Link Turns – Planet Hopping

Link Turns – Planet Hopping

“If you do that, a lot of interesting things fall out,” he said. Such an approach would generate demand for propellant in low Earth orbit, enabling lower cost launches (through increased demand for launches) and propellant depots, and also provide a predictable market for new reusable launch vehicles.

Moreover, such an approach could be affordable, as each step in the process would serve as a multiplier in reducing costs versus a direct-to-Mars approach. “It’s my belief that if we pursued this the right way, we actually could afford to do this, all the way out to the first landings on Mars, for the kind of budget NASA’s getting now,” he said.

That strategy, or something like it, is critical to the future of NASA’s human spaceflight program, he argued. Without such a strategy, he said, “we’re going to build a big rocket, and then we’re going to hope a space program shows up to fly it. Any in my opinion, that strategy—the strategy of default—is going to result in the end of the NASA human spaceflight program” when members of Congress question the wisdom of spending several billion dollars a year on that effort and its lack of progress in an era of constricting budgets. “If we haven’t done better in the next ten years than we have in the last ten years, we’re going to lose that fight, and NASA’s human spaceflight activity will end.”

Biden Likes

However, not surprisingly, there’s not much to say about Biden and space policy. The Biden campaign was one of the campaigns I contacted for an article in The Space Review about candidates’s positions on space, but, like the others, didn’t get a response from. The journal Nature had a little more success in early January, reporting that he “wants to make China a full partner in space rather than a ‘frustrated new entrant’ that has to catch up with the United States.” And at a New Hampshire debate last fall, he told an attendee, “I like the robotic programs” and, about human spaceflight, “with clear leadership we could do anything, good luck.” In the Senate he doesn’t serve on the Commerce or Appropriations committees, so he’s not on the front lines of either authorization or appropriations legislation that would affect NASA. However, he does chair the Foreign Relations Committee, which has a tangential but key role now: In June he and the ranking Republican on the committee, Richard Lugar, introduced S.3103, the “International Space Station Payments Act of 2008″. This bill would have extended the current waiver in the Iran, North Korea, and Syria Nonproliferation Act that allows NASA to purchase flight services from Russia. That waiver currently expires at the end of 2011, and NASA officials have said that they need the extension this year since it takes up to three years to build a Soyuz spacecraft (the extension does not include Progress spacecraft, since NASA is planning on commercial and/or international alternatives to Progress). However, enthusiasm for the waiver has dropped significantly in the wake of Russia’s incursion into Georgia this month, raising doubts it will be passed.

Keith Cowing, 10/28/2008, “Senator Biden on Reinvigorating our Space Program”, http://nasawatch.com/archives/2008/10/biden-on-space-policy.html KC

Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden, beaming with confidence, told some 2,000 supporters on Florida’s Space Coast on Tuesday that America’s space program was more than just about sending humans to the moon: it was about jobs. In the most comprehensive speech on space policy given by any candidate that has yet to visit Brevard County, Biden clearly suggested that a Barack Obama administration might regard NASA as a public works program as much as a program of scientific and technical achievement. “When John F. Kennedy challenged the nation to go to the moon he noted that the space industry not only demanded the best minds, it also created the best jobs,” he told supporters who braved a chilly October evening to attend the rally at Wickham Park in Melbourne. "And as it did in the Kennedy administration, I promise we will create a new generation of engineers, mathematicians and scientists and a few astronauts like [Florida Senator] Bill nelson as well in the process. Ladies and gentlemen, it is a goal that will also create jobs." Republican candidate John McCain, like Biden and Obama, supports giving NASA an additional $2 billion of funding to help the space agency speed the development of a new rocket to replace the shuttle after it retires in 2010. But Biden’s speech was the first time that any candidate had promised that the additional money was for more than just national prestige.

Mike Moore, author, journalist, speaker, and research fellow at the Independent Institute 1/12/2009, “An Agenda for Obama: End America's Counterproductive Pursuit of Space Dominance”, http://www.carnegiecouncil.org/resources/ethics_online/0029.html KC