Two Space Bills Move Ahead In The Senate
Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation Mark-up
“U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., chairman of the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, will convene an executive session on Wednesday, April 3, 2019 at 9:30 a.m. in Dirksen Senate Office Building G50 to consider the following legislative measures and nominations.
S. 919, Space Frontier Act, Sponsor: Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas)
S. 881, Space Weather Research and Forecasting Act, Sponsors: Sens. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), Cory Gardner (R-Colo.)”
The Senate Commerce Committee has just approved the Space Frontier Act and the Space Weather Research and Forecasting Act without amendment and without debate.
— Marcia Smith (@SpcPlcyOnline) April 3, 2019
Hum. I wonder how this one will play out? “NASA shall continuously maintain the capability for a continuous human presence in low-Earth orbit through and beyond the useful life of the ISS.”
“As long as NASA is wearing shoes, NASA will keep the laces tied.”
Can’t make it up. After watching the hearing yesterday, though, nothing surprises.
LOL. And maybe I misread earlier. It says “maintain the capability” and does not say “maintain a continuous presence” – so this can be fulfilled by keeping a tiny, empty space station in orbit without a crew, as long as its capable of having one. Words matter.
It means that when the ISS comes crashing to Earth they will need to have an option to replace it, hopefully by renting space on a commercial facility.
It’s also worth noting that it doesn’t say NASA will have a continuous human presence after ISS. It says they will maintain the _capability_ of doing so. Between Bigelow and SpaceX, I think that’s trivially satisfied. NASA can just say, “We can buy it when ever we want, so we have the capability to do so.”
Bigelow- that’s a name not tossed around as much these days as it was a few decades ago when many thought it was the only hope for a space station. In some ways might have been a better choice, but lessons learned.
Bigelow is a non-factor right now. They only have a handful of employees currently.
When did that happen? I assume we’re talking about the company with an inflatable module docked with the space station and (I thought) over a hundred employees as of the end of last year.
There was some major upheaval at Bigelow around spring 2018.
According to the chatter on the NSF forum Bigelow is in a holding pattern. Apparently they are having difficulty finding a large enough payload fairing to loft up the BA-330, which exceeds the largest EELV class payload fairing. Maybe it might fitted in the New Glenn.
The Bigelow company website hasn’t been updated since October 2018.
“Ummm, boss, what if we designed the module to fit the limits of actual launchers? You know, instead of… Just shut up and build more mockups? {sigh} Yes sir. “
Same mutterings in the NSF forum,
I’ve toyed with the idea of paying for access to NSF and wondered if it really is worth the price.
There is no need to sign up to the NSF forum. Just browse as a guest.
You only need to be a member if you wanted to posted comments and get new thread posting notifications. Membership is free.
Then there is the paid membership level for access to the more informative (technical) restricted L2 threads and posting in the Space Policy section. Which also funds the NSF forum.
Most NSF members does not have L2 access with free memberships.
Thanks – did it, at least the free side, for now.
Public side or L2?
Public side
It’s a shame. Bob Bigelow is a True Believer, with there added charm accompanying the proponents of an active alien presence.
I wonder if he has/had the funds to develop and build his own rocket? And why he didn’t?
Loosely following his activities in the 90’s, I watched him hitch his wagon to a series of rocket launching hopefuls, each offering the promise of putting his gear in orbit and none of which succeeded. If he’s bitter (not saying that he is, only that he has reasons) it is easy to understand.
Bob remains 30 years in the future. We will someday learn that his story was tragic.
And, that he was right all along about though bug-eyed aliens, one of who was finally elected to a formerly-important office.
I’m not totally surprised that they’re in a holding pattern. Dwayne Day’s piece over at Space Review said they’d been counting on the sovereign market to be their big purchasers, and it didn’t pan out – countries prefer to develop their own space hardware for national pride/technological infrastructure reasons. Meanwhile, there don’t seem to be any customers for private space stations.
I red that piece, wondering why the argument doesn’t apply to jet airliners or fighter jets, or submarines, or…well, the list is long.
I predict that over the long term Bob will turn out to be right, if he can wait that long.
If you just want to be able to launch your own satellites and space probes, then that’s an affordable capability for most countries that can afford to spend some budget space on space capabilities at all. And the list of countries capable of spending large amounts of money on crewed space programs is much smaller, with most of those countries also having the resources to just develop their own domestic space launch industries.
Whereas defense hardware is much more expensive, and the need much more urgent. They buy it from others because they can’t really afford to wait or dedicate the resources to developing it domestically.
I suspect jet airliners, fighters and submarines have a practical purpose. If a country needs those things and can’t build a sufficiently good one on their own, they don’t have a choice but buy from a foreign country/company. India did not _need_ to send spacecraft to the Moon or Mars, nor did Israel _need_ to land something on the Moon. So they could wait until they had the domestic capability to do so. But you do see some of this national flag waving when it comes to jets and submarines. Countries buy domestic products when they can. The President of the United States flies on a Boeing aircraft not a Airbus. And the President of France flies on an aircraft made in Toulouse not Seattle.
Just keep “hoping” – but life and probability will likely counter it.
That quote reminds me of a character from Asimov’s _Foundation_ novel (well, effectively a short story collection.) He was a very experienced diplomat, and in said many apparently comforting things during a week-long visit. But, on further analysis, everything he said turned out to be contradictions, meaningless verbiage, irrelevant or otherwise content free.
“…through and beyond the useful life of the ISS”? Isn’t that the same thing as “indefinitely” or “until further notice” and isn’t the mention of ISS actually irrelevant the the sentence’s meaning? “…continuously maintain the capability”? But not actually use that capability? While I appreciate the linguistic talent required to say so little with so many words, I also see a great deal of talent in being able to pack the most and least ambiguous content into the fewest words.
In his town hall the NASA Administrator detailed some of the risks created by the Indian ASAT test. Additionally, our adversaries gain intelligence into our observation and reaction systems. As is, any country can create debris fields creating risks to our civil and defense space programs. How about changing the bills identifying sanctions on anyone who purposely creates debris risking our astronauts, commercial assets, or defense assets.
These so-called ASAT tests are nothing more than space-borne terrorism. The Indians are to be shamed for it.
Technically, damage from debris from an ASAT test is already covered by the Outer Space Treaty. The launching nation is responsible for damages from anything they sent into space. And that included tiny scraps of metal from an ASAT test. Unfortunately, it would be very hard to prove who was responsible for a particular fragment. Was a given debris hit from the Indian or the older Chinese test? But it is possible to track the larger fragments (over 10 cm) and ISS and some other satellites maneuver to avoid close passes. That could be grounds for action under the OST’s non-interference clause.
I’m also not sure how debris from operational ASAT use. In that case, the debris from the targeted satellite would belong to a different nation. But I also suspect that any country actually shooting down someone else’s satellite wouldn’t really care about the OST.
Posted this in the wrong tab yesterday, because I’m retarded:
I was going to reply to it in the wrong thread, because I didn’t really care…
It’s actually not all that strange. NOAA is currently responsible for space weather monitoring and forecasting. The current, primary solar wind monitor at L1 is DSCVOR, and that’s a NOAA spacecraft. The forecasting is done by the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center here in Boulder. That is mostly about measuring the solar wind, not the Sun itself, but the usual practice is for NASA to design and build the spacecraft and for NOAA to operate them. But there is a huge overlap between solar wind science and space weather reports, so it’s a bit murky. For solar telescopes, I think there is so much of an overlap that NASA usually does it all themselves, as a solar physics mission, and passes the data on to NOAA to use for forecasting. The Department of Defense, usually in the form of the Naval Research Laboratory, is also involved, since they have their own spacecraft to worry about and therefore their own concerns about space weather.
But the this bill seems to be mostly about coordination and communication, not the hardware and operational responsibilities. That seemed odd to me, since NOAA and NASA do talk to each other and I thought the process was working. (Note that I don’t exactly do this for a living; I just have an office in the same building as people who do.) But now that I think about it, there could be conflicting requirements on the horizon.
One thing people have been talking about is a solar wind monitor at the Earth-Sun L5 point. Solar rotation causes active regions and coronal holes to pass under the L5 point about four and a half days before they pass under the Earth. That’s valuable for forecasting. It would also be great science, by providing multi-point measurements and information the structure of the heliosphere. But the two goals are very different when it comes to the data. One only need moderate to low resolution measurements, but very low latency in getting the data to Earth. The other would really benefit from much higher resolution, but buffering the data on board and only downlinking it once a week would be just fine.