Space Politics
Because sometimes the most important orbit is the Beltway…
July 23, 2008 at 7:26 am · Filed under Campaign '08, NASA, Other
It’s rare to see a major newspaper devote editorial space to, well, space. However, on Wednesday two of the nation’s largest newspapers (as well as one smaller paper that more frequently covers space issues) took on the topic in editorials and op-eds:
Leading off, the Los Angeles Times examines the proposed space policies of presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama in an editorial. The editors note that McCain “supports the vision for space exploration that President Bush articulated in 2004″ while Obama has proposed delaying Constellation by five years. (The editorial doesn’t note that, more recently, Obama has proclaimed his support for Ares 1 and Orion, the two major early components of Constellation.)
“Who’s right? There’s something to be said for pulling the plug on Constellation,” the editorial continues, suggesting that NASA rely on commercial services or international partners for human spaceflight, allowing it to spend more money on robotic missions. But then the editors worry that, since many robotic missions could be perceived “as the necessary prep work for human exploration”, this could boomerang against those missions—and the paper’s parochial interests at JPL.
The editorial concludes that the Bush-McCain approach “nicely balances realism and ambition”, but that Obama “is sounding like the more realistic, market-oriented candidate” because he wants to enhance NASA’s role in earth sciences research in addition to promoting more international and private-sector cooperation.
Meanwhile, a New York Times op-ed makes an argument for space solar power (SSP). O. Glenn Smith, a former manager of ISS experiments at JSC, reviews the arguments for SSP, including the use of the ISS as a testbed for SSP experiments. (He glosses over one of the major issues, the cost of launching a SSP system, saying that launch services being developed by SpaceX and Orbital under the COTS program “could be adapted to sending up a solar power satellite system”. However, even the NSSO report about SSP released last year admitted that “The vehicle fleet necessary to place a SBSP system into orbit does not exist today” and that a new generation of RLVs are required.) Smith’s closing argument: “[I]n a time of some skepticism about the utility of our space program, NASA should realize that the American public would be inspired by our astronauts working in space to meet critical energy needs here on Earth.” (See recent discussions about the potential conflict between alternative energy research and space exploration.)
Finally, Florida Today argues for “spreading the NASA gospel” to local businesses, so that they, in turn, will support the space agency. The editorial was spurred by a recent meeting at KSC that attracted about 100 chamber of commerce officials from across the state, most of whom hasn’t been there before. “Converting business leaders to the cause is important for building the kind of broad backing necessary to convince the state’s elected officials in the Legislature and Congress that NASA’s future is critical to all Floridians, not just Brevard County residents,” the editorial argues. However, business leaders are often less swayed by rhetoric like “the NASA gospel” and “the cause” then by hard economic data; there’s little of that in the editorial other than the claim that the retirement of the shuttle “could result in the loss of 6,400 jobs”, even though NASA cut that estimate to as little as 3,000 jobs last month.
July 23, 2008 at 6:47 am · Filed under Congress, NASA
Remember the minor kerfuffle that Congressman John Culberson set off last week when he said that “NASA wastes a vast amount of money”? Last night Culberson apologized for those comments, the Houston Chronicle reported. Culberson, speaking in the latest in his series of online video town hall meetings, said “I let my temper get a little bit away with me and I said something I shouldn’t have” when he made that statement. “Every agency wastes money but NASA itself is not a waste,” he said. “These fine people, the scientists and engineers there at NASA, I certainly owe these folks an apology because that is not what I meant to say.”
Lost in the discussion, though, was a proposal by Culberson to restructure NASA into a more NSF-like organization, “driven by the scientists and the engineers” and free of politics “as much as possible”. The Chronicle article simply noted that Culberson did not mention his proposal during the online town hall meeting.
July 22, 2008 at 7:39 am · Filed under Congress, NASA
On a panel about COTS at the NewSpace 2008 conference last Friday, Jeff Bingham, a staffer on the space subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee, said that the House and Senate had recently completed “pre-conferencing” of the NASA authorization legislation to speed its passage. “We had to do what is a six-week process in four days, and we did it,” he said, which resulted in some compromises, particularly in bill language regarding the Shuttle-Constellation gap. “We had some language [in the Senate version] that was a little bit more aggressive, shall we say, on dealing with the gap issues, and that’s had to be modified,” he said. Exactly when the Senate will take up the bill is uncertain. Bingham said earlier plans to bundle the bill with some other unrelated legislation to expedite its passage in the Senate fell through, so it may be taken up on its own as early as this week.
The Senate version of the authorization bill, S. 3270, was formally introduced last week; it’s not clear if this reflects the results of the pre-conferencing. The Senate version does include language calling for an acceleration of COTS, including development of a crew capability. The bill also calls for a report on what would be needed to recertify the shuttle for flights after 2010 as well as a provision that requires NASA to “terminate or suspend any activity of the Agency that, if continued, would preclude the continued safe and effective flight of the Space Shuttle Orbiter after fiscal year 2010.”
The pre-conferenced version of the bill, Bingham said, does include language calling for an additional shuttle mission to fly the AMS instrument to ISS. While the administration strongly opposes that provision, he said he didn’t think the administration would veto it if was included. “In some ways I welcome a veto on that, because I’d love to write the speeches to override that veto, which I think we could do handily,” he said. “But I don’t think it will get vetoed.”
July 19, 2008 at 7:14 am · Filed under NASA
One of the first panels Thursday at the Space Frontier Foundation’s NewSpace 2008 conference was titled “VSE: The Beginning of the End or the End of the Beginning?” The VSE, of course, referred to the Vision for Space Exploration, the national space exploration policy introduced in January 2004. Except that, earlier this year, the policy was quietly renamed the US Space Exploration Policy (although references to the former name are still on the NASA exploration web site). Or does the policy need a new name altogether?
“If we’re going to talk about sustainability, in my opinion we need to use a different vocabulary,” said Paul Carliner, a former Senate staffer. “I think we need to stop calling it the Vision for Space Exploration. A ‘vision’ is a word that connotes something of a plan for the future. This is not a plan for the future. This is a program that is ongoing, is current.” He noted the policy’s endorsement by Congress in the NASA Authorization Act of 2005 and the spending of billions of dollars on Ares, Orion, and other exploration-related programs. “That’s not a vision, that’s a program.”
What, then, should the exploration effort be called? “The current name is Constellation,” he said, referring to the term usually reserved for the transportation components of the plan. “We all need to start using that name of the program when we discuss what we’re talking about.” Carliner said that in the 1960s, the push to send a man to the Moon was not the “Vision to Send a Man to the Moon” but became known by names like Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, “names that to this day still have an iconographic status with the American public and the world.” Calling the current effort the Vision could be damaging to its long-term prospects, he said. “If we refer to it as that, nothing more than a plan for the future, then it becomes very easy not to sustain it.”
Another panelist, former White House staffer Brett Alexander, said that Constellation may not be the right name. “Calling it Constellation does kind of leave out that space science part,” he said. He noted that the original policy had the title “Renewed Spirit of Discovery”, a term that never gained much currency with NASA or the public. “The ‘Vision for Space Exploration’ was a name made up by NASA and [then-administrator] Sean O’Keefe at the time. It was apt, but it has outlived its usefulness.”
July 18, 2008 at 6:12 am · Filed under Campaign '08, Other
At the Space Frontier Foundation’s NewSpace 2008 conference in Crystal City, Virginia on Thursday, a group of over a dozen organizations announced the formation of a National Coalition for Cheap and reliable Access To Space (CATS). The purpose of the coalition is to “put cheap access to space back on the national agenda,” in the words of coalition coordinator Charles Miller. The coalition will develop a “declaration” for CATS over the next four to six weeks, including during a meeting at the DC-X reunion conference next month in New Mexico. That will be followed by a National Summit on CATS that will be held on the campus of Ohio State University on October 7-8 that will delve into how to achieve CATS. Why there? “Ohio is a battleground state” in the upcoming presidential election, Miller said; the Ohio Aerospace Institute is one of the member organizations in the coalition as well. The coalition will ask CEOs of major corporations and non-profits to sign the declaration, which will then be presented to the next president after the November election.
Although the location of the summit is based in part on the state’s role in the election, Miller said that the coalition does not have specific plans to engage with the campaigns prior to the election. “We don’t think that the campaigns will be able to hear this” because of all of the other issues during the campaign. Miller said that they are building inroads into both the McCain and Obama campaigns so that they’re prepared to discuss this with the winning campaign after the election, but not earlier.
July 18, 2008 at 5:49 am · Filed under Congress, NASA
Today’s Houston Chronicle report that Houston-area congressman John Culberson wants to introduce “revolutionary change” to NASA by completely restructuring the 50-year-old agency. Culberson, a bona fide space geek (in the best sense of the term), wants to model NASA on the National Science Foundation so it can “be driven by the scientists and the engineers” and “be free of politics as much as possible”.
How exactly Culberson proposes to do that isn’t clear: he hasn’t drafted any legislation on this, he told the Chronicle (which means that there’s no chance of anything happening on it this year), and didn’t go into details about how NASA would be transformed. While NASA and NSF are often closely linked as “science” agencies (although NASA is more than just science), the two organizations are very different, and it would seem at first glance very difficult to convert NASA into an NSF-like organization. For example: NASA has tremendous amounts of infrastructure, from field centers to space hardware; NSF, by comparison, has very little. Would NASA retain that infrastructure after that transition? If yes, how would it be run differently? If not, who (if anyone) would take if over, and how would they operate it for NASA?
The Chronicle notes that Culberson also made comments during an online town hall meeting earlier in the week that, on their surface, appeared to be disparaging towards NASA. “We’ve spent a fortune on NASA, and we don’t have a whole lot to show for it,” Culberson was quoted as saying, adding that “NASA wastes a vast amount of money.” Some might argue that those statements aren’t that controversial, but in the Houston area, they did generate a backlash from Culberson’s Democratic opponent and Rep. Nick Lampson (D-TX), whose district includes JSC. “It’s times like these when I’m relieved – and I know my constituents are relieved – that I’m the representative of JSC,” Lampson told the paper.
July 18, 2008 at 5:21 am · Filed under Other
As I noted here earlier this week, there is growing interest in alternative energy efforts that could end up competing with space exploration for federal funding—even as alternative energy advocates use the Apollo program as a model for their efforts. Now there are a couple more examples which demonstrate this trend.
An editorial in Wednesday’s Houston Chronicle made the case for an “Apollo-scale” program for alternative energy (in addition to increased offshore drilling):
If President Bush and Democratic leaders in Congress wished to show responsible leadership worthy of the public’s growing concern about high energy costs, they would together craft legislation that would encourage domestic energy production and begin a national research program – on a scale of NASA’s successful race to the moon – to develop clean energy from renewable sources such as wind and sunlight; superefficient batteries in which to store it; and alternative fuels such as hydrogen or some source not yet envisioned.
Then, yesterday, former vice president Al Gore made a similar call for alternative energy development:
Just as John F. Kennedy set his sights on the moon, Al Gore is challenging the nation to produce every kilowatt of electricity through wind, sun and other Earth-friendly energy sources within 10 years, an audacious goal he hopes the next president will embrace.
Such large-scale programs, if implemented, would be expensive, just as Apollo over 40 years ago. Where would that money come from, particularly if the presidential candidates are serious about reducing budget deficits? Lots of other programs would probably be under pressure, and it’s hard to see how NASA would be exempt.
July 17, 2008 at 6:36 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Last night several organizations co-hosted a “Teachers in Space” roundtable at George Washington University. The idea behind Teachers in Space, unlike NASA’s Teacher in Space program in the 1980s and the current group of educator astronauts, is to fly current teachers on suborbital spaceflights using any number of commercial vehicles currently under development, then get the teachers back in the classroom so they can share their experience—and, presumably, enthusiasm—with their students. Most of the panel discussion focused on the benefits of the program as well as the history of NASA’s past teacher-in-space efforts.
The roundtable came after three days of Congressional staff briefings by several people affiliated with Teachers in Space. Project manager Ed Wright said that they held several dozen briefings and were pleased with the results; he cited one hour-long briefing earlier in the day with a Congressional fellow who was particularly excited about the concept.
Right now, though, Teachers in Space isn’t seeking any specific legislation or federal funding. Wright said that they did get some commitments of support, up to offers to introduce legislation on the issue if needed, and also got feedback on how to win federal funding to help support this project. (Teachers in Space has several flights donated to it by several vehicle providers, and has also arranged a purchase of flights from XCOR Aerospace.) One earlier proposal called for funding flights of 500 teachers a year: one from each Congressional district plus several dozen others.
Charles Miller, president of Space Policy Consulting, said that it might still be too soon to pursue specific initiatives like that. “If you started a Teachers in Space program right now, 500 teachers per year, it would change how the Hill perceives risk,” he said. “They would probably try to put more burdensome regulations on the emerging industry, which is not ready for it, because you’re protecting the teachers.” He expected that in the next few years, once suborbital vehicles begin flying, and flying safely, that teachers, perhaps supported by funding from Congress, will soon follow. “It may not be the right idea right now, but within the next five years, they [Congress] could see it being the right idea,” Miller said.
July 15, 2008 at 7:14 am · Filed under Uncategorized
That’s the topic of an article in this week’s issue of The Space Review that I wrote about the potential risk to civil space programs posed by growing concerns about energy and desires for crash programs to develop alternative energy sources. Both major presidential candidates have appropriated arguably the biggest accomplishment of the Space Age to date—the Apollo lunar landings—as a way to describe the level of commitment (and size of funding) needed to gain “strategic independence” in energy (in John McCain’s words) or otherwise develop alternative energies.
That level of effort will require a lot of money: Barack Obama’s energy policy calls for $150 billion over 10 years for alternative energy research. Coupled with desires to reduce deficit spending, as well as growing pressure on the budget from mandatory spending, will space feel the squeeze in the next administration? As I conclude the article:
…but new energy policies will add to the existing fiscal pressures on NASA and space exploration in the next administration and beyond. That makes it all the more imperative for NASA and its supporters to craft approaches that are cost effective and also exciting and inspiring, to help win public support and thus funding. Otherwise, the Vision for Space Exploration and efforts like it might run out of gas.
In a related article, Greg Anderson examines what it takes to build long-term support for government initiatives of any kind, from Social Security to the Cold War, and how that can be used to build support in future administrations for space exploration. His conclusion: “Space expansion, therefore, must be presented to voters as being good for society as a whole. If the enemy in the Cold War was Communism, the alternatives to expanding the human economy beyond Earth are poverty, stagnation, and smaller, perhaps shorter lives for coming generations.”
July 11, 2008 at 7:31 am · Filed under Congress
Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) has probably gotten more attention than the typical freshman representative, in large part because of who she’s married to: NASA astronaut Mark Kelly. In an interview with Politico, she discusses that as well as a few other space-related issues:
- “NASA is an extension of how the United States has been a leader historically in science and technology,” she says. “But unfortunately, just like in many other areas, NASA is falling behind.”
- Talking about human exploration of Mars, she’s obviously not enthused about having her husband go on a one-way trip to Mars. As for others, “The whole purpose of sending humans into space is so they can come back and tell us what they can see.”
- Asked if she’s interested in flying in space herself, she said she was, and spoke favorably about ventures like Virgin Galactic. “I couldn’t afford that,” she said, citing its $200,000 price tag. “But I think someday in our lifetime an experience in space for the Average Joe will be more cost effective.”
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