Heritage Areas: Background, Proposals, and Current Issues
This report focuses on heritage areas designated by Congress and related issues and legislation. Over more than two decades, Congress has established 40 National Heritage Areas (NHAs) to commemorate, conserve, and promote areas that include important natural, scenic, historic, cultural, and recreational resources.
National Heritage Areas: Costly Economic Development Schemes that Threaten Property Rights
The U.S. House of Representatives is considering the Celebrating America’s Heritage Act (H.R. 1483) as amended by Representative Raul Grijalva (D–AZ). The bill would expand the cost and scope of federally sanctioned and federally financed economic development entities known as National Heritage Areas (NHAs). Although there is no specific provision in federal law that defines or authorizes the existence of such entities, Congress has been authorizing their “designation” on a case-by-case basis since 1984. There are now 37 NHAs operating throughout the United States. H.R. 1483 would add an additional six NHAs to the fold, expand the boundaries of three that are now in operation, and increase by 50 percent the amount of federal funds available to NHAs by way of the National Park Service (NPS) budget. If enacted, H.R. 1483 will cost federal taxpayers an additional $135 million. However, as reported by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), NPS funding accounts for only a fraction of the total federal funding received by NHAs every year. In fact, non-NPS funds amount to nearly 70 percent of the costs associated with the NHAs. If this pattern of broad public subsidies continues, H.R. 1483 would lead to an additional $270 million in NHA spending by federal, state, local, and not-for-profit entities. The process of identifying NHAs is highly dubious. An NHA-eligible region is defined by the National Park Service as “a place designated by the U.S. Congress where natural, cultural, historic and recreational resources combine to form a cohesive, nationally-distinctive landscape...[to] tell nationally important stories about our nation.” Nearly any parcel of land or long-standing structure could be touted as an intricate part of someone’s history, thereby opening the door to all sorts of opportunities for subsidies from the state, local, and federal governments.
Thermally Induced Dynamics of Satellite Solar Panels
Thermally induced structural motions are known to affect the attitude dynamics of low Earth orbiting satellites during eclipse transitions. Motions of e exible appendages such as solar panels lead to rigid body rotations of the entire satellite because the total angular momentum of the system is conserved. These potentially large attitude disturbances may violate pointing accuracy and jitter requirements. One type of thermally induced dynamics exhibited by solar panels is thermal snap. The Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite is a prominent example of a satellite that experiences thermal snap disturbances during eclipse transitions. This paper describes recent studies of thermally induced dynamicsof solarpanels, including an analysisofsatelliteattitudedynamics resulting from thermally induced structural motions and a laboratory investigation of the thermal-structural performance of a satellite solar panel. Analytical and experimental results demonstrate thermal bending deformations with acceleration transients that have characteristic thermal snap disturbance histories in response to rapid changes in heating. The studies show that solar panel thermal snap disturbances are caused by through-the-thickness temperature differences that vary at a nonconstant rate. Finite element analysis correctly predicts the thermal snap phenomenon observed in the solar panel experiments.