By Jeff Foust on 2012 January 27 at 3:07 pm ET In advance of his appearance Friday afternoon in Cape Canaveral, the campaign of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney released a letter from several key figures in the American space community endorsing him, calling him someone who “will restore America’s space program”. “We have watched with dismay as President Obama dismantled the structure that was guiding both the government and commercial space sectors, while providing no purpose or vision or mission,” they write. “This failure of leadership has thrust the space program into disarray and triggered a dangerous erosion of our technical workforce and capabilities. In short, we have a space program unworthy of a great nation.”
They repeat earlier comments by Romney that he would bring together the civil, commercial, and military space sectors to find common ground and perhaps share resources. “He will create conditions for a strong and competitive commercial space industry that can contribute greatly to our national capabilities and goals,” they write. “And he will ensure that NASA returns its focus to the project of manned space exploration that uniquely affirms American strength and values around the globe.”
Among the letters signatories are former astronauts Bob Crippen and Gene Cernan; the latter has been one the most vocal ex-astronaut critics of the Obama Administration’s space policy. Former NASA administrator Mike Griffin is also a signatory, along with several other former space officials: Scott Pace (now head of George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute), Mark Albrecht, and Peter Marquez. (Albrecht has been critical of NASA’s evolution into a “risk-averse feudal empire”, as he put it in a talk in November.) The commercial side is represented by Eric Anderson of Space Adventures.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 January 27 at 7:14 am ET While a lot has been written about Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich’s proposal for a lunar base by 2020 and related initiatives, Space News has some insights from the candidate on some more near-term space issues. Regarding the Space Launch System (SLS) heavy-lift rocket and Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV), he said he’d want to examine them in “the context of how rapidly alternatives could be developed and whether or not there was a way to actually have lots of competition to actually fly something.”
Gingrich added that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) needs a “serious review” in light of its cost overruns. “The fact that the Webb telescope has gone from $1.5 billion to $9 billion — and I’m told that people don’t believe that at $9 billion it’s going to be on budget — at some point you have to stop and say, ‘There’s something systemically wrong when you get into this scale of an overrun.’”
Meanwhile, Gingrich’s rival, Mitt Romney, will likely expound on his space policy ideas later today in a campaign appearance in Cape Canaveral. The time has shifted to later in the day—4:45 pm—at an Astrotech Space Operations facility. However, Rick Santorum has canceled an appearance on Florida’s Space Coast. He was scheduled to speak at a luncheon Saturday, but informed event organizers yesterday he would not be able to attend for undisclosed reasons.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 January 26 at 10:04 pm ET For the second time in less than a week, space became a topic of discussion at a presidential debate Thursday night. At the Republican presidential debate in Jacksonville, Florida, held by CNN, the candidates were given an opportunity to describe their policies regarding human spaceflight in particular, three days after the same topic came up at a debate in Tampa and a day after Newt Gingrich’s space policy speech on the Space Coast.
Mitt Romney was first, asked specifically to respond to Gingrich’s speech. “That’s an enormous expense,” he said of Gingrich’s proposal to create a permanent lunar base by 2020. “I believe in a very vibrant and strong space program,” he added, reiterating his comments in Monday’s debate to bring together various elements of the overall space community, including the military and the private sector, to help draft a plan for NASA’s future. “I’d like to come together and talk about different options and the cost.”
That plan, though, wouldn’t appear to include a lunar base. “I’m not looking for a colony on the Moon. I think the cost of that would be in the hundreds of billions, if not trillions. I’d rather be rebuilding housing here in the US.”
Gingrich, asked how he could achieve that goal while keeping taxes down, launched into another attack on NASA bureaucracy. “You almost have to wonder, what does the Washington office of NASA do? Does it sit around and think space? Does it contemplate that someday we could have a rocket?” The use of prizes and incentives, he said, and “common sense”—specifically citing human-rating the Atlas 5 rocket—could achieve those goals. “I’d like to have an American on the Moon before the Chinese get there.”
Unlike the Tampa debate, the other two leading Republican candidates, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul, also got to weigh in. Santorum was skeptical about the benefits of spending money on this in an era of massive budget deficits. “I agree that we need to bring good minds in the private sector” so that they’re more involved in NASA that currently, he said. “To go out there and to promise new programs and big ideas; it’s a great thing to maybe get votes, but its not a responsible thing.”
Paul started out his comments with a zinger. “I don’t think we should go to the Moon. I think we maybe should send some politicians up there.” He said he supported government funding for space only for military applications, and “not just for the fun of it.” He suggested that a stronger economy would allow for more private investment in space activities. “If we had a healthy economy and had more Bill Gateses and more Warren Buffetts, the money would be there.”
The discussion returned to Gingrich and his comments yesterday about how he supported statehood for a sufficiently populous lunar colony. Gingrich didn’t specifically discuss his statehood ideas, instead reiterating his plan. “I actually agree with Dr. Paul: the program I envision would probably end up being 90-percent private sector,” he said, getting NASA “out of the business of trying to run rockets.” He concluded, “I do not want to be the country that. having gotten to the Moon first, turned around and said, ‘It doesn’t really matter. Let the Chinese dominate space. What do we care?’ I think that is a path of national decline.”
Romney then weighed in again, saying he was skeptical that a lunar base could be privately financed. “If I had a business executive come to me and say they wanted to spend a few hundred billion dollars to put a colony on the Moon, I’d say, ‘You’re fired,'” he said. “The idea that corporate America wants to go off to the Moon and build a colony there, it may be a big idea but it’s not a good idea.”
The conversation went on from there about spending priorities in general and budget deficits, leaving space behind, perhaps for the last time in a 2012 presidential debate (this is the last debate in Florida before its primary Tuesday, and it seems unlikely the topic will come up again in a debate either in the primary or the general election.)
That exchange offered little in the way of new insights into the candidates’ space positions. Gingrich reiterated his comments made in Wednesday’s speech. Romney again brought up the idea of civil-military-commercial space cooperation that he mentioned on Monday (although this time without mentioning if other agencies and companies would be asked to pitch in financially), while distancing himself from Gingrich’s comments. And Santorum and Paul got to weigh in briefly on the topic, although neither has much of a shot of capturing the nomination given their current standings in Florida and national polls. It may not have been that enlightening, but this rare flurry of attention to space, which may continue through Friday when Romney speaks in Cape Canaveral, was fun while it lasted.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 January 26 at 7:15 am ET Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich offered some new—and attention-grabbing—goals for American space efforts in a speech Wednesday afternoon in Cocoa, Florida. However, while he offered some bold new goals for spaceflight, he didn’t go into much detail about how the US would achieve them, and his underlying political beliefs about space, including support for prizes and a disdain for NASA bureaucracy, remained the same as his previous comments during the presidential campaign.
The pronouncement he made before a reported audience of about 700 people involved the establishment of a permanent lunar base. “By the end of my second term,” he said, a line that itself generated a round of cheers, “we will have the first permanent base on the Moon and it will be American.” In addition, he said, there would be “commercial near-Earth activities” for science, tourism, and manufacturing. “It is in our interest acquire so much experience in space that we clearly have a capacity that the Chinese and the Russians will never come anywhere close to having,” he said, to another burst of applause. He also vowed that by the end of 2020 the US would have “the first continuous propulsion system in space” to allow for far shorter trips to Mars.
He also even suggested that lunar base could some day apply for statehood. Noting that his rival for the Republican nomination, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, had ridiculed Gingrich’s earlier calls for lunar colonies, he suggested Romney had missed something even bigger to poke fun of. “At one point early in my career I introduced the ‘Northwest Ordinance for space’,” he said, a reference to the 1780s act that enabled the creation of several Midwestern states. His act, he said, would allow a lunar base that reached a population of 13,000 to petition to become a state. “I will, as president, encourage the introduction of the Northwest Ordinance for space to put a marker down, that we want Americans to think boldly about the future, and we want Americans to go out and study hard and work hard and, together, we’re going to unleash the American people to rebuild the country we love.” That line got a loud and sustained round of applause.
Gingrich did not go into a great deal of specifics about how he would achieve those goals. One approach he suggested was to be “practical” about using equipment. “The Atlas 5 ought to be interchangeable, and ought to be as usable for NASA projects as it is for Air Force projects,” he said. (The Atlas 5 is, in fact, used for launching some NASA science satellites; an Atlas 5 launched NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory mission just two months ago.) He also called for a radical increase in space launch activity: “We need to learn how to do five or eight launches a day, not one.”
In his second space-related appearance of the day, before a space industry roundtable in Cocoa, he indicated that American space efforts required a sense of urgency reminiscent of wartime. “Let me take a radical example,” he said. “If we decided to human-rate the Atlas 5, how long would take take?” Mark Bitterman of United Launch Alliance noted that those efforts were ongoing as part of ULA’s Commercial Crew Development award and the company projected it would take three to five years. “But I’m asking a different question,” Gingrich responded, saying he wanted to know how long it would take if it was just an engineering problem. “I want to relentlessly adopt the model of World War Two, where we learned to fly B-26’s off aircraft carriers in a matter of months because we had no choice.” Bitterman suggested that, based on that model, human-rating effort could be “accelerated significantly.”
However, while the lunar base goal was new and got a lot of media attention, some of the core themes of his space policy philosophy remained unchanged. He expressed once again his interest in prizes. “I would want 10 percent of the NASA budget set aside for prize money,” he said, reiterating comments he’s made in the past, such as a town hall meeting in Texas in October. This was part of his design “to become lean and aggressive” instead of bureaucratic, as he perceives NASA today. “How can we build a bureaucracy this big and get into a period where we rely on the Russians while we watch the Chinese plan to surpass us, while we sit around bureaucratically twiddling our thumbs with no real reform?”
How well will that rhetoric play on Florida’s Space Coast, which is dealing with the economic fallout of the retirement of the Space Shuttle? We’ll find out on Tuesday when Republicans go to the polls. In the meantime, we may get a response from the Romney campaign later this week: he’s scheduled to make a Space Coast campaign appearance Friday afternoon in Titusville, Florida. In addition, CNN is hosting yet another presidential debate Thursday evening in Jacksonville, where, as in Monday night’s debate in Tampa, a state-specific issue like space could merit a question.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 January 25 at 12:50 pm ET GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich is making two appearances on Florida’s Space Coast this afternoon, where he is expected to talk about his space policy ideas in greater detail. Both of those events will be broadcast/webcast. At 3:30 pm EST Gingrich will participate in an invitation-only event by the Economic Development Commission of Florida’s Space Coast; that event will be webcast on Florida Today’s web site. (The announcement of the event appears to have a long agenda, but according to the campaign web site it will be wrapped up by 4:15 pm.) At 4:30 pm he is scheduled to speak at a town hall meeting in Cocoa, Florida. That event will air live on C-SPAN and its web site.
Update: Florida Today reports the schedule of events has changed: the town hall meeting will go ahead as scheduled at 4:30, followed by the industry forum at approximately 5:45 pm. Gingrich is apparently running behind schedule, hence the change.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 January 25 at 6:55 am ET A member of the Republican leadership of the House said Tuesday he supports an extension of a provision that limits the ability of the FAA to enact commercial spaceflight safety regulations. In an op-ed published in the Daily Independent newspaper in Ridgecrest, California, House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) discusses commercial spaceflight, in particular activities at Mojave Air and Space Port, located in his district. “It’s clear that the private sector is ready and willing to step up to keep America at the forefront of space flight,” he writes.
He adds, though, that he’s concerned that regulation could impede future growth of the industry, citing in particular the provision in the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act (CSLAA) of 2004 that prevents the FAA from enacting safety regulations except for cases linked to the “serious or fatal injury” of crew or participants, or events that “posed a high risk” of such injuries, during licensed or permitted flights. The expiration of that provision this December, he claims, “could mean a whole slew of new regulations on the growing $34 billion commercial space flight industry.” (The source of the $34-billion valuation for the industry isn’t cited.)
“There is no question that the safety of crew members and the public is of utmost importance, but unleashing Washington bureaucrats on this industry now could mean the end of private commercial space flight in America before it even gets off the ground,” he concludes. “That is why I am fighting to extend the 2004 provisions.” He doesn’t specify how he’ll seek to extend that regulatory restriction, but as noted here last week, the House version of an FAA reauthorization bill does provide an extension. A final version of the bill is expected to be completed in the coming weeks after House and Senate negotiators hammer out differences between their versions (the Senate version does not contain an extension) after reaching a deal last week on labor language that held up the bill for months.
Should the CSLAA provision not make it into the final FAA reauthorization bill, though, there may be additional opportunities before December 23 to include it in other legislation. For example, Congress will have to take up later this year another extension of commercial launch indemnification, as the current regime expires at the end of this year.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 January 23 at 11:29 pm ET The two current frontrunners in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, both had the opportunity to speak out about space policy during a debate Monday night in Tampa, Florida. Romney mentioned space first in passing as part of a longer comment about the problems experienced in the state during the Obama Administration. “This president has failed miserably the people of Florida,” he said. “His plans for NASA? He has no plans for NASA. The Space Coast is struggling.”
A little later, a moderator asked a specific space policy question: “Governor Romney, this is the state that put the first man on the Moon. America right now has no way to put people into space except to hitch a ride with the Russians. Meanwhile, the Chinese are ramping up their space program. At a time when you all want to shrink federal spending, should space exploration be a priority?”
Romney’s response:
It should certainly be a priority. What we have right now is a president who does not have a vision or a mission for NASA. And as a result of that, there are people on the Space Coast that are suffering, and Florida itself is suffering as a result. So what’s the right way forward? Well I happen to believe our space program is important not only for science but also for commercial development and for military development. And I believe the right mission for NASA should be determined by a president together with a collection of people from those different areas: from NASA, from the Air Force space program, from our leading universities, and from commercial enterprises. Bring them together, discuss a wide range of options for NASA, and then have NASA not just funded by the federal government, but also by commercial enterprises, have some of the research done in our universities, let’s have a collaborative effort with business, with government, with the military, as well as with their educational institutions, have a mission that once again excites our young people about the potential of space and the commercial potential will pay for itself down the road. This is a great opportunity. Florida has technology, the people here on the Space Coast have technology and vision and passion that America needs. And with a president who is actually willing to create a mission and a vision for NASA and for space, we can continue to lead the world.
The moderator then turned to Gingrich. “Would you put more tax dollars into the space race to commit to putting an American on Mars instead of relying on the private sector?” His answer:
The two are not incompatible. For example, most of the great breakthroughs in aviation in the 20s and 30s were the result of prizes. Lindbergh flew to Paris for a $25,000 prize. I would like to see vastly more the money spent encouraging the private sector into very aggressive experimentation, and I’d like to see a leaner NASA. I don’t think building a bigger bureaucracy and having a greater number of people sit in rooms and talk gets you there. But if we had a series of goals that we were prepared to offer prizes for, there’s every reason to believe that you’d have a lot of folks in this country and around the world who would put up an amazing amount of money and would make the Space Coast literally hum with activity because they’d be drawn to achieve these prizes: going back to the Moon permanently, getting to Mars as rapidly as possible, building a series of space stations and developing commercial space. There are a whole series of things we could do that could be dynamic that are more than just better government bureaucracy. They’re fundamentally leapfrogging into a world where you’re incentivizing people who are visionaries and people in the private sector to invest very large amounts of money and finding a very romantic and exciting future.
The other two candidates, Congressman Ron Paul and former Sen. Rick Santorum, were not asked the question and did not volunteer comments on space policy elsewhere in the 100-minute debate.
The responses by Gingrich and Romney are a study in contrasts in more ways than one. Gingrich has spoken on space previously on a number of occasions, far more than any other candidate, as regular readers of this blog know. His comments tonight are very similar to what he’s said before, promoting prizes and denigrating NASA bureaucracy. Romney, on the other hand, has said virtually nothing about space; his comments tonight are perhaps the most substantial comments he’s offered on space during the 2012 campaign. He offered a very different vision, where civil, commercial, and military organizations would collaborate with and even help fund NASA. Without further details, it’s a somewhat puzzling concept: what benefits would the military and commercial sectors get from more closely tying themselves to, and helping pay for, NASA programs? Perhaps over the next week—the Florida primary is a week from Tuesday—the Romney campaign will fine-tune that message.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 January 23 at 8:35 pm ET Tuesday night President Obama will give his State of the Union speech before a joint session of Congress. Some have wondered if he might sneak a brief mention of space into the speech because the administration disclosed today that former astronaut Mark Kelly will be at the speech, sitting in the First Lady’s box. Of course, the primary reason why he’ll be there has little to do with his NASA career but instead because of his wife, Gabrielle Giffords, who announced Sunday she would resign from Congress this week in order to devote more time to her post-shooting rehabilitation.
Another reason why it’s unlikely space would get much a mention in the address is that the administration may have something along the lines of space policy fatigue. This week’s issue of The New Yorker features a long article that takes readers behind the scenes of the Obama Administration, based on hundreds of pages of internal memos obtained by the magazine. The article takes a broad look at the administration acted and reacted to various issues, including, as it turns out, space.
The article notes that as a candidate for president in 2008, Obama “had promised a bold space program”, a reference to his space policy white paper the campaign released in August 2008. However, according to the New Yorker article, those plans foundered on projections of growing budget deficits. “Especially in light of our new fiscal context, it is not possible to achieve the inspiring space program goals discussed during the campaign,” a November 2009 memo (authorship unstated) advised the president. That sentence, the article noted, was in bold and underlined for particular emphasis. The result:
Obama was told that he should cancel NASA’s Bush-era Constellation program, along with its support projects, like the Ares launch vehicles, which were designed to return astronauts to the moon by 2020. The program was behind schedule, over budget, and “unachievable.” He agreed to end it. During the stimulus debate, Obama’s metaphorical moon-shot idea—the smart grid—was struck down as unworkable. Now the Administration’s actual moon-shot program was dead, too.
Later, the article notes the president received a letter dated February 2, 2010—one day after the release of the 2011 budget proposal that announced plans to cancel Constellation, as Obama was advised the previous November—from a Virginia woman whose husband was working on the program. “I voted for you. I supported you. But I am very disappointed in you. You are not the President I thought you were going to be,” the woman, identified only as “Ginger”, wrote, after criticizing the president for cancelling Constellation while continuing to fund wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Obama’s response to his staff: “can I get a sense of how Ares fit in with our long term NASA strategy to effectively respond”. A few days later he got that information and then instructed an aide to “Draft a short letter for Ginger, answering her primary concern—her husband’s career—for me to send.” What the president was told, and how he decided to respond, aren’t disclosed.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 January 22 at 7:38 pm ET In an appearance on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” program Sunday morning, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said he would be giving a major speech on space later this week in Florida. The former Speaker of the House, fresh off a victory Saturday in the GOP primary in South Carolina, said he would be giving a series of speeches on various topics in Florida this week in advance of the January 31 primary there. “I’ll give a speech on the Space Coast, for example, about the future of man in space and the future of the United States in space,” he said in the first half-minute of the appearance.
At the 8:10 mark, he also mentions his upcoming speech after referencing his 1984 book Window of Opportunity, which includes a chapter about space. “I’ll be at the Space Coast in Florida this week giving a speech, a visionary speech, on the United States going back into space in the John F. Kennedy tradition rather than the current bureaucracy.” That rhetoric sounds similar to some of his earlier comments that have been disdainful of NASA bureaucracy, such as this appearance in Florida in October.
Gingrich didn’t disclose exactly when he would give this speech, but it’s likely to be on Wednesday. Florida Today reports that Gingrich has two appearances on the Space Coast on Wednesday afternoon, attending a “‘Space & Technology Roundtable’ with Leaders of the Space Community” and, later, a town hall meeting in Cocoa, Florida. According to the same article, another candidate, Rick Santorum, will also speak on the Space Coast on Saturday—which, by chance, also happens to be the 26th anniversary of the loss of Challenger.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 January 21 at 11:10 am ET National Journal reported late yesterday that House and Senate negotiators had reached a compromise on long-delayed reauthorization legislation for the FAA. The compromise involves organized labor provisions in the bill that had forced a long series of short-term extensions. The compromise clears the way for drafting a version that both houses can pass, a task reported to be “manageable” with the labor deal in place.
The relevance to space policy is that the bill could resolve an issue for the commercial human spaceflight community: a provision in the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act (CSLAA) of 2004 that limits the ability of the FAA to pass safety regulations for such vehicles. That provision is set to expire this December, but as noted here last month, some in the industry have been seeking an extension since the industry has built up less experience than expected when the CSLAA passed. The House version of the FAA reauthorization bill does provide an extension, while the Senate version does not.
It’s not clear yet if the final version of the reauthorization bill—which may take a few weeks to draft—will include CSLAA language, but one group of industry experts is skeptical. Earlier this week Special Aerospace Services (SAS) hosted the 2nd Annual Human Spaceflight Technical Forum in Boulder, Colorado. The event was closed to the media, but Wayne Hale, SAS’s director for human spaceflight programs and a former Space Shuttle program manager, talked about some of the issues raised at the meeting, including that CSLAA provision, in an interview on Friday. Most of the people at the meeting “were not actively lobbying for an extension” of that restriction, he said.
The discussion at the meeting instead revolved around what the FAA would do when its current restriction expires on December 23. Hale said there was an understanding that the FAA would not immediately promulgate a series of new safety regulations, citing the time it takes to develop and make open for public comment any new rulemaking. “No one at the FAA is working in a back office to deliver a bunch of new proposed regulations on December 24th,” he said.
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