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The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20111229214520/http://www.spacepolitics.com:80/
Space Politics
Because sometimes the most important orbit is the Beltway…
An Orlando Sentinel article published today concludes that former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich would have “the greatest effect” on NASA simply because he “would pay attention to it.” The article contrasts Gingrich, a “self-described ‘space nut’”, with Romney’s criticism of Gingrich’s past support for concepts like lunar colonies. Marshall Heard, chairman of the Florida Aviation Aerospace Alliance, warns in the article that it would be a “disaster” if Romney said he was opposed to space exploration in general, although there’s no evidence that Romney is in fact opposed to space exploration.
A Florida Today article (via the Tallahassee Democrat, and now available on Florida Today’s own site) argues that it’s unlikely there will be “big changes” in space policy even if one of the Republican candidates wins the presidency in November. For example, given the administration’s support for commercial crew transportation, “it’s hard for a Republican to get on the other side of that position,” claims Howard McCurdy of American University. In the article, I argue that Gingrich may offer the biggest change from the status quo, given his disdain for NASA’s bureaucracy and his long-held support for large prizes as an alternative to government-run programs. However, a President Gingrich would likely face an uphill battle to implement any major changes, just as President Obama encountered in 2010 when he introduced his space policy.
December 22, 2011 at 3:41 pm · Filed under Campaign '12
In an op-ed Wednesday in the Orlando Sentinel, former White House and Pentagon official Douglas MacKinnon argued that former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was the only Republican presidential candidate with a “passion” for the space program. Gingrich, he said, “does want the United States to once again become the pre-eminent nation in space”. (Going perhaps a little overboard, MacKinnon worried about China “as it plans lunar colonies, while having unimpeded access to our strategic assets in low and geosynchronous orbit.” China hasn’t expressed any serious plans for lunar colonies, nor is it clear from his essay how the Chinese will have “unimpeded access” to American satellites.) Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney’s previous criticism of Gingrich’s visions of lunar colonies was, MacKinnon argued, a “predictable cheap shot” that “spoke volumes.”
MacKinnon’s praise of Gingrich’s views about space exploration is not entirely uncritical, though. In the op-ed MacKinnon cites “sometimes inconvenient evidence of Gingrich being on both sides of an issue”, in this case, the administration’s current human space exploration policy. He notes that Gingrich, along with former congressman Bob Walker, praised the administration’s decision to transfer crew transportation to low Earth orbit in a Washington Times op-ed in February 2010. However, MacKinnon says that, speaking in Orlando on October 12, Gingrich called “Obama’s decision to shut down the program a disaster and ‘a stupid move.’”
MacKinnon doesn’t provide details about exactly what Gingrich said, but it appears to be a reference to this interview with Central Florida News 13 on that day. The video of the interview, though, suggests a somewhat different assessment of the administration’s plans than what MacKinnon claims. After an off-camera reporter asks Gingrich, somewhat imprecisely, to “tell us your thoughts on the closing of the manned space program”, he replied:
I think it’s a disaster. Look, I grew up with the space program. I wrote a book in 1984, called Window of Opporutunity, where I outlined the size of the space program we ought to have. I think it is an absolute example of government bureaucracy run amok that we have spent this much money and we are without an ability to get into space. I think that we frankly ought to right now have a crash program, put up a big prize, challenge the private sector, and get back into space within two years, and in an aggressive way. We ought to set a goal of getting to the Moon, getting permanently on Mars. We just did a movie called A City Upon a Hill in which we have one of the original astronauts talk about the fact that we ought to be going to Mars. We have bureaucratized, dumbed-down, red-taped, and crushed the space program under government bureaucracy. We ought to liberate it and get back to having the kind of launch program that would not only bring jobs to Florida, but would put young Americans back studying, because they would have a chance to go out into space in their lifetime.
Gingrich doesn’t use the phrase “a stupid move” in the video interview (the space portion of which starts at about the 5:45 mark) but the article accompanying it says Gingrich called “called President Barack Obama’s decision to shut down the program a disaster and ‘a stupid move,’” so presumably it was from a portion of the interview not on the video, or else Gingrich was misquoted.
From the video, it does not appear that Gingrich is opposing the administration’s idea of supporting commercial human spaceflight development; if anything, he is talking about a far more vigorous program than either what the administration currently proposed or what Congress has been willing to support, with calls for a “crash program” that would restore a US human spaceflight capability within two years. (Whether such a program is feasible is, of course, another question.) In the rest of the clip Gingrich rehashes familiar ground with his complaints about how bureaucratized NASA has become, as he did at a Lincoln-Douglas debate earlier this month with fellow presidential candidate Jon Huntsman.
Earlier this month NASA administrator Charles Bolden expressed optimism that “sequestration”, the term given to the across-the-bord budget cuts currently in place for fiscal year 2013 after the failure of the supercommittee to come up with a long-term deficit reduction plan, could be avoided by Congressional action in the coming year. “I don’t think it’s going to happen,” he told an audience in early December, saying the agency was not making any special preparations for it as part of its FY13 budget planning.
A former occupant of Bolden’s current office is similarly optimistic that sequestration will be avoided. “There is no question that this atmosphere is very, very tough. The budget environment is going to be challenging,” said Sean O’Keefe at a Washington Space Business Roundtable luncheon last week. Despite that environment, he said that the automatic across-the-board cuts required by the sequestration process is enough to get Congress and the administration to act to craft an alternative that will prioritize cuts. “The spectre of sequestration is so onerous that the notion behind it is that it will force everybody to act to avoid something mindless, driven by a computer formula,” he said.
He said that he was not surprised that the supercommittee failed to come up with its own plan, calling that diverse collection of members the “let’s give peace a chance” move that predictably failed. He expects that in the coming year both Congress and the Administration will work to find an alternative, not wanting to appear to have failed in cutting spending during an election year as well as risk more downgrades from ratings agencies. “The chances of coming to an alternative to sequestration, I think, is high.”
O’Keefe, who served as NASA administrator from the end of 2001 to early 2005 and is now CEO of EADS North America, touched upon a wide range of topics, many not related to NASA or space policy, in his talk. In one passage, he endorsed the idea of turning over routine transportation to low Earth orbit of cargo and crews to the private sector. “The logic behind all this that I found compelling,” he said, “is that NASA is an extraordinary place… that is designed for the purpose of doing things that haven’t been done before.” Repetitive flight activities is something that may be better suited to the private sector, he suggested.
That activity, designed to support continued operations of the ISS, is important because the station is “exactly one invention, discovery, something away from being the next wonder of the world,” he said. “When that happens, it will be exactly like Hubble,” he said, referring to the space telescope that became beloved by the public after corrected optics allowed it to return stunning images and perform cutting-edge science. “Just one breakthrough, and we’re going to see this station in a completely different way,” rather than questioning the expense of building and maintaining it.
However, the prospect of that cut has been averted after the Senate rejected the cut Saturday morning. The cut was contained in a separate piece of legislation from the actual disaster relief bill, allowing senators to vote for the disaster spending but vote against the rescission. Both bills passed the House on Friday.
December 16, 2011 at 7:19 am · Filed under Congress, NASA
NASA’s decision to shift from a fixed-price contract for the next phase of its commercial crew development effort back to a Space Act Agreement (SAA), like that used in the first two rounds of the program, has resulted in a range of reactions. Much of the industry either directly involved in the program or otherwise supporting it, who fought the move away from SAAs this summer, endorsed the move. Meanwhile, some key members of Congress expressed concern about increased risk with this revised approach.
“This is a surprising victory for common sense within NASA in getting the most benefit for the country out of a limited Commercial Crew budget,” concluded the Space Access Society in a statement released shortly after Thursday morning’s announcement. That organization had argued that a switch to contracts based on Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR) “was likely to fatally increase Commercial Crew Program costs and timelines.”
The Commercial Spaceflight Federation (CSF) also endorsed the NASA move, citing NASA’s desire to promote competition by funding at least two companies in this upcoming and future phases of the program. “Competition is the key to the Commercial Crew Program, and we are pleased to see that NASA is continuing to promote competition,” CSF executive director Alex Saltman said.
The chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX), was less enthused with the shift, citing a potential for increased risk because, under an SAA, NASA cannot direct companies to meet specific requirements. Hall suggested that NASA accelerate the competition by perhaps doing away with the competition that industry appears eager to support. “In order to reduce risk and cost, and to minimize further schedule slips, it would be my hope that two commercial companies would team together to jointly develop a cost-effective and safe launch system,” he said in a statement.
The committee’s ranking member, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), also expressed concerns about increased risk under the SAA approach in a separate statement. “I am concerned that NASA’s plan does not appear to contain sufficient margins and other risk reduction measures to give Congress confidence that it has a high probability of successfully meeting the objective of providing safe and cost-effective commercial crew transportation to and from the International Space Station by 2016 or even 2017,” she said.
Also yesterday, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued its own report on NASA’s commercial crew program, citing concerns about budget levels. Noting that the funding levels are about half of what was originally projected, “NASA’s ability to execute its approach as currently planned is unlikely.” (In the context of the report, “as currently planned” refers to the agency’s prior plans for a FAR-based contract, not the shift to SAAs announced Thursday morning.) That would force NASA to support perhaps a single contractor, increasing programmatic risks. The report recommended that NASA reassess the program before going forward with the RFP for the Integrated Design Phase contract—which is exactly what NASA did, concluding that it would shift back to SAAs.
In an about face blamed on a “dynamic budget environment”, NASA is switching back to Space Act Agreements (SAAs) for the next phase of its Commercial Crew program, the agency announced Thursday. NASA had planned to issue this coming Monday a request for proposals (RFP) for what was called the Integrated Design Phase of the program. Instead, it will switch back to SAAs, used in the first two rounds of the Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program, with details on timing to come in the next few weeks.
In a telecon Thursday morning with reporters, Bill Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for NASA’s Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, said the limited funding available for commercial crew in 2012—$406 million instead of the requested $850 million—as well as uncertainty about future budgets, led to the decision to shift its procurement strategy. “In a dynamic budget environment, it makes it tough for us to deal with that budget fluctuation” when using fixed-price contracts, he said. “If we don’t get the funds that we anticipated, it makes it tough for us to negotiate the contract and inefficiency in renegotiating that contract.” That budget uncertainty in future years, he said, drove them to make the shift back to SAA.
The new SAAs will replace the Integrated Design Phase contracts, which had been intended to get system designs to the critical design review (CDR) level of the development. The goal of the new SAAs will also to get designs as close as possible to CDR, although Gerstenmaier warned that, since NASA cannot direct companies under an SAA like it can under a contract, “there is a risk there what we won’t get exactly what we anticipated.” However, he said that risk is mitigated in part by the publication of NASA requirements for crew transportation systems and later contracts for providing those services.
The decision comes several months after NASA announced its plans to switch from SAAs to a more conventional contract for the next commercial crew phase, despite strong feedback from much of industry not to do so. The rationale at the time was the need to direct companies to meet NASA requirements, something that NASA now hopes companies will do without explicit direction from the agency. While industry might support this move back to SAAs, Gerstenmaier said that NASA made this decision without consulting industry. “We really made this decision on our own,” he said, with budgets as the driving factor.
However, NASA did consult with Congress on this, he said, “and they kind of understand our position and they understand the logic behind why we made this shift.” (It’s worth noting that as recent as September the Senate directed NASA to limit its use of SAAs in future commercial crew procurements.) He added that NASA is also working with Congress on an extension to its existing Iran North Korea Syria Nonproliferation Act (INKSNA) waiver to allow it to continue purchasing Soyuz seats, as budgets will likely delay the entry of commercial crew systems into service to 2017.
Asked if this was as far as NASA could go with SAAs for the commercial crew effort, Gerstenmaier said this morning that he thought so, but “I wouldn’t definitively say that at this time.”
The House released last night its draft of an omnibus spending bill that covers most federal agencies, excluding those, like NASA, included in last month’s “minibus” appropriations bill. One minor note of interest: Division B of the omnibus, which covers energy and water, does not call out any funding for the Department of Energy to restart plutonium-238 production, despite a lobbying push by astronomers last week.
Accompanying the omnibus is a disaster relief spending bill, which seeks to offset its $8.1 billion cost through a rescission of FY12 spending for non-defense discretionary spending. That across-the-board cut of 1.83 percent implies, for NASA, a cut of $325 million from its $17.8 billion topline for 2012.
December 13, 2011 at 7:14 am · Filed under Campaign '12
Even as the space and political intelligensia was digesting the weekend’s comments by GOP presidential candidates Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney on lunar colonies, space mirrors, and other space issues, Gingrich spoke out again on space on Monday. In a rather collegial Lincoln-Douglas debate on national security and foreign policy issues with fellow presidential candidate Jon Huntsman Monday afternoon in New Hampshire, Gingrich referenced NASA as part of a broader discussion of procurement reform needed for the DoD. “You have a National Aeronautics and Space Administration which has currently got no vehicles that can get to the space station,” he said, starting at approximately the 58:30 mark of the video. “Has it occured to you to wonder what the billions are for and what the thousands of employees are doing? They sit around and they think space.” A ripple of laughter could be heard from the audience at this point. “Do you know how hard it is to get to a period where we’ve spent this much money and don’t have a vehicle that gets into space?”
Gingrich’s latest comments came after some reaction to Saturday night’s debate, when Romney argued that, unlike Gingrich, he did not support he development of a “lunar colony” for mining the Moon, while Gingrich responded that the US should be in space in an “aggressive, entrepreneurial way”. POLITICO sees this as the return of “Newt Skywalker”, the nickname applied to Gingrich in the 1980s when he was a congressman interested in space and other technology issues.
That article also includes a clip of a video interview with Romney on Monday where the former Massachusetts governor again raised the issue when asked about differences between himself and Gingrich. “The idea of a lunar colony? I think that’s going to be a problem in the general election,” Romney said about two and a half minutes into the clip. “So you’re suggesting he’s a little nutty?” asked POLITICO’s Mike Allen. “I’m suggesting he has differing views than I do on very important issues,” Romney responded, but later added, “I’m not going to characterize the Speaker’s views on science.”
Others, though, defended Gingrich’s views. “I’ve made fun of Gingrich before. There’s a lot to make fun of,” writes Dorian Davis in an op-ed for The Daily Caller. “But zapping him on the space program is shortsighted pandering.” David says that space is of strategic importance but decries the lack of a “John F. Kennedy-esque national public commitment” to spaceflight. Meanwhile, writing for National Review Online, Rand Simberg argues that the debate between Romney and Gingrich offers “a window into their mindsets”. Gingrich “sees space as a frontier of human opportunity and plenty, and wants to direct space policy toward opening it using the traditional American tools of entrepreneurship and competition,” Simberg writes, while Romney “comes off as someone who not only has given no serious thought to space policy other than as a cudgel against his political opponent, but as a soulless technocrat.”
And that whole idea of “space mirrors” raised by New York Times columnist David Brooks on Friday? PolitiFact judged that claims as true, with the caveat that it dates back to Gingrich’s first book, published in 1984 and based on a “NASA-sponsored new concepts symposium” held in 1979. Gingrich, PolitiFact adds, “doesn’t appear to have reiterated the call for floating mirrors in recent years, [so] we can safely assume the idea is no longer at the top of his policy agenda.”
December 11, 2011 at 10:29 am · Filed under Campaign '12
It turns out Saturday night’s debate was not the first time that former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has invoked former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s reported interest in lunar colonies. In an interview with the editorial board of the Des Moines Register on Friday, Romney brought up the subject when asked about how he differs with Gingrich on several issues. “I saw that the Speaker had a measure that I read about which was to put a permanent colony on the Moon to mine rare materials from the Moon,” Romney said. “Ah, I think we have some better priorities for our spending before we do that.”
Romney also brought up another space-related venture he linked to Gingrich. “He even talked about a series of mirrors that we could put in space that would light our highways at night. I’ve got some better ideas for our resources.” The video of the interview is available below; Romney’s mention of lunar colonies and space mirrors starts at approximately the 40:30 mark:
For example, he has called for “a massive new program to build a permanent lunar colony to exploit the Moon’s resources.” He has suggested that “a mirror system in space could provide the light equivalent of many full moons so that there would be no need for nighttime lighting of the highways.”
The source of the quotes in the Brooks column isn’t cited, but an initial search didn’t turn up anything recent (i.e., during the current campaign) said or written by Gingrich on those issues.
December 10, 2011 at 9:52 pm · Filed under Campaign '12
(Updated at 11:45 pm with full quotes and video.)
At Saturday night’s Republican presidential debate in Des Moines, Iowa, space made a cameo appearance in an exchange between two of the frontrunners, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. When Romney was asked by the moderator to describe how his positions differed from those of Gingrich, Romney brought up, as a rather unexpected example, that Gingrich supported the development of big lunar colonies, whereas Romney did not. “We could start with his idea to have a lunar colony that would mine minerals from the Moon,” Romney said. “I’m not in favor of spending that kind of money to do that.” The line was greeted with laughter from the debate audience.
Gingrich, in his response, brought up space. “I’m proud of trying to find things that give young people a reason to study science and math and technology, and telling them that some day in their lifetime that they can dream of going to the Moon, they can dream of going to Mars,” he said. “I grew up in a generation where the space program was real, where it was important, where, frankly, it is tragic that NASA has been so bureaucratized.” He then cited Iowa State University, just up the road from the debate in Ames, as an example of a place doing “brilliant things” that attract students. “I’m happy to defend the idea that America should be in space and should be there in an aggressive, entrepreneurial way.”
The portion of the debate that included that exchange is below:
