By Jeff Foust on 2012 February 28 at 8:49 am ET For the last several years there has been a flurry of activity at the state level in the form of legislation and other initiatives to support commercial space ventures: tax policies, liability indemnification, support for spaceport projects, and so on. This year, for example, the Florida legislature is working on legislation to support spaceport efforts at Cecil Field in Jacksonville, the Colorado legislature is taking up a liability indemnification bill, and the New Mexico legislature considered, but did not pass, an update to its own liability indemnification statute. California, though, has largely been on the sidelines while these and other states have worked on legislation to attract space businesses.
Stu Witt wants to change that. Witt runs the Mojave Air And Space Port, an FAA-licensed spaceport that is the home to a number of entrepreneurial space companies. Witt is concerned that other states that offer various legislative incentives will lure those companies out of the state, to the detriment of not only his spaceport but the state in general. “Virginia, Maryland, Texas, Florida, New Mexico, Colorado, and other states, with the support of their governors, legislators and business communities, are visiting aerospace businesses at the Mojave Air and Space Port in an effort to recruit them and their highly-skilled jobs to their states,” he said in a statement Monday.
The statement was tied to a press conference at the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference in Palo Alto, California, where Witt discussed his concerns and his request for action. He’s asking the state legislature to consider several pieces of legislation that would make California more competitive versus those other states and thus more likely to attract and retain those space companies. Those pieces of legislation include liability indemnification, “zero-g, zero tax” incentives, tax credits, and making it easier for the spaceport to tap state infrastructure funding.
At the press conference, Witt said their latest effort, backed by companies at Mojave as well as SpaceX and other companies in the state, has the support within the legislature of Assemblyman Steve Knight and a few others, and their specific requests for legislation were submitted last week. They’ve tried to push for similar legislation three times in the past but failed to get it through, he said, although with term limits in the state legislature there is “a whole new cadre of characters” there that he hopes will be more receptive this time around.
Witt said that this legislation can help keep the companies that have revitalized his airport over the last decade in the state and allow them to fly from there. “The view from space, if I had a choice, I’d like to see the Golden Gate Bridge and the tip of Baja from my trip,” he said. “The view would sell itself if you have a place to fly from California, and I would like to see some of these companies have the opportunity to stay in California and operate.”
By Jeff Foust on 2012 February 27 at 7:46 pm ET The House Science Committee has now scheduled its usual hearing on the administration’s budget proposal for NASA. The hearing is scheduled for 2 pm on Wednesday, March 7. NASA administrator Charles Bolden is the sole scheduled witness. While members got soe opportunities to pose questions (or raise concerns) about the NASA budget earlier this month when presidential science advisor John Holdren talked about the overall FY13 R&D budget proposal, this will be an opportunity for the full committee to go into greater detail with the head of the space agency about the funding, or lack thereof, for specific NASA programs.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 February 26 at 7:00 am ET After presidential candidate Newt Gingrich’s speech that featured the goal of a permanent base on the Moon by 2020, he was criticized by some of his fellow Republican candidates, among others, for proposing what they believe to be an expensive venture. Mitt Romney’s campaign issued a statement criticizing the plan, which it argued could cost “up to $500 billion”; Rick Santorum ran a radio ad affixing the same price tag to the plan. But just how much would a lunar base cost?
In an effort to answer that and other questions about the fiscal policies of the candidates, The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget issued a report this week estimating the costs of some of those policies. The bipartisan group examined the proposals from the four major remaining candidates—Gingrich, Romney, Santorum, and Ron Paul—and estimated how much they would cost or save the taxpayers.
On page 17, it looks at Gingrich’s plan to “Establish a Moon Base and Manned Mission to Mars”. The report sets a range of prices for the plan, from $140 billion in a “low-debt” scenario to $270 billion in an “intermediate-debt” scenario up to $620 billion in the “high-debt” scenario. The committee got those estimates from a review of two earlier reports: an April 2009 report by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that looked at several potential funding scenarios for NASA’s then plans for space exploration, and a two-page document from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) that summarized the estimated costs for an international lunar base. An endnote in the committee’s report explains the differences in the scenarios are based on different estimates of cost overruns, from 0 to 50 percent.
The committee presumably used both reports since the CBO report is focused only on the cost of Constellation, but not a lunar base; the CSIS report examined the cost of a lunar base but assumed some Constellation-specific infrastructure (Ares 5 and Orion) would be in place. (There is some overlap, since the CSIS study includes the cost of developing Altair, which the CBO also includes in their Constellation budget.) The committee’s report then simply assumes that a human mission to Mars will cost the same amount as establishing a lunar base, an assumption that the report sheepishly admits “comes with an unusually high degree of uncertainty.”
There are some flaws in the report’s analysis. One is a numeric error: the report fails to add in a 25-percent overrun for the cost from the CSIS report of the lunar base itself and it maintenance (which, for the latter, the report only includes one year of what is an annual cost, presumably since the base won’t begin operations until 2020 in this scenario.) When that happens the lunar base cost rises to $142 million and thus the total cost to $284 million. (That total works out, over eight years, to $35.5 billion a year, approximately twice NASA’s current $17.8-billion budget.) Then there’s the addition of a human mission to Mars, which Gingrich did not explicitly call for in his Florida speech last month: instead, he set a goal of developing “the first continuous propulsion system in space” to enable shorter-duration Mars missions, but didn’t state that one should be carried out by 2020.
Yet another question is whether a lunar base development plan that a President Gingrich might seek funding for would be anything like the older Constellation plans. Gingrich has given no details about his proposed lunar base, but has, in that speech and on other occasions, suggested he would make use of non-traditional approaches like prizes to fund these efforts. Whether these approaches would be successful or not is unclear, but they do suggest old models might not be the best way to estimate their costs.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 February 25 at 10:47 am ET Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was speaking at a town hall in Kalamazoo, Michigan, on Friday when he was asked—unexpectedly, perhaps, given the locale—about NASA planetary exploration efforts. Romney, according to CNN’s account of the event, “said he would study different options”, a response along the lines of the space policy he laid out nearly a month ago in a Florida speech. But he had a little more to add specifically about racing China for a human return to the Moon, POLITICO reported:
And I know China is headed to the Moon. They’re planning on going to the Moon, and some people say, oh, we’ve got to get to the Moon, we’ve got to get there in a hurry to prove we can get there before China. It’s like, guys, we were there a long time ago, all right? And when you get there would you bring back some of the stuff we left?
That response would suggest that a human lunar exploration effort wouldn’t be a high priority for a Romney Administration, something that’s perhaps a bit surprising given that his team of space policy advisors includes former NASA administrator Mike Griffin, who implemented the Constellation program to enable a human return to the Moon as called for by the Bush Administration’s Vision for Space Exploration. Romney, of course, has previously been critical of fellow candidate Newt Gingrich’s call for a lunar base by 2020.
It’s worth noting that various media accounts of the event described Romney as being in a light mood: the Wall Street Journal called his campaign stop “cheeky” while MSNBC called the former Massachusetts governor “just plain funny”. Some advocates for a human return to the Moon, thought, might not be laughing.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 February 24 at 6:44 am ET It’s been two weeks after the release of a NASA budget proposal that proposed major cuts and radical changes to the agency’s planetary science programs, particularly its Mars exploration program. While congressional action on that budget proposal is still months in the future, proponents of the program are continuing to rally their opposition to those cuts while NASA officials defend the proposal.
Earlier this week NASA administrator Charles Bolden visited JPL, where he “seemed to receive a warm and friendly welcome from JPL staffers”, in the words of a Pasadena Star-News account, despite a budget proposal that could cause some of them to lose their jobs. He offered few additional details about the agency’s plans to replace the previous plans for the joint ExoMars missions with a “viable, affordable” alternative that could feature missions in 2018 and/or 2020. If those plans do work out, Bolden promised, “hopefully you’ll find a minimum loss of jobs here” at JPL, the Pasadena Sun reported.
Advocates in Congress, though, are continuing their push to restore planetary funding. In an op-ed in this week’s issue of Space News (a version of which also appeared in the Star-News) Reps. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and John Culberson (R-TX) made the case that funding for planetary science, including not just Mars exploration but a proposed Europa orbiter (a personal favorite of Culberson), should be restored. “Slashing NASA’s budget for exploring the solar system would be a serious mistake that would threaten our nation’s hard-won and long-held leadership role” in space exploration, they argue. The administration’s proposed cuts to planetary science “would compromise a program painstakingly built up over decades and jeopardize a work force that, once dissolved, would be difficult, if not impossible, to reconstitute.” In addition, Schiff held a town hall yesterday with JPL employees “to discuss the future of space exploration”, according to a tweet from the congressman, which presumably included discuss of Mars exploration funding.
In addition, yesterday the American Astronomical Society (AAS) released its own statement on the proposed NASA budget. Unlike the AAS’s own Division for Planetary Sciences, which was sharply critical of the proposed Mars and other planetary cuts, the main AAS offered a more nuanced view. The AAS is “deeply concerned” about those cuts, the release stated, but the paragraph discussing that comes after one where the organization of professional astronomers said it was “grateful” for funding for the James Webb Space Telescope. “It is challenging to receive a budget from the President that supports part of our discipline and undercuts another,” AAS executive director Kevin Marvel said in the statement, saying the AAS would work to get Congress to “fully support all of the decadal surveys’ priorities.”
By Jeff Foust on 2012 February 23 at 7:22 am ET “Obama campaign could trip over space policy” reads the headline of a Houston Chronicle article today that sounds almost hopeful that space policy—specifically, continued US reliance on Russian vehicles to transport astronauts to and from the International Space Station—will become an issue during this year’s presidential campaign. The article tries to make the case that the “politically embarrassing reliance on Russia” could give Republicans “a potential avenue of attack on Obama in the fall campaign”, at least in Florida. (The article is tied to President Obama’s visit to Florida today, but that trip is focused on an energy policy speech in Miami and campaign fundraisers, not space.)
It’s possible space could become an issue, but there are a couple issues with that assessment. One is that regardless of the decisions made by the Obama Administration on Constellation, we would be relying now on Soyuz vehicles for ISS access: the original Vision for Space Exploration featured a gap of up to four years between the 2010 retirement of the shuttle and the introduction no later than 2014 of a Crew Exploration Vehicle. By the time Obama took office, the entry into service of what had become Ares 1 and Orion had slipped to at least 2015, and perhaps much later, in the opinion of the Augustine Committee. Short of extending the shuttle program or simply stretching out the remaining missions—at significant cost—the US would likely be using Soyuz vehicles right now even if Constellation remained alive and on schedule.
The second issue is whether this issue rises to worthy of national debate in the general election. Space has traditionally been a topic of niche, regional interest, and that seems unlikely to change this year given bigger concerns about economic, foreign policy, and social issues that have dominated the Republican primary campaign to date. There is the Space Coast in Florida, a state expected to be up for grabs in the 2012 campaign. But it’s worth noting that Brevard County—the heart of the Space Coast—is a small part of the state overall, and one that leans Republican: John McCain won the county by 30,000 votes in 2008 but the lost the state overall as Obama had much larger margins of victory elsewhere in the state, including more populous portions of the state’s “I-4 Corridor”, where space is not an issue. A campaign may decide to maximize its resources by focusing on other issues in other regions of the state where it thinks it may get better leverage.
The counterexample, of course, is last month’s unexpected debate about lunar bases triggered by Newt Gingrich’s speech on the topic of space on the Space Coast. For several days people were talking about space—until they moved on to other topics. Space was brought up in campaign ads and statements even after the candidates moved on from Florida, but I noted earlier this month that this was less a discussion about space but instead a way of criticizing Gingrich’s conservative bona fides by other candidates, who argued that Gingrich was pushing a half-trillion-dollar government program instead of finding ways to reduce government spending and budget deficits. That doesn’t augur well for a sustained, substantive debate about space policy once the campaign moves on to the general election phase.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 February 22 at 7:36 am ET How active NASA should be in ensuring, or even regulating, the safety of commercial crew vehicles is an issue that has been debated for some time, but a couple of events in the last week demonstrate that the issue is still on the minds of people on Capitol Hill.
At last Friday’s hearing about the administration’s FY13 budget proposal for R&D programs, the first question posed to Office of Science and Technology Policy director John Holdren was not about proposed spending for NASA or other agencies, but about whether NASA had sufficient authority to oversee crew safety given its use of Space Act Agreements (SAAs). “I have a problem with this,” said committee chairman Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX). “It’s my understanding that NASA can’t require the companies to meet any safety standards. I don’t know how that could have been left out.” Hall then asked Holden how NASA would ensure that these vehicles “ultimate are going to be safe enough to take NASA astronauts to the International Space Station?”
Holdren said he was not familiar with the details of the the limits of Space Act Agreements on enforcing compliance to safety standards. “I can’t imagine that NASA does not retain that responsibility” for ensuring crew safety, he said. “And if there is a problem in the agreements that would jeopardize that, I am sure we will fix it.”
Under a Space Act Agreement, NASA can’t force companies to meet specific safety requirements. NASA originally planned that the third phase in the Commercial Crew Program would be done under a contract in part to mandate compliance. However, NASA backtracked in December, saying the next phase, like the first two, would use SAAs in order to make better use of limited funding.
At a Commercial Crew program forum at the Kennedy Space Center earlier this month, NASA officials said they were confident that safety would be ensured without mandating compliance, since it will be in the companies’ best interests to meet NASA’s published safety standards in order to qualify for future contracts for crew transportation that will require meeting those standards. “So, our safety requirements are on the street and we would expect that any partner that might want to go after that service capability, and any commercial partner that might want to use NASA and its ISS as a potential customer, will need to look seriously at those requirements and understand what they are and understand the safety parameters we have within those requirements,” deputy program manager Brent Jett said at the February 7 briefing.
A separate issue is the role of NASA versus the FAA in regulating commercial crew launches. Such a mission would likely be considered a commercial launch and thus require a license from the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST), but one senator warned the FAA last week not to get more involved. “The FAA is going to be doing some of the regulations on this, but don’t think they’re going to be to the exclusion of NASA,” Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) said in a speech at the FAA’s 15th Annual Commercial Space Transportation Conference on Thursday. “When you start man-rating a rocket, NASA’s going to be all over them with all four feet,” a figure of speech that engendered a few chuckles from the audience.
“Now I will admit that I have been a skeptic about getting the FAA involved,” Nelson said later in his speech. “But if the FAA’s expertise can really help do the routine things, and stay out of the knickers of NASA, and let NASA provide the technical know-how to keep the missions and the payloads and the astronauts safe aboard these new launch vehicles, and let the FAA prepare the safety guidelines for the industry, then we ought to be alright. But if you get the FAA starting to want to do what NASA does, then we’ve got a problem.”
By Jeff Foust on 2012 February 21 at 6:33 am ET The Mars Society released a statement over the weekend where, not surprisingly, it expressed strong opposition to the proposed cuts to NASA’s Mars exploration program contained in the agency’s fiscal year 2013 budget proposal. “America’s planetary exploration program, in particular that involving the Red Planet, is one of the greatest chapters in the history of science, civilization and our country. Its abandonment represents nothing short of embracing America’s decline,” Mars Society president Robert Zubrin said in the statement. It encouraged members to participate in next week’s Space Exploration Alliance “Legislative Blitz”, a grassroots lobbying effort where participants will meet with congressional offices.
On Monday the Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) of the American Astronomical Society (AAS), a professional organization of planetary scientists, warned of the “grave danger” NASA’s planetary sciences program was in because of the proposed budget cuts. “Reductions of this magnitude focused narrowly on planetary science indicate that NASA is stepping away from one of its most popular and successful programs,” the DPS statement reads. “This program provides excellent value to America.” The statement falls short of calling on specific action beyond urging “Congress to support and fund a vigorous planetary science program as recommended by the National Research Council” (a reference to last year’s planetary science decadal survey), although in a tweet from the DPS DPS chair Dan Britt called on members to email or fax their congressional representatives.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 February 18 at 6:23 pm ET In the first opportunity for members of Congress to publicly question the administration on details of its fiscal year 2013 budget request for NASA, members of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee expressed concern Friday about proposed cuts to NASA’s Mars program and its exploration program.
“NASA seems to have been singled out for unequal treatment,” committee chairman Ralph Hall (R-TX) said in his opening statement at a hearing on the overall FY13 research and development budget proposal for the federal government. He noted that other civil research and development agencies has received at least modest increases, while NASA got a small overall cut. Hall specifically called out the agency’s planetary science program and its “grossly disproportionate cut” of 20 percent.
Hall also complained that the administration was trying to “slow-roll development of a heavy-lift launch vehicle”, the SLS. “I cannot stress enough the importance of accelerating the launch system to ensure we have an alternative method to transport people and cargo to the ISS as well as the ability to launch missions beyond low Earth orbit.”
The committee’s ranking member, Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), also brought up the “significant changes and reductions” in the NASA budget proposal in her opening statement. “I have questions about how the proposed cuts to the Mars science program will affect US leadership,” she said. “I’m also worried about the perception this plan may create that the United States is an unreliable partner in international collaboration.”
The hearing’s sole witness, Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) director John Holdren, defended the administration’s Mars plans when asked about it by Hall. Despite the decision not to participate in ExoMars, he said, “we retain the most vigorous and forward-leaning Mars exploration program that there’s ever been, the most forward-leaning in the world.” He cited the ongoing missions, as well as the Mars Science Laboratory rover en route to Mars and the MAVEN orbiter slated for launch in 2013. “We are in no way retreating from our commitment to a vigorous program of Mars exploration, including laying the groundwork for human exploration.”
Later in the hearing, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) asked Holdren whether that commitment to Mars exploration meant “that you feel that there will be no more delays in the development of the SLS.” Holdren said he had a “cloudy crystal ball” when it comes to predicting the development of complex technical projects like the SLS, but “our expectation is to keep SLS on schedule.”
Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-OH) asked Holdren why NASA’s education budget was cut from $136 million in FY12 to $100 million in the FY13 request. “We constantly have a big challenge with NASA,” Holdren said, “namely, budget caps, and too many great and important missions inside that agency to fit within the budget.” Holdren suggested that NASA’s education program lost funding because it didn’t stack up as well against either other agency programs or STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education programs in other agencies. “The NASA program lost a bit in that domain. And that was partly the result of the comparative assessment across the STEM ed programs, and partly the result of the overall pressure in NASA to do everything, and to do everything well.”
Not everyone on the committee, though, expressed displeasure with the NASA budget proposal. “Given where we are in terms of the overall budget, I guess I’m one who thinks that you’ve done a reasonably good job in trying to put something together that will work, and I want to complement you for that,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) told Holdren. She said she had a “high degree of skepticism” that Europe would be able to live up to its own commitments for ExoMars given the fiscal turmoil in the EU. “The proposal being made by the administration is a prudent one, and I think the overall NASA budget is a pretty solid one,” she said.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 February 17 at 1:06 pm ET
In a speech Thursday, Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL), chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee’s space subcommittee, said he would work to get NASA’s commercial crew program funded at the level requested in the administration’s fiscal year 2013 budget proposal this week, while insisting that the president himself is a “fan” of the space agency.
Nelson, speaking at the FAA’s 15th Annual Commercial Space Transportation Conference in Washington on Thursday morning, gave a long and sometimes meandering account of the current state of space policy, shifting from concerns about budget sequestration to a first-person account of his lobbying efforts to secure the passage of the Senate’s version of the NASA Authorization Act of 2010 in the House in September 2010. “And thus, the blueprint was set for three years going forward” for NASA, he said.
That legislation authorized $500 million in FY2012 for NASA’s commercial crew program, and while the administration originally requested even more—$850 million—the program got less than half that request, $406 million, in the final FY12 bill. This year is setting up to be a repeat: the legislation authorizes $500 million for the program, while the administration is requesting nearly $830 million. Nelson suggested, though, that this year would end differently. “We will get it on up in the appropriations coming up this year,” he said, “but there’s always a struggle.”
Part of the problem securing commercial crew funding, he claimed, was that “people were uncomfortable with a new player on the block,” a reference to SpaceX. He noted that some Apollo-era astronauts have been “very suspicious” of SpaceX’s claims, but, “once you inserted in there the name of another competitor, which was a name they were familiar with—Boeing—the tension in their faces would relax.”
The upcoming COTS demonstration flights by SpaceX and Orbital for cargo delivery to the ISS may be critical to winning support for commercial crew, Nelson said. “We need SpaceX and Orbital to succeed, and we need to prove that the emerging commercial space industry can fly to the ISS safely, and meet all of NASA’s standards,” he said. SpaceX’s COTS mission, recently delayed to April, will take place “right at the right time, because that’s about the time decisions are starting to be made in regards to the appropriations.”
Nelson also touched upon his perceptions of the White House’s view of space in his talk. He called his efforts to convince the Obama Administration to nominate Charles Bolden for NASA administrator in 2009 “one of the best day’s work that I think I ever did”, but later said he “had to strain and grunt in my work down at the White House” to secure that nomination.
Later in the speech he complained that there had to be “a lot of education down there at the White House” on space, but that the problem was not with the President. “The President is a fan,” Nelson said. “The President, in internal meetings where they’re trying to take money away from NASA, has said no, and I know this for a fact,” he claimed. The problem with the administration is instead with the Office of Management and Budget, he argued. “For too long, OMB has thought it was running the space program instead of NASA. We’ve had to have a few head-knocking sessions to start to smooth that out. And I’m happy to tell you today that it is finally getting smoothed out.”
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