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Mark Whittington gives Kerry space policy advisor Lori Garver the smackdown. Twice.
NASA’s BAA for technologies in support of the VSE hints that the agency is thinking beyond a lunar flags-and-footprints redux — NASA Issues Call For Moon, Mars And Beyond Technologies:
One other area that has been long-supported in talk but not enough dollars is use of local resources — on the Moon, Mars, or other celestial locales — to sustain future human explorers.
As explained in the BAA, and under NASA’s Lunar and Planetary Surface Operations (LPSO) Technology effort, the space agency is on the lookout for resource utilization systems.
“Technology areas of potential interest include excavation, extraction, collection, beneficiation technologies for lunar and/or Martian resources.”
The NASA BAA notes this call for proposals includes solids and/or gases; reconfigurable, modular chemical process technologies for on-the-spot oxygen and/or propellant production from lunar or Mars resources; and technologies for local production of structural feedstock materials from lunar and/or Martian resources.
Furthermore, the NASA document stresses the need for surface manufacturing and construction systems.
Technologies of interest include those for the production of structural components using either “imported” feedstock or available lunar and/or Martian resources; autonomous or tele-operated robotic technologies for surface facility assembly and maintenance; and, technologies for off-Earth creation of solar photovoltaic systems or other energy systems.
The BAA itself is available here, and is well worth reading to get a better idea of what NASA has in mind.
Looks like the Kerry photos will soon be back online (well, at NASA, anyway…they’re all over the internet, regardless of whether they were yanked from agency websites):
After a legaL review by NASA lawyers, the photos of Sen. John Kerry in the famous ,”bunny suit” will be posted sometimes this evening on http://mediaarchive.ksc.nasa.gov.
And the Kerry campaign has only itself to blame.
Plus, there’s this interesting bit:
NASA laywers claim the pictures might violate the Hatch Act, a federal law prohibiting campaign activities on government installations. Earlier Monday, there was apparently no objection to Kerry’s campaign holding an invitation-only, town hall meeting on the federally-owned grounds of the KSC Visitor Complex.
I wondered about that myself, after hearing about a Dick Cheney stopover at a military base somewhere out west on Monday or Tuesday, where this kind of prohibition was specifically referenced (it was on NPR, so naturally the fact that the rule was even mentioned in the report suggested that he was violating it)…if Dick Cheney appearing a military pep-rally during election season is somehow suspect, shouldn’t John Kerry’s visiting a NASA facility for a “town hall meeting” (by definition — and execution — a political event) be equally or even more suspect?
Via Space News Briefs:
U.S. Air Force Space Command intends to award a sole-source contract to Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) for an unspecified number of launches over a five-year period.
The so-called indefinite delivery-indefinite quantity contract has no guaranteed cash value for SpaceX, but the firm’s president, Elon Musk, said it could lead to at least one and possibly several Air Force launches. Air Force Space Command said a sole-source award is justified because SpaceX is the only U.S. company in a position to provide launch services for $5 million to $10 million in the year ahead. SpaceX’s Falcon 1 rocket — being offered at $6 million a launch — is slated to debut this autumn carrying an experimental satellite for the Pentagon.
Earlier this year, SpaceX protested a sole-source contract award by NASA to Kistler Aerospace for data from Kistler’s planned K-1 rocket. NASA ultimately withdrew the award.
Drudge reproduces a Fox News transcript in which Kerry campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill circumlocuitously claims NASA intentionally leaked the Bunny Suit pictures of John Kerry’s
visit to KSC:
CAHILL: …senator carr [sic] took a tour of a bio facility at nasa. it was just the two of them, and the nasa staff, and all of a sudden this is a leaked photo.
HUME: it was leaked?
CAHILL: yes.
HUME: it was made by nasa, right?
CAHILL: yes, it was.
HUME: so the campaign had no idea there would be any photographs.
CAHILL: none.
HUME: when it was agreed he would put on his th costume.
CAHILL: there was no press there. there was — nothing. all of the sudden these photographs are out.
And I bet the Senator was shocked, shocked to discover that someone had taken a picture of him…or perhaps he just posed for the pictures before he didn’t pose for them.
I think the pictures are amusing, but hardly a “Beetle Dukakis”-level embarrassment. I find it irritating, however, that a Presidential candidate would willingly pose for several pictures during a campaign stop and then be surprised and angry when those pictures later end up in public. What was/is the Kerry campaign thinking?
And is it me, or is it just a little bit paranoid to jump so swiftly to the conclusion that the “leak” of these “surprise” photos (for which he posed) is a “dirty trick”? It says a lot about the Kerry campaign that they would choose to make wild accusations like this rather than simply dismiss it with a shrug and “So what’s the big deal?” type of comment…responding this way only makes a distracting issue out of something quite trivial. On the other hand, that may indeed be the point.
SpaceDev, makers of the hybrid engines used on SpaceShipOne, has been nominated for a 2004 World Technology Award.
Compared to the major missions to Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn in recent years, the Messenger mission has almost gone unnoticed.
The orbiter — the first for Mercury — is set for launch next week, with arrival in 2011.
Kistler Aerospace is getting a brief reprieve from investors. Things are looking even less good for the company after a potentially lucrative NASA contract for flight data was withdrawn earlier this month.
Jeff Foust at The Space Review wonders whether the vision is losing focus:
If NASA is truly misinterpreting the intentions of the President — and one must keep in mind that these comments were made at a a conference of Moon, not Mars, advocates — the question is why? Is this part of the bureaucratic inertia linked with the difficulty in changing the course of a large agency in a short period of time? Or, is there a deliberate effort by people within NASA, either its top leadership or mid-level managers, to reshape the vision into something they find more palatable?
Spudis thinks that NASA officials are deliberately misrepresenting the vision. “My point is not that they misunderstand it, but that they are misrepresenting it,” he said. “This is all done deliberately, and the agenda is to kill this, or to morph it into something that it was never intended to be.”
Unfortunately, after raising the possibility that some within NASA are trying to derail the VSE or change it into something else, Foust doesn’t address in depth why they are doing so, nor what they might hope to change it into.
Some examples of how NASA’s top leadership and/or mid-level managers are working against the VSE would no doubt make for an interesting “Part II” companion article.
In light of the big scandal last year over Boeing’s use of ill-gotten proprietary information on the EELV program, it’s hard to believe this kind of thing actually goes on.
I wouldn’t be surprised if job interviews occasionaly result in inadvertent disclosures of proprietary information, but that is a far cry from the sort of systematic, directed questioning described in the article, specifically intended to extract such information under false pretenses.
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