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The national space policy, one year later

The Space Review
by Jeff Foust
Monday, June 27, 2011

The space community often treats the release of new policies as major milestones,
the end of a long process largely conducted behind closed doors. A prime example was the release of the Obama Administration's national space policy, one year ago this week. Immediately after its release, industry, media, and other observers closely
examined both the language and tone of the policy, looking for what had changed and
what had remained the same, congratulating the administration for its insights or
lamenting the policy's oversights (see "A change in tone in national space policy",
The Space Review, July 6, 2010).

However, the release of a policy, while the end of one, largely private process, is
more importantly the beginning of a much more public process: its implementation.
Like the reports of countless blue-ribbon committees over the years that provided
recommendations on the future of the nation's space efforts, only to collect dust on
bookshelves, policy documents run the risk of being little more than words on paper
unless those words are backed by government actions. A year after the release of its
overarching national space policy, what has the administration done to carry out
this policy?

A report card on implementing the policy
A panel of experts from inside and outside government debated that question at a
forum in Washington earlier this month held by the Secure World Foundation. Their
assessment, not surprisingly, is that the administration's implementation of the
policy is very much a work in progress, with clear efforts underway in some areas
but lacking in others.

Marquez said the efforts of the administration, in concert with industry and foreign
governments, to "fight off" LightSquared were an "A-plus moment for the
implementation of the president's space policy".  "Implementing the policy is far more difficult" than writing it, said Peter Marquez, who in his previous position as director of space policy for the National Security Council led the development of the national space policy. A new policy often comes in conflict with existing programs, a situation he analogized with a person who says he'll start a diet tomorrow, only to have that plan run afoul of a business lunch or other exigency. "The president knows that full well when he signs on to the document: that that is my desire, but that sometimes desires don't match up with reality."

Marquez, who left the government last fall to become a vice president at Orbital
Sciences Corporation, offered his assessment of how the administration was
addressing various elements of the policy. He said the administration is making
progress in areas like assured access to space, with work starting on a revamp of
the national space transportation policy that dates back to 2004. The government is
also taking steps to address ongoing problems with space procurement, examining
alternative approaches ranging from block buys of systems to hosting government
payloads on commercial satellites. "DOD is, by and large, the most prolific procurer
of capabilities, and DOD is aware that they have a problem, which I think is a key
first step," he said.

He also singled out the administration's policy on positioning, navigation, and
timing (PNT), citing a specific issue he said has become "one of the greatest time
sucks" in recent months. That issue, which has gained broader attention only within
the last few weeks, involves plans by one company, LightSquared, to deploy a
wireless broadband system using a combination of terrestrial and satellite
infrastructure. Other companies warned that LightSquared's system could interfere
with GPS receivers, effectively jamming them, a conclusion backed by test results
released in recent weeks.

"The recent activity with LightSquared has taken the majority of everybody's time
who works space issues, whether they're at State, whether they're at DOD, or whether
they're at the White House," Marquez said. He said the efforts of the
administration, in concert with industry and foreign governments, to "fight off"
LightSquared were an "A-plus moment for the implementation of the president's space
policy", whose provisions include a call to "invest in domestic capabilities and
support international activities to detect, mitigate, and increase resiliency to
harmful interference to GPS."

He added that among the recent recommendations regarding LightSquared by the
National Space-Based PNT Advisory Board-on which he serves-was that the company's
spectrum allocation be moved away from any global navigation system, not just GPS.
"It was an awareness by the US's advisory board that the foreign PNT systems were
just as valuable as US domestic PNT systems, again, reflecting back to what was in
the president's policy," he said.

In other areas of the policy, though, the administration has made little progress to
date. The government "has not done a very good job at the SSA [space situational
awareness] portions and orbital debris directives that are in the national space
policy," Marquez said. While SSA is critical to safe and responsible space
operations-one of the central tenets of the overall policy-it's not adequately
funded, he said. Export control reform is another area that has seen little
progress, given disagreements between the White House and Congress. "I don't really
know if there's going to be any move forward on export control," he said.

"I think we're doing a good job with implementing the policy," Marquez said. "I
think we're doing the right things and it's moving in the right direction."
Marquez also noted some mixed messages about another aspect of the policy, involving "mission assurance" of space capabilities. While key military officials have
expressed their support for this, he said, they may not be interpreting that concept
the same way as originally intended. "When the term 'mission assurance' was put into
the policy, my intent was not to mean assuring the satellite's function," he said.
"That was the last thing in my mind. What was really meant there was to assure the
satellite's reason for being." In other words, if that space-based system failed,
there was some backup system, be it in space or on the ground, to carry out that
role. "So far we've been wrapped around the axle of how to gold-plate a satellite so
that it functions in all conditions, and that was the wrong approach."

While NASA policy, specifically its human spaceflight plans, predated the overall
national space policy by several months, Marquez addressed its implementation as
well. "The NASA rollout was about as bad as it possibly gets," he said of the
decision to unveil those plans as part of the agency's budget request in February
2010. "It's still very vague as to what the actual direction is," he said, an issue
which he says is not the fault of NASA but instead the White House. "I just don't
think the White House gave appropriate leadership for an agency that was crying for
it."

Overall, though, Marquez is satisfied with the pace of implementation of the policy.
"I think we're doing a good job with implementing the policy," he said. "I think
we're doing the right things and it's moving in the right direction."

International reaction and codes of conduct
One major difference widely cited between the current administration's space policy
and the one released by the George W. Bush Administration in 2006 has been its tone.
The Obama Administration's policy has been more open to international cooperation on various issues, although it retains language from previous policies that puts strict
guidance on when the US should sign onto space arms control measures.

Previous US views on space issues, including space arms control, "was not received
well by the international community," said Ben Baseley-Walker, advisor on security
policy and international law for the Secure World Foundation. "It was seen as
inconsistent, it was seen as antagonistic, and it was seen as isolationist." That
view can't be immediately changed, he said, but the new space policy takes steps in
that direction. "What the national space policy has done is to start to rebuild
trust, start to rebuild consistency, and start to rebuild the reliability of the US
as an internationally-engaged partner."

Just how willing the US is to be a better international partner will depend on not
just the words in the policy, but other forces, notably funding, that force the US
to engage more with other nations. "The US has not been put into a situation
financially, or on specific limitations on the goals it wants to achieve, to have to
deal with international partners," he said. That could change down the road, he
noted, such as when-at some time after 2020-the International Space Station is
retired, at which time it's possible the only space station in orbit is Chinese.

More recently, the national space policy has been wrapped up in debates about a
proposed "Code of Conduct" for outer space activities promulgated by the European
Union (see "Debating a code of conduct for space", The Space Review, March 7, 2011). The document seeks to provide a set of best practices dealing with space activities, including avoiding the creation of orbital debris and minimizing the risk of
collisions.

"What the national space policy has done is to start to rebuild trust, start to
rebuild consistency, and start to rebuild the reliability of the US as an
internationally-engaged partner," said Baseley-Walker.  Many of the elements of the EU Code are closely aligned with themes of the new US national space policy, which puts a new emphasis on space sustainability and ensuring access to space for all who wish to use it peacefully. This has raised speculation that the US might soon sign on to the EU Code: although so far there has been no formal move by the US to do so, there have been discussions between American and European officials about aspects of the proposed code of conduct.

Baseley-Walker noted that proposals like the EU Code can be "an asset to national
security in the long-term", and that the national space policy does endorse the use
of such "transparency and confidence-building measures" to, in its words, "encourage
responsible actions in, and the peaceful use of, space." However, he said the US
should proceed with caution when it comes to the EU Code in order to encourage wider adoption of the code, or something like it, by other nations. "Being very careful
with our diplomatic strategy and working out our timing and how best we can build
the foundations for long-term success for this issue" is preferable than expending
political capital on signing onto this particular document, he said.

Andrew Palowitch, the director of the Space Protection Program, a joint effort of
the US Air Force and the National Reconnaissance Office, said his personal view was
that any such code of conduct needs to be a truly international document, not an EU
one, with involvement from Russia, China, and "space wannabe" nations. Such an
approach makes any code more difficult to do, "but harder is not necessarily
'wronger'; you want to do this because it's the right thing to do."

Marquez said that while the national space policy is aligned to some degree to the
EU Code, that doesn't mean that the US should sign onto it. "You can say that the
intent of the EU code of conduct is in line with the US national space policy, and
that I would wholeheartedly agree with," he said. But interpretation of that
language can differ even within the US, let alone with an international audience,
raising the risk of "the law of unintended consequences."

"I don't think the US signing up to an EU code of conduct shows a form a
leadership," he said. "We're already doing these things, we've signed up to doing
them on our own. Leadership is gained through experience and knowledge, not through following."

How much does the new policy matter?
While panelists discussed details about implementation, and its affect on
initiatives like the EU Code of Conduct, they also weighed in on a bigger question:
just how influential has the new policy been? Some questioned how big of an impact
it's had, at least so far.

"Everything that happened in this last year, and everything that's going to happen
in the next year, is completely independent of that national space policy," said
Palowitch. His rationale is that it takes years to plan and carry out major space
programs, and thus a new policy has little effect on programs already in some phase
of development and operations. "Changes do not happen rapidly in space."

Government activities in the last year, from the surge in national security
satellite launches to the impending retirement of the Space Shuttle, had their roots
in decisions made long before the policy's release, he noted, while commercial
activities are largely independent of national space policy and are based on
economic rationales. Even discussion about the EU Code, he argued, had their basis
outside of the policy.

"Everything that happened in this last year, and everything that's going to happen
in the next year, is completely independent of that national space policy," said
Palowitch. "Changes do not happen rapidly in space." Palowitch also offered a corollary to his argument about the independence of actions from the national space policy: "our actions, our reactions, and our inaction has been the actual policy that we have shown for the past year and will do for the next year." That's particularly true regarding international perceptions of US policy, he said. "What we did action-wise over the year was 1,000 times more important than what we actually wrote down on a piece of paper."

However, despite questioning its near-term impact, Palowitch called the new national
space policy "fantastic" and expects to see results from it in the next 18 to 24
months. He said a number of government agencies are moving forward with implementing aspects of the policy, but those efforts take time. "We're not going to see those in the next 12 months," he said, citing the constraints of coordinating changes among government agencies.

Marquez disagreed with the claim that the policy hasn't changed anything in the last
year. "It is somewhat false if you look at political initiatives and international
relations initiatives," he said. "What we've been doing on the international front
has dramatically changed in the past year."

It's clear that the space policy's impact, whatever it turns out to be, will be
measured over the long haul and not based on what's been accomplished in its first
12 months. The policy, said Baseley-Walker, has created "intellectual foundations"
that agencies within the government are still grappling with. "Which is," he added,
"what the space policy should do: it should lay down long-term direction for
building sound, extensive national and international policy."