NASA Partners Await Policy Shakeout

Aviation Week: NASA Partners Await Policy Shakeout

By Frank Morring, Jr.


European and Japanese space agencies are awaiting further developments as the U.S. puts the finishing touches on its new policy for exploration, adopting a wait-and-see attitude until Congress funds a compromise space plan and NASA fills in the details.

Speaking at a Washington conference organized by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, representatives of the European Space Agency (ESA), Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), France’s CNES and Germany’s DLR all expressed caution in the face of continued U.S. uncertainty.

“The NASA authorization bill does not provide information on which way we go,” says Andreas Diekmann, head of the ESA Washington office. Diekmann referred to the three-year NASA reauthorization bill President Barack Obama signed Oct. 11, which won’t be funded by an appropriations measure until a “lame-duck” session of Congress after the mid-term elections Nov. 2.

Fresh from a two-day retreat with NASA’s senior managers, Administrator Charles Bolden conceded in a statement distributed to agency employees that “there are still many details that the appropriations process will provide” about the future U.S. space program.

But he says he and his colleagues — including directors of the agency’s field centers — agreed on a broad policy based on the “clear direction” in the authorization language.

The international partner representatives agreed that the call for a heavy-lift launch vehicle is clear, and said they would accept flights for their astronauts in the commercial crew vehicles Bolden said NASA will push under the new law, provided they are safe. If commercial vehicles can close the gap in U.S. access to space after the space shuttle fleet is retired next year, so much the better, Diekmann says.

They also are satisfied with the authorization act’s call for international cooperation on exploration beyond low Earth orbit, and in general say the International Space Station can provide a model for that future cooperation. But beyond that, the message is too blurry for them to make specific recommendations to their agencies and the governments that fund them.

Lunar Plans

Norimitsu Kamimori, director of JAXA’s Washington office, says the Japanese government already has lowered the priority of a planned second lunar orbiter to follow Selene. But it also is going slowly on plans to develop a follow-on to the Hayabusa asteroid sample-return mission, pending greater clarity from the U.S. government.

Juergen Drescher, head of the DLR office in Washington and a surgeon with human spaceflight experience going back to the Shuttle-Mir program of the 1990s, cautions that there is a need for care in opening the ISS to more users. The new NASA plan calls for extending station funding until 2020, and while he urges all of the station partners to move quickly to use the orbiting facility over the next nine years, Drescher says Russia’s Mir station suffered logistics problems and even a potentially disastrous fire because of poor planning.

In the long term, there needs to be a clear understanding of how the international partners can contribute to deep-space exploration. Emmanuel di Lipkowski, space attache and CNES representative at the French Embassy in Washington, says that while “none of us would question the need [for] American leadership in space,” so far it is difficult to see just what that leadership wants its partners to do. “It’s not very clear for us what the message is in this new space policy, and we will have to clarify it.”