in Palm Bay, Florida, that “embodies the importance of President Obama’s space exploration policies for Florida,” in the words of the statement. After the tour, Jemison and Mark Santi, the president of Advanced Magnet Lab, will speak to the media “to discuss how President Obama’s policies ensure that Kennedy Space Center will continue to make history as America’s spaceport during the new chapter in space exploration that our nation is embarking upon.”
While Advanced Magnet Lab may embody “the importance of President Obama’s space exploration policies for Florida,” space appears to be only a small part of its overall portfolio. The company mentions that superconducting magnets offer “many attractive attributes for space exploration”, but its space-related business appears to be limited to a contract with NASA to develop a model for high-power superconducting machines and a partnership with a NASA/JSC researcher on a NIAC grant to study the use of superconducting magnets in radiation shielding systems.
Jemison, as a NASA astronaut, flew on the STS-47 shuttle mission in 1992, her sole spaceflight. Her current activities include serving as the leader of the 100 Year Starship Initiative as part of the team that won the $500,000 grant from DARPA earlier this year to help start the effort.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 June 30 at 6:50 pm ET On Monday, Mark Albrecht, the executive secretary of the National Space Council over two decades ago, gave a speech at a Space Policy and History Forum forum in Washington. Much of his talk covered familiar ground he’s previously discussed, such as in a speech last November, including his experience on the Space Council during the George H.W. Bush Administration that he recounted in last year’s memoir Falling Back to Earth. That included his current assessment of NASA, in which he suggested the space agency should be “razed and raised”, and, more specifically, criticism of the Space Launch System (SLS) heavy-lift rocket, which he said was “too expensive, too slow, and too old.”
Albrecht did offer some new (at least compared to his November talk) thoughts about the state of the space agency. “I think at least three large constituencies have taken hold and own a significant part of NASA and the civil space program,” he said, “and they’re going to have to be dealt with. As time goes on, as the years go on, they get bigger and stronger and more entrenched.”
The first of those constituencies is what Albrecht calls “farmers.” These are people “who own a piece of the current program,” he said, ranging from a contract or a project all the way to a field center. “They have carved up that $17.3 billion, they lobby for it directly and independently, they fiercely protect it, and anybody who wants to change it is going to have to come through them.”
The second group he dubbed “the committee,” which represents groups of people who believe that “if you want to do something, every group has to be satisfied,” he explained. “So you accept programs, projects, and designs that satisfy the committee requirements, not an efficiently or effectiveness requirement.”
The final group in Albrecht’s taxonomy is the “Tinkerbells.” These are people, he said, who believe that if Americans just knew how great NASA was, “the money would come pouring in and all of these things could be solved.”
The combination of these three groups create a set of “boundary conditions” that Albrecht said could limit any effort to reform NASA. One is that any new program must be added on top of existing programs, rather than replace them. “If you try to substitute something new for something that’s ongoing, we’ll get you,” he said of those entrenched interests. New programs also have to be contracted in the same, generally cost-plus ways of old programs, he said. (That’s why he believes the COTS and CCDev programs, which have used funded Space Act Agreements rather than conventional contracts, have attracted criticism: “Different is threatening, because people start saying, ‘why can’t you do that differently?’ and they don’t want to do it differently.”) A final boundary condition, according to Albrecht, is that “you have to use, to the maximum extent, the infrastructure that already exists.” That means using centers and contractors in their traditional roles.
These constituencies are entrenched within NASA and have to become overcome in order to enable real change for the agency. “The longer it goes, the harder it’s going to get because those groups—and there are probably more—get stronger and stronger and stronger.” It was those constituencies, he suggested, that stymied the Bush Administration’s attempts to focus NASA on the Space Exploration Initiative over 20 years ago. “If it didn’t work in 1989, it is going to be much, much harder to do that in 2012 or 2013.”
But if those forces were strong enough to stop SEI 20 years ago, what’s the hope of overcoming them today if they’re that much stronger? Could sequestration, with its automatic across-the-board spending cuts, be the factor that overcomes those forces, as one attendee suggested during a question-and-answer session? “It really is the dark side,” Albrecht said. But, he said, history has shown that major changes have taken place in government agencies like the DOD because of “draconian” budget cuts. “Those are the times when really new and innovative things happen.”
However, he said he preferred to find ways to enact what he believes are the necessary changes without slashing NASA’s budget. “Let’s just think about what we could do with NASA at $17.3 billion, if we really, really focused it, and really got rid of the redundancy,” he said. “At $17.3 billion we could have an absolutely unbelievable space program.”
By Jeff Foust on 2012 June 30 at 5:03 pm ET Late Wednesday afternoon the Republican Party of Cuyahoga County (RPCC), Ohio, which includes the city of Cleveland, sent out a press release claiming that it had become aware of plans to move work on human spaceflight activities from the NASA Glenn Research Center there. “This move will have devastating effects on the economy of northeast Ohio,” the RPCC release stated, adding that “that this move will not be officially announced until after the 2012 presidential election.”
An email message to NASA Headquarters late Wednesday seeking comment wasn’t answered, although agency officials did provide statements to local Cleveland media outlets about the RPCC statement. “NASA is not transferring human spaceflight research and development activities from the Glenn Research Center,” a spokesperson told the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
The RPCC pressed its case, though, with an event Thursday that included former NASA administrator Mike Griffin and Scott Pace, who both advise Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. (Neither were present at the Cleveland event in a campaign advisory, according to a WEWS-TV account that referred to them as “Michael Griffith” and “Michael Pace”.)
Griffin also provided a quote in the RPCC release on Wednesday, only citing his affiliation as a former NASA administrator and not as a space policy advisor to the Romney campaign. “The fact that the Obama administration is seriously considering moving Human Space flight work out of Glenn is a [sic] deeply troubling,” he stated. “To eliminate Glenn’s role in human spaceflight is to call into question its very participation in NASA’s future.”
On Friday the RPCC sent me a chart from an “internal NASA document” that the party said was proof of the planned cuts. (This document was also apparently distributed at the Thursday event.) The chart, titled “HEO Cum FTE total reduction By Center FY13 thru FY16 2014 PAA vs FY13PB”, showed the “work scope change” in terms of numbers of full-time equivalent (FTE) employees that would be cut by center, presumably for the Human Exploration and Operations (HEO) mission directorate. For Glenn it showed a cut of 244 FTEs. However, other centers would also suffer job cuts under this plan, including 311 at the Johnson Space Center and 254 at the Marshall Space Flight Center; others centers would lose fewer than 100 positions each. The chart did not indicate when those staffing changes would take place beyond the fiscal years 2013-2016 timeframe in the chart title.
An RPCC spokesman declined to provide additional information on the source of the chart, only saying it came from “inside NASA.” A NASA spokesperson told the Plain Dealer in a follow-up article that the chart came from a “budget-planning exercise conducted by mid-level staff” and did not represent final NASA plans. A White House spokesman said they had not seen any plans to cut jobs at Glenn “and we have no intent to transfer such activities.” And, for good measure, the article noted that NASA said Glenn had already lost 214 positions—during the four years Griffin served as administrator.
Glenn is getting this attention since Ohio is a key state in the November election, with both major parties looking for any advantage that can win votes. Here, though, the focus is on jobs, not space policy. The coverage of the alleged planned job cuts said little about broader policy issues, beyond a comment made by former Sen. George Voinovich at Thursdays event and reported by WEWS. “If the President gets reelected… he should be asked, where are you going, what do you want?” he asked, either unaware of or unsatisfied with the existing policies of the space agency. “And if he’s not elected, it’s going to be up to President Romney to lay out what is his vision, where are we going.” So far, of course, Romney has said little about what his space policy vision might be if elected in November.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 June 28 at 6:32 am ET Earlier this year, inspired at least in part by comments from astronomer and science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson upon the release of his latest collection of essays, some space activists started a petition on the White House website asking for NASA’s budget to be, at a minimum, doubled. “Tomorrow is gone without NASA,” the petition pleaded. “Please at least double NASA’s annual budget, and continue to support the most inspirational program in the country.” Backed by a group called Penny4NASA, a reference to their desire to see NASA’s funding increased to one percent of the overall federal budget, the petition got the 25,000 signatures needed within 30 days to merit an official response from the White House.
Yesterday, the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) published the administration’s official response to the petition. The response, though, doesn’t directly address the petitioners’ request: that NASA’s budget be doubled. “NASA and space are so important to our future that we do need to be doubling and tripling what we can accomplish in this domain,” reads the OSTP response, citing, among other things, increases in the number of vehicles that can access ISS, the 100-times-more-powerful James Webb Space Telescope, and the Mars rover Curiosity, with 10 times the mass of scientific instruments than the rover Opportunity.
But what about budgets? Here, OSTP warns of budget cuts proposed by the Republican-led House, whose budget plan “if spread evenly, would significantly cut NASA’s budget, forcing the deepest cuts to the space program since just after we landed on the Moon.” By comparison, “the Administration has proposed a NASA budget for FY 2013 that spares the agency from such cuts and yet will deliver more than ever from this essential driver of American innovation.” Not exactly the message those who signed the petition were necessarily looking for.
Of course, in today’s fiscal environment, with the scythe of sequestration looming over every discussion of the 2013 budget, doubling NASA’s budget—or even far more modest increases—isn’t very realistic. (There is also the issue of what fraction of the federal budget should be devoted to NASA, and whether even that metric makes sense, but that’s a discussion for another post.) If space advocates want to increase NASA’s budget, they’ll need to find another approach than a petition, and they’ll need far more than 25,000 people to support that effort.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 June 27 at 7:07 am ET China’s Shenzhou-9 mission, now winding down with a landing expected later this week, has not made than big of an impact on the American political psyche, it appears. Whether it’s because Americans are distracted by other issues, or because the Chinese achievement—including the first crewed docking with a proto-space station—doesn’t seem that impressive, there hasn’t been that much hand-wringing about China overtaking the US in space, beating the US to the Moon, or other concerns.
“China is not overtaking the United States in space. It is, however, advancing,” wrote Joan Johnson-Freese in an essay for CNN. That advance is slow, she noted, but could pose a risk if the US shows impatience regarding its own long-term plans for human exploration beyond Earth orbit. “The real danger for the United States is in ceding space exploration and leadership to China because it lacks the political will to proceed at a steady, supportable pace. This will have broad strategic implications.”
One op-ed that has raised concern about China’s plans is an essay in Foreign Policy by John Hickman, who worries about China’s long-term plans to eventually send humans to the Moon could lead them to claim lunar territory—perhaps the entire Moon—as their own. “Even if it seems like science fiction, though, the ramifications are so vast that the possibility needs to be taken seriously,” he warns. “If Beijing did decide to annex the moon, or even just part of it, doing so would undermine the current international legal regime in space, encouraging other countries to annex their own extraterrestrial territory.”
That claim was pooh-poohed by the Chinese publication Global Times in a commentary there Tuesday. “This ludicrous, aggressive perspective discloses the distorted mentality of a few Americans facing the rapid rise of China,” wrote Han Zhu. “They actually see the moon, where the US put a man four decades ago, as US territory where other countries can’t venture. This is a minority view, but a disturbing one.” Space entrepreneur Robert Bigelow expressed similar concerns about China claiming the Moon last year, while top US experts on China’s space program said there was no evidence China was interested in making territorial claims on the Moon.
On of those experts, Dean Cheng of The Heritage Foundation, will be speaking at a Marshall Institute event Friday on “China’s Space Program: Assessing the Implications for the U.S.”, along with Kevin Pollpeter and former House staffer Leslee Gilbert. In a blog post shortly before the Shenzhou-9 launch, Cheng reviewed China’s space ambitions, both human and robotic, and concluded, “For the U.S., the question is whether there will be a coherent response to the Chinese challenge.”
By Jeff Foust on 2012 June 23 at 3:40 pm ET A member of the House normally not involved in space issues is asking her colleagues in the Senate to provide additional support for NASA’s Mars exploration program. In an op-ed published in the Pasadena Sun late Friday, Rep. Judy Chu (D-CA) describes the importance of the Mars exploration research done at JPL in particular, but raises concerns about the budget for that, citing the most recent proposed cuts in the program in the administration’s FY13 budget proposal. Those cuts, she notes, could lead to layoffs at JPL.
Since the House has already passed its appropriations bill “that substantially increased funding” for Mars exploration, she calls on the Senate to do even more, although she doesn’t quantify how much additional funding it should add to the bill. She instead argues that “the two chambers of Congress must come together so we don’t undercut future advances” in Mars exploration. “Senators have proposed funding for JPL, but they need to provide even more,” she writes.
While Chu doesn’t speak much on space issues, there is some local interest at play here. Her current district, the 32nd, covers much of the eastern part of the San Gabriel Valley, east of Pasadena. However, after redistricting, she is running this year in the reconfigured 27th district, which now includes most of Pasadena (although it’s not clear from the resolution of the available maps if JPL itself is just inside or outside the district.)
Also yesterday, the Houston Chronicle’s Eric Berger published a clarification on the “60 Minutes” piece on SpaceX provided by its host, Scott Pelley. The clarification specifically addressed the perception in the piece that Neil Armstrong “had testified against commercial space flight”, to use the Pelley’s words Pelley in a question to SpaceX founder Elon Musk. “We should have made it explicit in our story that, while Armstrong was ‘not confident’ that the newcomers could achieve safety and cost goals in the near term, he did want to ‘encourage’ them,” Pelley writes (emphasis in original), citing Armstrong’s prepared testimony before the Senate Commerce Committee in May 2010.
This letter was prompted by reaction to the re-airing of the “60 Minutes” segment earlier this month by Chris Kraft, who argued that the segment distorted the views of Armstrong, Gene Cernan, and others. As I earlier noted, this criticism came only after the second airing of the piece, in the wake of SpaceX’s successful test flight to the ISS. The original airing, back in March, included those same views, but Kraft and others didn’t appear to claim then that their views had been mischaracterized—or, at least, they weren’t able to get the media’s attention back in March.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 June 22 at 4:02 pm ET It’s that time again for the commercial launch industry in the US: every three to five years, they head up to Capitol Hill to make the case for extending a provision of commercial space law that’s little known outside the industry and obscure to some even within it: launch indemnification. That process is gearing up once again, as both government and industry officials seek another extension of that law.
The launch indemnification “regime”, as it’s widely known, involves the sharing of responsibility of third-party damages from a commercial launch accident. As part of the commercial launch licensing process, the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST) calculates the “maximum probable loss”, or MPL, to third parties that a launch vehicle could typically cause, a dollar amount dependent on the vehicle and launch site but averaging around $100 million. Launch providers must demonstrate financial responsibility, usually through insurance, for the value of the MPL. The federal government then agrees to indemnify the launch provider for any losses above that MPL value, up to $1.5 billion in 1988 dollars (approximately $2.7 billion today when adjusted for inflation.) Responsibility for any losses above that level reverts back to the launch provider.
In practice, there has never been a commercial launch accident that has created third-party losses that have triggered indemnification. However, the industry believes that the regime is important in order to protect launch providers from unforeseen catastrophes, as well as to provide a level playing field internationally, because launch providers in other countries have similar protections. A few critics have grumbled that the system puts the government on the hook for potentially billions of dollars in losses should such a catastrophe take place (although Congress would have to appropriate the funds to pay any damages above the MPL level.)
At a hearing by the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee earlier this month on this topic, both AST and industry argued for an extension. George Nield, the FAA associate administrator for commercial space transportation, said that the White House was seeking a five-year extension of the regime, a bit longer than the three-year extension passed by Congress in 2009. (Before that, Congress passed a five-year extension in 2004.)
Industry warned that if Congress failed to renew the indemnification regime, it could further hurt the competitiveness of the US launch industry, which is already struggling to compete with European and Russian firms because of higher prices. Alison Alfers, a vice president with DigitalGlobe, said that the company seriously considered a non-US launch of its upcoming WorldView-3 remote sensing satellite because foreign vehicles were, on average, 40% cheaper than similar American rockets. “We believe we are at a tipping point” for the US launch industry because of its high prices and eroding technological edge, she warned. “Any changes in the indemnification program that may lead to higher prices will result in foreign providers being the first choice for consumers like DigitalGlobe.”
At the same hearing, Alicia Cackley of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) did raise one concern about the system, and that is with how AST calculates the MPL value. “It is quite different from the way the industry in general does it,” she said. The FAA calculates casualty losses and then computes property losses as a fraction of that; Cackley said the industry instead starts with property losses using more sophisticated models. “We are definitely looking at the methodology and have some questions and suggestions for them about ways to improve it.” Nield noted at the hearing that they’re open to working with GAO on alternative MPL approaches, although he cautioned that some of those models may be significantly more expensive to use but may not yield a significantly different result.
At a hearing on the commercial space industry held earlier this week by the Senate Commerce Committee, GAO’s George Dillingham also noted his office’s concerns about MPL calculations, but said that it should not delay a renewal of the indemnification regime. “I think so,” he said when Sen. John Boozman (R-AR) asked him if it should be extended even if the MPL calculation issue hasn’t been fully addressed. “We didn’t talk to anyone in the industry who would say that this is something that shouldn’t be extended.”
Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL), who chaired the hearing, agreed that indemnification should be extended. “Companies have to know what they can buy insurance for,” he said. “That’s why we’ve simply got to continue this.”
At the House hearing, though, there were some more critical questions about the indemnification system, including why the launch industry should get this kind of support from the federal government when most other industries do not, as well as general concerns about the liability posed to the government under such a system. Panelists argued that the chance of an accident whose third-party losses exceed the MPL is very remote (less than one in 10 million, Nield said) and that the launch industry is a strategic capability of the nation with national security implications. An extension did appear to have the support of key committee members like Palazzo, though.
Despite those expressions of support, neither the House nor the Senate has yet to formally introduce legislation to extend the launch indemnification regime. That is not necessarily a surprise: in 2009 the extension was passed by Congress late in the year, and signed into law just days before it was set to expire at the end of the calendar year. With a limited number of legislative days remaining this year, though, and a lot of high-priority issues that Congress needs to take up, action now rather than at the last minute might be appreciated by the industry.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 June 19 at 12:30 pm ET As previously noted here, retiring Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) sees NASA in a “good position” to both make use of the International Space Station and explore beyond Earth orbit, a position she reiterates in an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle on Sunday. “America should have two goals,” she writes. “First, to ensure manned access to the International Space Station,” to make use of the station, citing specifically the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) on the ISS. “Second, to achieve manned space exploration beyond low-Earth orbit, places where no human has ever been.” “NASA is an investment, not an expenditure,” she argues, whose funding should be supported.
Earlier this month NASA announced it was canceling a small astronomy mission, the Gravity and Extreme Magnetism Small Explorer (GEMS), citing cost overruns of 20-30 percent on a mission that had been cost-capped at $119 million. That decision especially hurt Orbital Sciences Corporation, which was contracted to both build GEMS and launch it on its Pegasus XL rocket. Space News now reports that Orbital is lobbying Congress to restore the mission, claiming NASA’s cancellation decision was based on “an erroneous and incomplete set of cost, schedule and technical data”. It also warns the cancellation of GEMS may result in the layoffs of up to 150 people currently working on the satellite, and even retirement of the little-used Pegasus XL, which launched last week for the first time since October 2008 with only one other mission on its manifest.
On Monday the FAA and NASA announced a memorandum of understanding about how the two agencies will cooperate on regulation and oversight of commercial cargo and crew missions. The contents of the MOU were not that surprising, and most of the news came from the comments that NASA administrator Charles Bolden made about the status of the commercial crew program and when awards for the its next phase will be made. Nonetheless, the MOU got an endorsement from an unexpected source. Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH) told Dayton TV station WDTN that the agreement could lead to local jobs. How? “We know that with the Air Force they have the experience, expertise on unmanned, operating unmanned vehicles,” he told the TV station. “NASA of course has the issue of space, and FAA has the ability working with the commercial sector. As we get all of them cooperating and working together we know that it could mean jobs back here at home.” From his comments, and a speech he made last month, he may have been confusing the FAA/NASA MOU on commercial spaceflight with efforts to get FAA, NASA, and the Air Force to cooperate on UAVs.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 June 14 at 8:30 pm ET Last month’s successful test flight by SpaceX to the International Space Station was a major milestone for commercial spaceflight, and also for public and political perceptions of the industry. The Senate Commerce Committee will reexamine the industry in a hearing Wednesday, June 20, titled “Risks, Opportunities, and Oversight of Commercial Space”. The hearing, according to the committee’s announcement, will examine the commercial space industry and review ISS commercial cargo and crew efforts. Scheduled witness include:
- Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA associate administrator for human exploration and operations;
- Pam Melroy, a former NASA astronaut who now works at the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation;
- Gerald Dillingham of the Government Accountability Office;
- Mike Gold of Bigelow Aerospace; and
- Michael Lopez-Alegria, another former astronaut who is now president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation.
This likely won’t be the only hearing on commercial spaceflight this summer. Last week, in a statement praising the agreement between NASA and Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), a key House appropriator, on the future of NASA’s commercial crew program, Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX), chairman of the House Science Committee, said his committee would hold an oversight hearing on that program “later this summer”.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 June 14 at 7:03 am ET Within the next few days China will launch Shenzhou-9, its fourth crewed mission but the first since 2008. The spacecraft wil ferry three people, including the country’s first female astronaut, to the Tiangong-1 experimental lab module that China launched last September. The mission will likely trigger another round of hand-wringing among some commentators in the US, expressing concern that China is catching up to, or even surpassing, the US in space, with adverse impacts for both national prestige and national security. A couple of recent white papers offer a more nuanced view of China’s capabilities, though.
“The PRC [People’s Republic of China] has made significant advances in its space program and is emerging as a space power,” concluded China’s Evolving Space Capabilities: Implications for U.S. Interests, a white paper prepared by the Project 2049 Institute for the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission and released in late April. Chinese space technology is not as advanced as the US and other major space powers, but “China’s relative advances are significant,” the report notes. In particular, it warns that China’s capabilities pose a security threat to the US by enhancing Chinese military systems while threatening to disrupt or disable US space systems in a conflict. “China’s space ambitions are in part peaceful in nature. Yet technologies can also be used with ill-intent,” the report states.
However, the report also notes that space planning policy is spread out among a range of government entities that could create coordination issues. “Senior civilian leaders within the party and government view space as a national priority and therefore direct significant resources toward the country’s space-related technology base. However, space policy, planning, and program management appear fragmented and loosely coordinated among a range of military and civilian players,” it states. While the China National Space Administration (CNSA) is billed as the Chinese equivalent of NASA, it lacks NASA’s influence within the government and “functions in large part to facilitate international exchanges and cooperative programs with other space-faring nations.”
Last month the Defense Department issued the 2012 edition of its annual report on China’s military capabilities. Only about half a page of this year’s report (starting on page 8 of the printed document) is devoted to space issues, briefly discussing China’s growing space capabilities. However, it also suggests that Chinese space programs “are facing some challenges in systems reliability” based on recent events. It cites the August 2011 failure of a Long March 2C launch and problems with the DFH-4 communications satellite bus as evidence that a surge of Chinese space activity “may be taking its toll.”
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