By Jeff Foust on 2012 February 6 at 6:37 am ET While Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has been the subject of criticism and even satire for his comments about establishing a permanent lunar base (as the first step to what eventually could be statehood for a lunar settlement), the former Speaker of the House doesn’t appear to be backing down from those statements. In an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, host David Gregory asked Gingrich (after showing a brief clip of the “Saturday Night Live” sketch inspired by Gingrich’s comments) if those topics “ultimately hurts your seriousness” in the campaign.
Gingrich disagreed. “Every serious analyst understands that the Chinese are going all out to dominate space, the Russians today have the only man-rated vehicle available to the United States in space,” he said. “I didn’t propose any additional federal spending, I proposed a fundamental reform of NASA to engage the private sector in very bold and very dramatic ventures.”
Gingrich hit again on a long-running theme that NASA is mired in bureaucracy. “I think every American should wonder why we’ve spent billions and billions and billions on NASA and currently have no vehicle to put human beings into space,” he said. “I believe it’s possible to unleash the American people, to inspire the private sector, to encourage entrepreneurs and to have a dramatically better space program than we have today.”
He specifically said he doesn’t desire a massive new government program: “I’m not for a gigantic federal tax-paid program, I’m for a dramatic reform of the current program.” However, in an op-ed released by his campaign Sunday, Rick Santorum argued that was exactly what Gingrich was proposing. “Building a federally-funded moon colony would inevitably cost—at the very least—billions of dollars,” Santorum writes. “In addition to our current overspending, this would ultimately saddle our children with the price tag for another one of Speaker Gingrich’s grandiose ideas.”
Santorum’s op-ed accuses Gingrich of “pandering” to voters on Florida’s Space Coast (which, if it was, didn’t turn out to be very successful) and proposing something unrealistic and wasteful. “[I]t takes away from the more immediate, important, and realistic goals of the space program; encouraging partnerships between the space program and private businesses to grow the technology, engineering, and manufacturing sectors of our economy,” he writes. He doesn’t offer more details about how he envisions the public-private cooperation beyond that it “puts the focus on where we need it now, stimulating our economy and putting people back to work.”
In that respect, the visions of Gingrich and Santorum aren’t necessarily that far apart: Gingrich himself has reiterated his preference to have the private sector take a bigger role in space efforts, using mechanisms like prizes over traditional government programs. But Gingrich’s call for a lunar base by 2020—an admittedly audacious goal that has metastasized into a “moon colony” in the rhetoric of critics—has turned his policy into a big fat target for his opponents for the GOP nomination. On “Meet The Press”, Gingrich recalled being interviewed shortly after his Florida speech by Fox News Channel’s Greta Van Susteren, who, he recalled, said “she couldn’t imagine President John F. Kennedy being met with the kind of attacks, the kind of ridicule, the, the lack of faith in America that has come up in the last few days.” Of course, 2012 is a vastly different era than 1961, when the imperative for a human mission to the Moon was much stronger and clearer than today. By proposing a major goal for America in space without much discussion of either “why” or “how”, Gingrich has opened himself up to the criticism he’s received over the last two weeks that, remarkably, has yet to abate.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 February 5 at 9:36 am ET “This is my new euphemism for getting off track,” writes veteran journalist Gwen Ifill of the term “moon colonies”, in the wake of GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich’s speech last month and the reaction to it. “Most candidates are pretty good at driving home the same points over and over again, but once in a while they veer drastically off course. This is what happened when Gingrich started telling voters along Florida’s Space Coast that he would invigorate NASA by planning for an American colony on the moon.”
Getting “off track” can subject a candidate to criticism and negative ads, as both Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum have done in recent days. It can also lead to ridicule and satire, perhaps best illustrated by this skit that opened last night’s episode of “Saturday Night Live”:
It would seem the idea of lunar settlements, if not striking a nerve, has at least tickled a funny bone…
By Jeff Foust on 2012 February 3 at 8:04 pm ET This morning we noted that GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney criticized fellow candidate Newt Gingrich’s plans for lunar bases in a letter on the Romney campaign web site, even though space policy looked to be in the rearview mirror after the Florida primary earlier this week. Now another Republican candidate has joined in.
In a 60-second radio ad posted on its web site, the Rick Santorum campaign also criticized Gingrich’s plans as “fiscal insanity”. The ad starts with a discussion of the $15-trillion national debt, then asks, “what does Newt Gingrich suggest? Spending half a trillion dollars on a moon colony.” (As noted in the earlier Romney post, the $500-billion cost estimate appears to come from a single article; the Gingrich campaign never announced what it thought it would cost.) A couple Gingrich soundbites from his January 25th speech in Cocoa, Florida, follow. The announcer then says, “Gingrich’s idea is fiscal insanity, and another reason true conservatives are uniting behind Rick Santorum.”
Ron Paul, it would seem you’re up next.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 February 3 at 6:27 am ET The conventional wisdom was that, after the Florida primary earlier this week, space policy would fade from the presidential campaign at least though the rest of the GOP primary race. By and large, that’s been the case: as the candidates have moved on to Nevada and other states, they’ve focused their attention on other issues, including the economy. But one leading candidate brought up space again yesterday, primarily as a cudgel against another.
“Ground Control to Major Newt: Nevada Needs Jobs, Not Moon Colony” reads the headline of a release from the Mitt Romney campaign. The release argues that Newt Gingrich is focusing on literally out-of-this-world ideas like a lunar settlement that the Romney campaign claims “could cost up to $500 billion” (based on a quote from a single article) while “Nevada is suffering from a jobs and housing crisis”. That lunar base idea, the Romney release argues, is the “latest in a string of expensive extraterrestrial initiatives” that would drive up government spending. Those initiatives largely predate Gingrich’s current presidential campaign, ranging from his “space mirror” concept from the 1980s to more modest proposals for space manufacturing and tourism tax credits from 2006 (which is sourced from an interview published in The Space Review) to, of course, his “Northwest Ordinance for space” lunar statehood act. The Romney campaign doesn’t discuss its views on space—or anything else—in the release: the apparent message is that a candidate who talks about housing on the Moon isn’t concerned with housing problems of voters in Nevada.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 February 2 at 6:27 am ET Yesterday House and Senate conferees released the final, compromise version of a long-delayed FAA reauthorization bill that Congress is expected to pass in the coming days. While the debate about the bill revolved primarily around labor provisions in the bill, the commercial space transportation industry was waiting to see if it would contain an extension of a provision in the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act (CSLAA) of 2004 that restricts the ability of the FAA to enact safety regulations for crew and spaceflight participants on FAA-licensed launched. That restriction expires eight years after the CSLAA’s enactment, or December 23rd of this year. The House version of the FAA reauthorization would amend the CSLAA by keeping the restriction in place until eight years after the first licensed flight of a spaceflight participant, while the Senate version had no language about the CSLAA.
The conference report version of the FAA reauthorization bill gives the industry a partial victory. Section 827 of the bill (on page 318), tucked away in the “Miscellaneous” section of the bill between sections on air passenger screening privacy and air transportation of lithium batteries, extends the current restriction on safety regulations, but only to October 1, 2015. The joint statement of managers of the conference report provides a few more details, on page 152 of the PDF document: “Nothing in this provision is intended to prohibit the FAA and industry stakeholders from entering into discussions intended to prepare the FAA for its role in appropriately regulating the commercial space flight industry when this provision expires.”
Update: Congressman Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), whose previously spoke out in favor of an extension of that CSLAA provision, issued a press release today taking credit for getting at least a limited extension into the final bill. The release quotes from several industry officials as well—Eric Anderson of Space Adventures and the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, Jeff Greason of XCOR Aerospace, Mirk Sirangelo of Sierra Nevada Corp., and George Whitesides of Virgin Galactic—praising the extension. McCarthy, the House majority whip, serves a district that includes the Mojave Air and Space Port, a hub of entrepreneurial space activity.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 February 1 at 6:50 am ET Last night Mitt Romney won a “decisive victory” in the Republican presidential primary in Florida, with 46 percent of the statewide vote. Many space advocates are wondering if the candidates’ space positions, particularly the speeches made last week by Romney and Newt Gingrich, made much of a difference. One way to check is to see how voters in Brevard County—the heart of the Space Coast—voted compared to the rest of the state, based on data from Florida’s Division of Elections:
|
Brevard |
Statewide |
| Gingrich |
32.9% |
31.9% |
| Paul |
7.7% |
7.0% |
| Romney |
42.7% |
46.4% |
| Santorum |
15.3% |
13.3% |
The numbers don’t suggest that space played a major factor in the election on the Space Coast. Romney polled nearly four percentage points lower in Brevard than the state as a whole, but if these voters were rejecting his space policy, they weren’t necessarily attracted by Gingrich’s alternative: Gingrich polled only one percentage point higher in Brevard than he did statewide, but Rick Santorum—who said little about space and even canceled a campaign appearance in the county—did two percentage points better there.
A harder question to answer, though, is whether Gingrich’s space comments, including his calls for a Moon base by 2020 and even the potential for lunar statehood, more broadly helped or hurt him statewide. Those comments got a lot of attention—far more than Romney’s more pragmatic propsoals on Friday—including a significant amount of derision and ridicule in the media. It doesn’t show up in exit polls, which found the economy to be by far the most significant issue among voters. But was it lurking in voters’ minds when they cast their ballots Tuesday?
By Jeff Foust on 2012 January 31 at 7:11 am ET Yesterday the space advocacy organization Tea Party in Space (TPIS) formally endorsed Newt Gingrich for the Republican presidential nomination. “Newt Gingrich is the only credible candidate in this primary race in Florida who has any credibility when it comes to America’s future in space,” TPIS president Andrew Gasser said in a statement. The organization said it based that endorsement of an evaluation of the candidates’ space policy positions and a grading on “tea party core values of fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government, and free markets”, where Gingrich was ranked as “superior”.
Although the statement made no mention of the other GOP candidates, a previous post on the TPIS web site by Gasser criticized a lack of vision by Mitt Romney in his policy, in large part because one of those people advising the Romney campaign on space is former NASA administrator Mike Griffin. “While we all agree that Dr. Griffin is well educated in physics and engineering, his track record suggests he is not grasping the economic condition of this country,” Gasser writes. “Moreover, NASA was crippled under Dr. Griffin’s leadership.”
While TPIS has come out strongly for Gingrich in advance of today’s primary in Florida, other space organizations have remained noncommittal. The National Space Society said it was “pleased” Gingrich released a space policy, the organization said in a press release last week. The organization stopped short of formally endorsing that policy, but noted the plan “contained many details that align with NSS goals”. The NSS asked other candidates to release their own policies (the release is dated January 26, a day before Romney’s space speech.)
The Space Frontier Foundation also didn’t formally endorse Gingrich’s policies, citing its desire to remain non-partisan, but the organization was clearly pleased with its emphasis on space settlement. “The SFF applauds Speaker Gingrich for embracing space settlement and is celebrating that support for space settlement has grown to include large parts of NASA, the current administration, and Speaker Gingrich,” it stated in a release Thursday. The organization was less welcoming of Romney’s plan, though, citing, like TPIS, Griffin’s association with the Romney campaign. Recalling Romney’s comment in Thursday’s debate that he would have “fired” any executive that came to him with a multi-hundred-billion plan for a lunar base, the Foundation’s executive director, Will Watson, said, “Confronted with Mike Griffin’s plan to return to the Moon, Mitt Romney would have fired Griffin and rightly so.” The Foundation called for the Romney campaign to “cast a much wider net for space policy advisors”.
While these organizations tend to show more support for Gingrich than for Romney, it doesn’t appear it will do the former Speaker of the House much good: latest polls showed that Romney was headed to a sizable victory in Florida today.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 January 31 at 6:43 am ET The space policy news cycle—such as it is—has been dominated in the last week by developments in the Republican presidential race, thanks to speeches and debate appearances by the major candidates. However, there are a few other things that have taken place during the last week worth mentioning:
The Obama Administration has delayed the release of its fiscal year 2013 budget proposal by a week. The budget was to be released on February 6, but instead will be released on February 13. Federal law officially requires the budget proposal to be released on the first Monday of February, but the administration has missed that date in previous releases. (Plus, presumably everyone will be talking on February 6 about the Super Bowl the previous night, or at least the commercials that aired during the big game…)
While Americans have been discussing the space policy positions of Republican candidates, Indians have been witness to an emerging controversy involving the former head of the nation’s space agency. Last Wednesday the Indian government formally barred former Indian Space Research Organisation head G Madhavan Nair and three other officials from any future government positions. The government cited their roles approving a deal between ISRO’s commercial arm, Antrix, and a telecommunications company, Devas, in 2005, giving the company a chunk of S-band spectrum in violation of existing regulations. The government canceled the deal last year as part of its investigation. Nair has been fighting back against the ban, and on Monday he formally asked Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to revoke the ban and probe the government’s actions.
Satellite broadband company LightSquared continues its debate with the government officials about the potential interference the company’s proposed ground-based portion of its system would have with GPS signals. An interagency group concluded that there’s no way for LightSquared to operate with GPS without causing interference, a conclusion LightSquared disputes, as Aviation Week reports. Meanwhile, the company has filed an ethics complaint with NASA’s Office of the Inspector General, claiming that the vice chairman of the government’s National Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing Advisory Board, Bradford Parkinson, has a conflict of interest with a GPS terminal manufacturer flighting the LightSquared system.
This weekend, the Northeast Junior State Congress Convention will take place in the Washington area, including a Model Congress. Interestingly, according to the press release announcing the event, the legislation students will be considering during the Model Congress includes “a bill to promote privatized human space exploration”.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 January 29 at 8:49 am ET [Updated at 10:45 am to include some clarifications from Eric Anderson.]
After Mitt Romney talked about space on Friday in Cape Canaveral, Florida, I had the opportunity to talk with Eric Anderson, who is one of the people who signed the open letter endorsing Romney on space also released Friday. He provided some insights into what Romney’s views are about space, particularly the commercial sector.
Anderson, in a phone interview, said he was contacted a few months ago by the Romney campaign to serve on a space working group, whose members are those who signed Friday’s letter; he added he’s met Romney several times and talked to him “one-on-one” on commercial space in particular. “He had not thought a lot about commercial space,” Anderson admitted, but in those personal conversations, Romney indicated to Anderson his enthusiasm for the private sector’s recent developments in human space flight capabilities. Anderson believes that if Romney won the presidency he would be an advocate of commercial space.
Anderson continued, “You must remember, Mitt Romney is a very experienced businessman. People in business of course believe in private industry! They know that if you can find goods and services in the private sector then clearly those would be preferable to the government recreating that capability.â€
Of course, both President Obama and Romney’s chief rival for the GOP nomination, Newt Gingrich, have also spoken out in favor of, or taken action to support, commercial space. Anderson’s company, Space Adventures, is an indirect beneficiary of NASA’s commercial crew initiative: it is partnered with Boeing, one of the companies that has won funded Space Act Agreements from NASA for development of commercial crew transportation systems. Anderson acknowledged that, but suggested that the administration should have done more since rolling out its plans almost exactly two years ago. “In terms of commercial support, the current policy is not a bad one at all,” he said. “However, the execution of that policy and its support evaporated after that initial period,” adding that there was “the general sense that the White House didn’t really back the plan up.”
Anderson said there was also “good and bad ideas” in Newt Gingrich’s plans to use billion-dollar prizes to incentivize the private sector to go to the Moon and Mars. Prizes, he noted, have been effective on smaller scales when carefully tailored, citing the $10-million Ansari X PRIZE in particular, but he’s not sure that they would work on the much larger scale proposed by Gingrich. “It has to be realistic,” he said.
Anderson agreed that Romney hasn’t provided many specifics, but said that’s the right approach for now. “It’s not the right thing to do now to set goals,” he said. “He doesn’t know enough about it to pick this over that.” Anderon believes, though, that a President Romney is “by far the likeliest” to select a plan that could be carried out over one or two terms of office. “NASA has been kicked around like a pinball. We can’t keep stopping and starting,” he said. A new plan “can’t break the bank like Constellation, and it can’t be directionless.”
“Should he win the White House,” Anderson said of Romney, “he would take decisive action on what NASA’s mission should be.”
By Jeff Foust on 2012 January 28 at 7:59 am ET Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney spoke late Friday afternoon at an Astrotech facility in Cape Canaveral, Florida, and, as expected, address his views on space policy in his relatively short (approximately 15-minute) speech. As in his previous discussions in two debate earlier this week, Romney said little about what he thought NASA and the national should be doing in space, but did describe what he would do to create a new vision for NASA if elected.
“So I’m not going to come here today and tell you precisely what the mission will be,” he said. “I’m going to tell you how I’m going to get there.” He said he would bring in people from various sectors of the space community, including the Defense Department, “astrophysicists from some of the leading institutions of the world”, industry executives, and NASA officials. They, he said, “will talk about each of those missions, each of those objectives, and then determine which mission for NASA, which mission for space, will most effectively carry out those missions.” That approach, he said, would make sure the job was done right and would support the nation as well as “protect ourselves from threats from space.”
Romney, in the passage above, was using “mission” in two different contexts: one being the plan for NASA that this interdisciplinary team—which sounds like something along the lines of blue-ribbon panels like the 2009 Augustine Committee and its predecessors—would develop, but also the objectives for the space program. In his speech Romney identified four objectives for American space efforts: “existential” studies of things “going on in the universe that could dramatically affect the Earth”, supporting commercial efforts, increasing the health and well-being of Americans through research and spinoffs, and national defense. “Each of them is, in and of itself, a critical priority, but collectively they suggest our space program is an integral part of America’s exceptionalism, and we must have a space program that combines all four of those missions.”
This approach to developing a mission for American space efforts was rooted in his experience in the private sector, where people collect data and and then make decisions based on the analysis of those data. That approach was different from others, he admitted, in comments that perhaps indirectly referred to Newt Gingrich’s speech two days earlier where he called the creation of a permanent lunar base by 2020. “In the politics of the past, to get your vote on the Space Coast, I’d promise hundreds of billions of dollars, or I’d lay out what my mission is,” he said. “I’m not going to do that. I know that’s something very attractive, very popular, but it’s simply the wrong thing to do.”
While Romney did not mention his rivals for the GOP nomination by name in the speech, he did directly attack President Obama. “If you wanted to put together a list of President Obama’s failures, it’s a long, long list, indeed. But the one in particular I want to talk about today is his failure to define a mission for the space program for this nation,” he said. “People are suffering because of that, we’ve lost technology because of that, people have lost jobs because of that. It’s time to have a mission for the space program of the United States of America.” Later in the speech he criticized the administration on more general grounds, such as the economy; the latter two-thirds of his speech, in fact, said little about space except for an anecdote about a Boy Scout troop that flew a flag on Challenger’s final mission and eventually got it back.
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