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Former Rep. John Culberson to join Clark Hill lobbying firm
By JACQUELINE FELDSCHER
— Former Rep. John Culberson starts this week at Clark Hill lobbying firm.
— Rep. Rick Larsen will visit the Federal Aviation Administration's technical center this week to see if they need more manpower or better technology to handle the expected boom in space launches.
— Rocket Lab delays launch Sunday night due to problems with a video transmitter..
WELCOME TO POLITICO SPACE, our must-read briefing on the policies and personalities shaping the new space age in Washington and beyond — publishing each Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Email us at [email protected], [email protected] or [email protected] with tips, pitches and feedback, and find us on Twitter at @jacqklimas, @bryandbender and @dave_brown24. And don't forget to check out POLITICO's astropolitics page here for articles, Q&As, opinion and more.
TONIGHT: Panel event on space diplomacy. The Italian Embassy is hosting an event tonight as part of its Digital Diplomacy series on how technology has changed the way people talk and think about space. Officials from the National Air and Space Museum, NASA, Virgin Galactic and OneWeb will sit on the panel, which will be moderated by Jacqueline Klimas. You can get more details and RSVP here.
ASTROPOLITICS
SCOOP: Former Rep. John Culberson joins Clark Hill. The former chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies joins the lobbying firm this week, where he hopes to continue fighting for the planetary science and space exploration missions he prioritized during his 18 years in Congress. "I knew I wanted to continue my work as an advocate for NASA to protect the good work I've already done," Culberson, who lost his re-election bid in November, told POLITICO.
Culberson said his top priorities include crewed government and commercial spaceflight missions, the Space Launch System deep-space rocket, and the interplanetary and astrophysics missions recommended in the decadal survey. On Capitol Hill, Culberson supported NASA's missions to explore Jupiter's moon Europa.
The Texas Republican will split his time between the firm's offices in Washington, D.C., and Houston, Texas. He'll be unable to lobby in the House until next year following the mandatory "cooling off" period, but can still work with other parts of the government and do strategic consulting and advising.
SPACE Q&A
IS THE FAA READY FOR MORE LAUNCHES? That's the question Rep. Rick Larsen (D-Wash.) is asking this week when he visits the FAA's William J. Hughes Technical Center. The New Jersey facility is where researchers work on solving problems the agency faces in overseeing the nation's airspace, including technology that will help employees deconflict airplane flights and space launches.
"The FAA has permitted or licensed more than 370 launches and reentries. A quarter of those are in the last five years and there's only an upward trend on commercial launches and reentries," Larsen, a member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, told POLITICO during a recent interview in his Capitol Hill office. "So does the FAA have the capacity to manage the numbers of launches we expect to see? That's a budgetary item that will be worth looking at, whether they need more manpower or investment in technology to help them manage launch and reentries with the people they have."
Larsen also urged the U.S. space program to stop constantly responding to other nations' achievements, a change he argues could free up the American program to be more innovative and notch some firsts of its own. "I still think we look at the Chinese space threat and think in terms of defense too much and not in terms of offense," Larsen, who also co-chairs the U.S.-China Working Group, said. "We shouldn't be doing things to respond to China. We should be doing things to make China respond to us because we did it first." Read the full Q&A here.
TOMORROW: National Space Council to hold its fifth meeting. Vice President Mike Pence is expected to ask NASA to speed up its timeline for lunar missions at the council's meeting on Tuesday in Huntsville, Ala. The meeting of Cabinet officials will include an update on NASA's progress in carrying out the president's first space directive, which ordered NASA to return to the moon, said Scott Pace, the council's executive secretary. Officials will hear from two panels focused on human spaceflight, which include two former space shuttle astronauts: retired Col. Eileen Collins and Sandy Magnus.
The panel is also expected to receive an update on the effort to reform launch regulations, Pace said.
LIFTOFF POSTPONED: Rocket Lab delays DARPA satellite mission. The Huntington Beach, Calif.-based small launch delayed the scheduled launch from its New Zealand launch site on Sunday evening Eastern time because of a problem with a video transmitter. "It's not an issue for flight, but we want to understand why, so we're waiting off for the day. We'll assess and advise a new target lift-off time soon," the company wrote on Twitter. The mission was expected to carry the Radio Frequency Risk Reduction Deployment Demonstration, which will qualify a new type of membrane antenna for use in space, according to a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency release.
QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Hello from the children of planet Earth." — The English greeting included on the Golden Record, which launched in 1977 aboard Voyager 1 and 2 to send sounds of the planet into space.
— Jet Propulsion Laboratory proposes mission to Neptune's moon.
— InSight lander is using magnetism to search for water on Mars.
—NASA has a plan to fix InSight's digging tool, which got stuck last month.
— Mars 2020 helicopter could open up new kinds of exploration.
— NASA has hours of audio on SoundCloud, including Golden Record recordings.
— One of these four programs will be NASA's next flagship for astrophysics.
— First Boeing Starliner test flight delayed again until August.
— Air Force final bid request for national security launches could come this week.
— See NASA's new picture of Jupiter.
— One NASA astronaut talks about how to paint in space.
— News you can use: NASA determines optimal nap length.
TODAY: The Italian Embassy hosts an event on space diplomacy.
TOMORROW: The National Space Council meets in Alabama at noon Central Time.
TOMORROW: Acting Defense Secretary Pat Shanahan testifies on the Pentagon's fiscal 2020 budget request at the House Armed Services Committee.
TOMORROW: The head of the National Science Foundation testifies on the fiscal 2020 budget request at the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice Science and Related Agencies.
Bryan Bender @bryandbender
Dave Brown @dave_brown24
Jacqueline Feldscher @jacqklimas
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About The Author : Jacqueline Feldscher
Jacqueline Feldscher is a national security reporter at POLITICO.
Prior to joining POLITICO, she covered defense from Capitol Hill and the Pentagon for the Washington Times and the Washington Examiner, where she was part of the team that launched the Daily on Defense newsletter. She began her journalism career at Navy Times, covering the Navy and Coast Guard.
She's an alumna of Boston University and holds a masters in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
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