By Jeff Foust on 2012 January 20 at 6:36 am ET Early month the White House will release its fiscal year 2013 budget proposal. While most of the details of that budget proposal have been, or very soon will be, nailed down, some organizations are making a last-minute push to lobby for funding for NASA science programs in particular. Others, though, worried about what the budget proposal may contain, are already looking ahead to Congressional action on the budget.
The Planetary Society is in the first camp. This week the organization released a letter it sent to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on NASA science funding. In the letter the society asks OMB for a “small but significant” change in NASA science funding, so that it accounts for 30 percent of NASA’s overall budget. (In FY2012 science accounts for $5.09 billion out of the agency’s $17.8-billion budget, or 28.6%.) This “modest rebalancing”, the society argues, would support the agency’s portfolio of science programs in an era of tight budgets. “If NASA’s overall budget shrinks, we are concerned that the Science program will carry a disproportionate burden of any reduction,” the letter states. “Increasing the share of the NASA budget for Science is the best place for the agency to make the most effective use of the taxpayers’ money in today’s austere budget environment.”
The Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) is more pessimistic about the administration’s budget request, particularly for the planetary science portion of the overall NASA science budget. “The reality is that within NASA’s science budget, planetary science is nowhere near the Administration’s top priority and that does leave us vulnerable to budget pressures,” DPS chair Dan Britt writes in a DPS newsletter published this week. A cut to planetary science funding, he notes, would jeopardize a wide range of missions as well as research funding.
However, he is more optimistic about how Congress will deal with planetary science funding. “Planetary science has a lot of friends on both sides the aisle in Congress. Congress likes the results the planetary science program, they like the consensus plan in the Decadal Survey, and they want to see it continue,” he writes. NASA’s planetary science program got a largely sympathetic hearing by the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee in November, with the OMB blamed for problems like the apparent unwillingness to commit to cooperation with Europe on Mars exploration. Britt adds, though, that Congress won’t act on its own. “While Congress is a potentially friendly forum, it’s going to be up to us, the planetary science community, to make the case for continued priority support.”
By Jeff Foust on 2012 January 18 at 7:11 am ET Last week, a top State Department official surprised many when she indicated the US did not support a proposed “Code of Conduct for Outer Space Activities” endorsed by the European Union. Speaking at a breakfast with reporters on January 12, Ellen Tauscher, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, said the proposed EU code was “too restrictive” and that the US would not sign on to it. “We made it very definitive that we were not going to go ahead with the European Code of Conduct,” she said, according to the Space News account of the breakfast. “What we haven’t announced is what we’re going to do, but we will be doing that soon.”
Tauscher’s comments took some by surprise, since it appeared in recent months that the US appeared willing to at least endorse the principles of the EU Code if not explicitly signing on to them. In an article Monday in The Space Review, lawyer Michael Listner speculated that the US would instead propose its own code of conduct in response. Such he move, he argued, might not necessarily win support from other spacefaring nations (which had expressed opposition to, or simply ignored, the EU document) and might also aggravate the Europeans.
On Tuesday, the US made its move. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton formally announced that the US would support the development of an “International Code of Conduct for Outer Space Activities” in cooperation with the EU and other nations. “A Code of Conduct will help maintain the long-term sustainability, safety, stability, and security of space by establishing guidelines for the responsible use of space,” she said.
News of the new US effort was first reported Tuesday by the Washington Times, who got quotes from several people expressing concern that such a code might jeopardize national security by limiting what the US can do in space. However, Clinton said in her statement that “the United States has made clear to our partners that we will not enter into a code of conduct that in any way constrains our national security-related activities in space or our ability to protect the United States and our allies.”
What isn’t clear is how this “international” code will differ from the EU draft that has been circulating since 2008, including what specifically the US took issue with in the EU document as being too restrictive. A fact sheet about the new initiative in fact praises the EU code. “The European Union’s draft Code of Conduct is a good foundation for the development of a non-legally binding International Code of Conduct focused on the use of voluntary and pragmatic transparency and confidence-building measures to help prevent mishaps, misperceptions, and mistrust in space,” it states.
In at least some respects, then, the US “rejection” of the EU code is hardly a surprise, but part of a long-term effort to craft a more international document. Even EU officials said last year that their proposed code was a draft; one likened it to an “internal memo” that the EU was soliciting feedback upon but not expecting anyone to immediately sign on to. Development of a final international code of conduct might still be well into the future.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 January 18 at 6:36 am ET On the final day of last week’s meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Austin, Texas, attendees to made it to the morning plenary got a bonus speaker: Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), a member of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee. In his brief comments he tried to assure the astronomers in the audience that, despite last year’s budget battle over the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), Congress supported that mission.
“I know that some members of the AAS were upset at the prospect of the House Appropriations Committee canceling the James Webb Space Telescope,” he said. Smith explained that the move by the appropriations subcommittee chaired by Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) was to “draw attention to the management and budgetary problems facing the JWST” and get the White House to respond. “I do believe that Frank Wolf has now got the Obama Administration’s attention,” he said. “Contrary to what might have been written at the time, Congress supports the James Webb Space Telescope.”
Astronomers, though, can be excused if they thought otherwise. Just a month earlier, members of the House Science Committee grilled NASA and Northrop Grumman officials about the telescope’s cost overruns and delays, putting them on notice that the latest JWST “replan” was the agency’s final chance for avoiding cancellation. “In my view, NASA’s latest replan for the James Webb Telescope is the agency’s last opportunity to hold this program together,†committee chairman Ralph Hall (R-TX) said at the time.
Smith went on to say that Congressional criticism of NASA’s human spaceflight plans, particular by Hall and ranking member Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), don’t mean they’re similarly critical of the agency’s science activities. Hall and Johnson, he said, “have been unified in their criticism of the Obama Administration’s lack of planning for human spaceflight, and I share their skepticism,” he said. “However, I hope that the broad science community does not translate such criticism of NASA’s programs into a perception that arguments between Congress and the Administration mean that Congress is somehow anti-science.” Even people in Washington, he quipped, “are made humble” by various astronomical discoveries.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 January 13 at 10:36 pm ET As previously noted here and elsewhere, Newt Gingrich is the Republican presidential candidate who, so far, has talked the most about space during the 2012 campaign by a large margin. Moreover, central Florida is one of the few places in the country where space is a major issue. Thus, it wasn’t surprising that, when Gingrich talked with the editorial board of the Orlando Sentinel Friday, part of a visit to Orlando to open a new campaign office there, that the issue of space came up.
However, the newspaper’s account of that editorial board meeting didn’t provide much in the way of new insights about his thoughts on space policy beyond what he has previously discussed. He said he loves “the romance of space” and believes that NASA should be “more realistic about risk taking”. He also talked up the benefits of prizes, something he has long endorsed. However, he was short on specifics, beyond suggesting that five to ten percent of NASA’s budget be used for prize programs.
The article includes a video with clips from his meeting with the editorial baord, including a couple brief comments about space. In one, he talks about prizes in a little greater detail, while in the other he brings up the criticism of past space-related ideas expressed last month by another Republican candidate, Mitt Romney:
You know, I was very surprised when Governor Romney twice recently sort of poked fun at ideas I’ve had about space. I thought it showed a total lack of vision on his part…
So I want to start with the idea that I believe we need to reclaim John F. Kennedy’s vision and we need to decide to go boldly out into space. I think that I’d like to set at least five, and maybe ten, percent of the NASA budget aside for prizes. Because if you go back and look at the history of aviation in the twenties and thirties, prize money got huge multipliers of effort: Lindbergh crosses the Atlantic for $25,000, for example. If you had set aside just five percent of the NASA budget over the last ten years, you’d have $8 billion in prize money.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 January 12 at 3:44 pm ET When John Grunsfeld took the podium Wednesday at the NASA Town Hall meeting at the American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting in Austin, Texas, he noted he was just into the sixth day of his new job as NASA’s associate administrator for science, and he had spent three of those days at the Austin conference. That meant that Grunsfeld largely addressed only in broad terms his ideas of the challenges and opportunities the space agency’s science efforts face in the current environment.
“One could say accepting the role of associate administrator at NASA is slightly crazy, and I certainly think it’s higher risk than anything I’ve ever done before,” said the former astronaut who flew on five shuttle missions, including three to service the Hubble Space Telescope. He told the astronomers who packed the ballroom for the hour-long session that “I do feel the full weight and responsibility of carrying an enormous science program to help enable all of you to be great scientists. My job is to help all of you to change the world.”
Grunsfeld indicated he would look beyond the traditional boundaries of NASA’s science programs to leverage capabilities elsewhere in the agency and get the most of out the directorate’s budget. He said he planned to work with Bill Gerstenmaier, the associate administrator for the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, “to see what synergies we have.” He cited in particular the potential use of the Space Launch System (SLS) heavy-lift rocket to launch large science missions. (That, of course, assumes funding will be available to build such flagship-class missions down the road, let alone afford the cost to launch them on the SLS.) He also cited potential cost reductions for science missions from using emerging launchers like the SpaceX Falcon 9, and also opportunities to use the International Space Station as a testbed to demonstrate technologies for use on future missions.
Not surprisingly, much of attention devoted to NASA’s space programs is focused on one of its biggest, and most controversial, missions, the James Webb Space Telescope. “The James Webb Space Telescope is one of the primary goals of NASA, and one of its highest priorities,” alongside utilization of the ISS and development of the SLS and Multi Purpose Crew Vehicles, he said. “That means astrophysics is very important to NASA, and we should all be happy about that.”
Grunsfeld and other NASA officials were upbeat about the “replan” of the telescope’s development developed last year. “We’ve got a really good plan going forward,” he said. “I really do feel that we have a good handle on the programmatics and the science system engineering.”
He acknowledged, though, that the program went through a tough experience last year with the replan and the threatened defunding by Congress. “It was real drama,” he said of the effort to win funding for the telescope, thanking AAS members for their efforts the Congress, which he called “a loud and clear voice about basic science research.”
“About a year ago, I didn’t know we would be having this town hall this year,” Eric Smith, deputy program director for JWST, said Monday at a separate town hall meeting devoted to JWST. That was because of the uncertainty about the telescope’s future at that time. “We are here this year, so I’m very optimistic” about the program’s future.
At Wednesday’s town hall, Grunsfeld acknowledged that NASA’s science programs are facing a “constrained” budget environment that will pose a challenge going forward, but cautioned scientists against internecine battles among the community, or between the science and human spaceflight directorates. “We are only as strong as our whole, and if we pit community against community, everybody loses,” he said.
Grunsfeld and the new acting director of the astrophysics directorate, Paul Hertz, offered few specifics about future funding, since that is pending the FY2013 budget request due for release on February 6. Both talked about the importance of “balance” among funding new missions versus existing missions versus research, but didn’t offer additional details. “I’m not planning any big radical changes,” Grunsfeld said.
While unable to take beyond the current fiscal year, Hertz noted at the town hall that astrophysics, when JWST is included (it is now a separate program but still widely perceived as part of astrophysics), accounts for over $1 billion of NASA’s budget. Therefore, he said, the agency and the scientific community need to maximize the value which that significant amount of money can provide. “That’s not small change,” he said. “We have a substantial allotment of federal funding to support the astrophysics program that we do. We have to spend it wisely.”
By Jeff Foust on 2012 January 11 at 8:20 am ET Today, as Florida legislators ramp up their activities for the 2012 session, they’ll be visited by representatives of the state’s space industry for Florida Space Day. This annual event is designed to raise awareness among legislators of the industry and advocate for measures to help support it. As the Space Florida release suggests, industry will both try to demonstrate that Florida is a leading state in the industry, but has room to grow.
This year, Florida Today reports, Space Day participants will press for passage of three relatively modest bills designed to support the state’s commercial space industry. One would formally recognize Cecil Field in Jacksonville, which already has an FAA spaceport license, as a spaceport. Another would revise the definition of “spaceport facilities” to make them eligible for state transportation funding. A third would change how Space Florida gets funding from the legislature, giving the state agency the money for specific projects up front to improve efficiency. None of the bills proved to be particularly controversial in recent committee hearings, Florida Today noted.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 January 10 at 11:26 am ET Pushing the boundaries of scientific knowledge has become increasingly expensive. In astronomy, that has meant larger telescopes, both on the ground and in space (in addition to increasingly complex planetary probes). In particle physics, it involves a series of larger and more powerful accelerators. However, one Nobel laureate fears that governments’ willingness to fund such ventures may have reached its limit.
Speaking on the topic of “Big Science in Crisis” at the American Astronomical Society conference Monday night in Austin, Texas, Steven Weinberg said he was pessimistic that governments would fund the next step in particle accelerators beyond Europe’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), regardless of the scientific case for it. “It’s going to be a very hard sell, and it may be impossible to get the next accelerator built,” he said.
That pessimism, he said, stems from his experience two decades ago with the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), a large particle accelerator that was already under construction near Dallas when Congress canceled it in 1993. The project, he said, got an “undeserved reputation” for cost overruns and, with a limited constituency for the program within Congress, was vulnerable to being cut.
“Whatever else it is, a large scientific lab is a public works project,” Weinberg said. “It, therefore, will always get enthusiastic support from local politicians, as it [the SSC] did in Texas, and hostility, or at best apathy, form other legislators from other parts of the country.” Weinberg admitted later in his talk that the project compounded its problems by initially relying too much on a single political patron, then Speaker of the House Jim Wright (D-TX), who was forced to resign in 1989 because of a scandal, as well as not doing enough outreach to other members of the House (which led the later effort to cancel the SSC.)
Those issues, along with competition for funding elsewhere in science (another issue that hurt the SSC), remain today. “All of these problems are going to come up again when we go to our governments for the next big accelerator,” he said.
Weinberg says there are similar problems with the future of astronomy, in particular with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). “Its history is somewhat reminiscent of the SSC,” he said. “It’s facing accusations of overspending, but the problem again is that at the funding levels being requested, it’s being stretched out to the point where it’s getting more and more expensive.” Like the SSC, the JWST has a strong Congressional patron, in this case in the form of Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), “but you can’t really rely on it too much.”
Weinberg, who has long been a strident critic of human spaceflight, also brought that up in his talk. “All of the great discoveries that have made such great progress in cosmology in particular have been from unmanned observatories,” he said. “The International Space Station was sold as a scientific laboratory, but nothing interesting has come from it.” He did say the ISS now has “one real science experiment” on the ISS, in the form of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, but that experiment largely runs autonomously from the activities of the station’s crew. He also blamed the ISS in part for the SSC’s demise, as the Clinton Administration elected to advocate for the station’s continuation in Congress, but not the SSC, when both were threatened with cancellation in 1993.
Although Weinberg didn’t menton it, his description of scientific labs as public works projects could also apply to human spaceflight activities: they too have largely local support, with a few key patrons in Congress primarily from districts and states with NASA facilities, while the rest of Congress tends to be apathetic, at best. Interestingly, after his talk Weinberg could be seen chatting with NASA’s new associate administrator for science, John Grunsfeld, a former astronaut best known for his work on several Hubble Space Telescope servicing missions; perhaps he sought to remind him that human spaceflight and astronomy can coexist and even work together.
Weinberg didn’t offer specific solutions to the problems facing big astronomy and physics projects beyond an overall increase in government spending that would provide more funds for those projects without putting them into competition with infrastructure, education, and other priorities. “We mustn’t get into a conflict between science and these many needs of our society. For one thing, we’ll lose,” he said.
Without some kind of change that makes governments more willing to fund big science projects, he concluded, “we may see in the next decade or so an end to the search for the laws of nature which will not be resumed again in our own lifetimes.”
By Jeff Foust on 2012 January 6 at 6:10 am ET Last week the Chinese government issued a white paper titled “China’s Space Activities in 2011″ that outlined the country’s recent activities in space as well as, more importantly, its plans for the next five years. Most of what that white paper included had been previously announced by Chinese officials, including robotic lunar landers, continued progress on its long-term space station plans, and development of new launch vehicles. However, the compilation of those plans into a single document have triggered a wide range of reactions in the West.
Syndicated columnist Cal Thomas sees China as “attempt[ing] to fill” a vacuum created by the US decision to cancel the Constellation program in 2010. He believes that China’s space efforts, including long-term plans for human lunar missions, have a military motivation. “Who doubts that China will use trips to the moon to build a permanent colony and will operate that colony, at least in part, to further its military goals?” he asks, without describing exactly what military purposes a lunar base would support. He also suggests that China’s satellite navigation system, which currently only serves China and surrounding regions but will be expanded globally by the end of the decade, can “jam or make mischief with America’s global positioning system network,” again without further explanation.
Thomas blames the Obama Administration for its decision in 2010 “to cut NASA’s budget” although, in fact, the administration’s FY2011 budget request, released in February 2010, called for a modest overall increase in the agency’s budget. (NASA ended up getting less money than either in that request or what it received in FY10, but that came after protracted deliberations in Congress that were not wrapped up until more than halfway into the fiscal year.) “The next president should declare a rebirth of the U.S. space program, with clear goals, such as a U.S. moon colony and a trip to Mars,” Thomas concludes. “A reduction in unnecessary government spending will help pay for it.”
Apollo 11 Buzz Aldrin also sees China’s space plans as a cause of concern in an op-ed published in The Huffington Post. “The Chinese challenge comes at a time of a dangerous convergence, the international debt crisis and a contentious, highly consequential presidential election,” he writes. “In short, 2012 is an inflection year — the year we will and must decide whether the U.S. has the will and ability to lead the world in human space exploration.”
Yet Aldrin’s prescription is very different from what Thomas argues. Aldrin makes no call for a lunar base. Instead, he supports development of commercial crew transportation systems, with NASA’s own Orion MPCV evolving “to become a dedicated exploration system” (which, arguably, is the agency’s plan today, with an ISS crew transportation role for the MPCV as a belated backup for commercial crew at best.) Much of Aldrin’s piece describes his concept for Earth-Mars “cycler” spacecraft that would reduce the launch mass required for human expeditions to the Red Planet.
“In a nutshell, the advantages — not least for the U.S. economy and permanent leadership in space — are almost incalculable if we begin from this first step,” Aldrin concludes. “On the other hand, if we wander aimlessly, pick our way from one short-term goal to another, lose vision, ambition or commitment, we will find ourselves spending the next fifty years the way we have spent the last — without significant outward movement.” That conclusion would also fit well into Thomas’s column. However, the fact that the two disagree about what direction those initial steps should take us suggests that making progress may be easier said than done.
By Jeff Foust on 2012 January 3 at 7:05 pm ET While you’re awaiting the results of tonight’s Iowa caucuses (or even if you’re just watching the Sugar Bowl), you can catch up on the positions of the Republican presidential candidates on space in this article published today in The Space Review. It largely recaps what has been posted here over the last few months, with a little bit of additional material: for example, I looked into the voting records of some of the candidates who are or have been in Congress in lieu of position statements from the various campaigns (none responded to a brief questionnaire I sent to them last month.) We may hear more from some of the candidates—at least those who survive the initial rounds of Iowa and New Hampshire—on space issues when they start spending more time in Florida, whose primary is at the end of this month.
By Jeff Foust on 2011 December 30 at 12:07 pm ET Last week some people noted that we are now less than a year away from a prophesied end of the world, which, according to some (mis)interpretations of the Mayan calendar, will be on December 21, 2012. Fortunately this is little more than the inspiration for a bad Roland Emmerich movie, but last week also marked the T-1 year milestone for a far more real—albeit far less apocalyptic—event.
On December 23, 2004, President George W. Bush signed into law the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act (CSLAA) (PL 108-492). That bill includes a provision that restricts the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST) 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. According to the law, that restriction expires eight years after the law’s enactment, or December 23, 2012, just under one year from now.
The restriction was intended to allow the industry to build up experience upon which future safety regulations could be based. However, the industry was developed far more slowly than anticipated in late 2004, after the prize-winning flights of SpaceShipOne. There has, in fact, been no crewed commercial suborbital flights since the final SpaceShipOne flight on October 4, 2004, although developments by Virgin Galactic, XCOR Aerospace, and others suggest that such flights could resume in the coming year. This has led to calls from some in the industry for some kind of extension to the current restriction before it expires next December.
There is, in fact, legislative language to provide an extension: the House version of the FAA reauthorization bill (HR 658) includes a provision changing that moratorium from eight years from enactment to eight years from the first licensed flight of a spaceflight participant—effectively resetting the clock and then some, since it appears unlikely such an event will take place before the end of 2012. The House passed that bill at the beginning of April, but it has been stuck in limbo ever since, awaiting a conference with the Senate version (S. 223), which does not include such a provision. That stalemate has been linked primarily to debates about language regarding labor unions in the bills. However, the Wall Street Journal reported last week that there are signs of a compromise in the works that could allow for passage of the reauthorization bill by the spring.
What will happen in conference to the House provision extending the regulation moratorium is uncertain. However, it’s worth noting that the FAA itself has previously expressed opposition to any extension. “We are not in favor of an extension of the moratorium,” said FAA/AST senior attorney Laura Montgomery during a session of the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in October. Letting the moratorium expire would give the office the flexibility to act if the need arose, something that she said is missing now. “Right now, our hands are tied. Even if there was something that was obviously foreseeable that we would want to do something about to protect a participant, we can’t.”
At the same event, Courtney Graham of NASA’s Office of General Counsel said that NASA didn’t have a position on a potential extension. However, she suggested that, at least for commercial orbital spaceflight, where NASA is likely to be a major customer, the industry might prefer that the moratorium expire. Otherwise, she cautioned, NASA will be the only government agency setting regulations for crewed vehicles. “The NASA requirements are going to be the default for the industry for the foreseeable future” in such a scenario, she said. “It’s really hard to say where the flexibility in [vehicle] design is going to be if you don’t know what the FAA is going to end up with” for its regulations.
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