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Feature Illustration by Matthew Billington
TThe three men traveled 1400 miles from Houston to Washington on a mission, and they are not alone. Nearly 100 citizens have come down to the capital to advocate for the country's continued investment in its space program, as they do for three days each year. But today, the agenda for these three is a little different. They do not only defend the American space program, they advocate The role of Houston in the US space program. And they agreed to let Houstonia Mark with them through Washington's corridors of power.
These absolutely tireless men – who will travel six miles on this rainy day in May – are Bob Mitchell, chairman of the Bay Economic Houston Partnership, Dave Martin, a Houston city council member, and Dennis Paul, the Texas representative. All are Republicans accused in one way or another of protecting the Johnson Space Center, and all are here on behalf of Citizens for Space Exploration, a Houston-based multi-state non-profit organization.
Maybe they're preaching a bit to the choir. Each of the eight meetings today will be with Texas politicians. Nevertheless, they might need a little reminder of the importance of the Johnson Space Center for Space City.
Usually these meetings are deliberately vague. Nobody with Citizens for Space Exploration is supposed to lobby to get support from any of the 10 centers that make up the Civil Space Program. But it's out the window as they file in the office of US Representative Brian Babin, who is decorated with a framed poster wall of NASA.
"What can I do for you, Bob?" Babin asks, turning to the group, who is sitting around a long conference table.
Without even looking at the papers in front of him, Mitchell starts. "Well, it's like that," he says. "We do not fly the space shuttle.We use only mission control for the International Space Station.Other side has not been used for years.The Johnson Space Center is the homeland of spaceflight inhabited, but we do not get what we should get, we feel we are being ousted. "
The Johnson Space Center, located in the southeast corner of Houston, is located in Babin District and, as Chair of the Subcommittee on Space, Technology and Science, it has tremendously of success. The position "gives him the ability to get things moving," Mitchell explains later.
What's frustrating is that while the JSC is struggling, things seem to be going well for NASA as a whole. The agency finally has a new leader. In April, former US Representative Jim Bridenstine, a Republican from Oklahoma, was confirmed as a director, replacing Charles Bolden more than a year after the retirement of the former astronaut. Engineers are making progress building the Orion Space Launch System capsule and rocket for the March jump. There was even a slight increase in funding.
Each new White House administration has the power to dictate NASA's missions, and President Donald Trump has repeatedly stated that he wanted to see the United States return to the moon, build a lunar space station and reach Mars. Trump has proposed to increase the agency's budget for 2019 to $ 19.9 billion from $ 19.5 billion, while the Congress is looking to increase the budget even more, by noting that it's going to cost $ 19.9 billion. appropriating $ 21.5 billion.
Locally, however, there is growing concern that more centers across the country – the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and the Kennedy Space Center in Florida – are taking ahead of the Johnson Space Center.
The signs are subtle, says Mitchell. That's the fact that Houston has to share the Commercial Crew Program – a joint project of NASA, SpaceX and Boeing to build commercial spacecraft that will launch astronauts into low Earth orbit – with the Kennedy Space Center. That's the way NASA's headquarters at D.C. has issued a request for bids to set up the Orion modules – on which astronauts will train before performing the first manned space launches, planned for the 2020s – without placing the project at JSC, instead of leaving its site open . "And everyone knows that when there is anything to do with astronauts or astronaut training, it's supposed to be there in Houston," Mitchell told Babin.
"We need to make sure the Johnson Space Center is on the radar screen, and that there's a serious conversation about what they're historically in charge of manned spaceflight," adds Martin, Mitchell's winger, whose district includes JSC.
For more than 50 years, the Johnson Space Center has housed the Mercury Seven – the first seven astronauts to travel in space, as part of the Mercury Project – with a huge barbecue and a special performance by famed stripper Sally Rand to Sam Houston Coliseum. But there are newcomers who want what Houston has, who have worked to cut out some of the programs, funding, and jobs for centers in their own parts of the country.
As his assistants take notes, Babin nods and promises to keep an eye on things. But he reminds Mitchell, Martin and Paul that he can not focus solely on Houston's interests. "I sympathize with the Johnson Space Center, but as chair of the space subcommittee, I have to work on behalf of the entire space program," he says. "I'll do my best, though."
Mitchell closes his gray folder, bends over the table to grab Babin's hand, and thanks him for the moment. Given the distance they traveled and the months of planning that preceded these meetings on Capitol Hill, the conversation is short and almost flippant.
In a few seconds, the trio moves back into the marble rooms, heading for their next appointment. "I think it's gone well," Paul says, blowing a bit to keep up with Martin's pace as they emerge on the steps of the Rayburn House of Representatives' State House. -United. "Wait, where's Bob?
He is already standing on the sidewalk, holding an open taxi door and motioning for the group to hurry up.
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Houston Mission Control (photographed during Apollo 13 emergency) was once the heart of the US space program.
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TThe taxi splashes puddles of water while the rain falls. "You know, the Johnson Space Center would never have happened if LBJ had not worked there," says Paul at the back of the cab. Paul is a training engineer, the only one in the Texas Legislature since being elected in 2015 – the JSC is also in his district – and a history buff to boot. He devoured books about Lyndon Johnson, the space program, and how Houston had a part of the action. It's a story that the three defenders know by heart.
"It certainly helped Sam Rayburn, the Speaker of the House, and Albert Thomas to sit on the credits," said Martin.
"Lord, however, there was nothing like LBJ to get things done." "He wanted something, he was just pushing and pushing until he got there. Get it, "said Mitchell laughing and shaking his head.
When Mitchell started making these trips 18 years ago, he did not know anything about it. In fact, he knew almost nothing about space exploration. As a child growing up outside of Houston, he was amazed, along with the rest of the world, for Neil Armstrong to take those first steps on the moon, but he did not never really thought about how it all went. He had never considered the years of research and training, not to mention the funding and politics, that had allowed these things to happen, putting Houston at the center of the show.
But when he grew up, Mitchell spent years working at Grumman Aerospace, a NASA contractor at the time of Apollo, before working for the Bay Economic Houston Partnership and figuring out what was going on at the JSC. He learned quickly, and soon everyone answered him when there was a question about the space program.
Mitchell has always had a supernatural ability to read people, which makes him particularly good at what he does. And even after nearly 20 years of traveling to Washington, he is so completely immersed in his work – and his goal of pushing for Congressional support for the JSC – that he has not seen a part of it yet. from DC which is not located between the airport, its hotel and Capitol Hill.
"The JSC is the key to our region," Mitchell said. "So many jobs are related to the fact that the center is present and that it is very present in the space program.It is of vital importance that the JSC maintains its core competence, that It is the homeland of manned spaceflight, we want to be part of the decisions, we want to make sure that we are relevant, and we are part of the decision-making process in Washington, DC And that's it. why we do it. "
The purpose of NASA is to send people into space and explore it. But as Mitchell well knows, its existence is decidedly down-to-earth, tied to both the White House and Congress since President Dwight Eisenhower responded to the launch of the Soviet Union. Sputnik by creating the agency in 1958.
Other experts are in agreement. "NASA is political, and it has always been, as a national policy instrument, a regional policy instrument, and very much interested in the members of Congress who have constitutive interests in what NASA does," John Logsdon, an historian of space and founder of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, says. "The very foundation of NASA is political, it is not an abstract research organization, and the decisions it makes are always influenced by politics."
This includes why the Johnson Space Center, originally known as the Manned Spacecraft Center, was put in Houston in the first place. The year Kennedy proposed to travel to the moon in 1961, it turned out that US Senator Albert Thomas, a Democrat and protected by Johnson, was the chairman of the Senate Appropriation Committee. And he made it clear to the administration that if they wanted funding for their space program, Houston would need to get out of it. "The road to the moon passes through Houston," Thomas said at the time.
The reason he wanted the center? Because builder George R. Brown, as well as representatives of Humble Oil (now ExxonMobil), Rice University and a handful of real estate developers, have seen the opportunity to transform farmland and farmland 20 miles southeast of the city. real estate, with the space program at the center of development. Humble Oil donated the land to Rice, and the university authorities sold it to the US government for $ 20, according to the act.
Even after the passage of Hurricane Carla on the Texas coast – deposit of a shrimp boat on the exact site where the main building would be built, in the middle of about 1,600 acres of swamps – the plans have been implemented.
The populated space flight center put Houston on the map as more than a rough-tumble oil city. Hundreds of aerospace scientists, engineers and experts have flocked to Bayou City to help train astronauts, launch them into space and place them on the moon. The population of the Clear Lake area has skyrocketed, with land around the center having more than tripled in less than a decade.
Houston capitalized on its new position. In 1965, the city built the Astrodome, and when our baseball team started playing there, we renamed them the Astros. In 1967, Houston itself adopted the official nickname Space City, and we christened our Rockets basketball team a few years later. It has been woven into our identity, impossible to ignore.
For decades later, the leadership of the JSC – renamed for Johnson a few months after his death, in 1973 – kept the center in the spotlight. "When I arrived at the Johnson Space Center, we had leadership that was really able to have a vision of what we wanted to do and what we wanted to do." said George Abbey, the director of the center from 1996 to 2001. "And the JSC was at the center of that, the Johnson Space Center was really the leader in manned spaceflight."
The Texas Congress delegation contributed to these efforts. For years, Houston has had strong funders in Congress to ensure the JSC maintains its role. Even after Apollo Over the past few days, there has never been any question of whether the JSC would oversee the Skylab space station or the space shuttle manned space flight program, or whether the JSC would lead the International Space Station after its launch. 1998.
In 1993, the US representative Jack Brooks, the Beaumont cigar democrat who had represented his district for decades and was one of the most prominent members of Congress, swept to stop killing the ISS before his construction, saving it by a single vote. Incidentally, this incident inspired the Bay Economic Houston Partnership to help launch Citizens for Space Exploration.
"It would have been devastating for Johnson to lose this program and Jack knew it, because he wanted to know what was going on, he knew about it, and he saved it and told us saved, "says Abbey.
But Brooks was removed from office a year later – his Republican-majority district was furious with his support for a gun settlement – and replaced by Steve Stockman, who was so low on the GOP totem, he did not want to see it. has never gained much power during his time in Congress. (He has since been convicted of 23 counts of federal fraud.)
No one has ever risen to replace Brooks. Kay Bailey Hutchison became a dedicated JSC lawyer when she was elected to the US Senate, but the Dallas Republican could not block the moves to cancel the space shuttle program (2004), abandon the program of Lunar exploration known as Constellation (2010) reduce funding for JSC (2010).
Meanwhile, the JSC's leadership after Abbey was less inclined to push back the cuts and cancellations of projects. "I was brought up under the direction of Chris Kraft and other leaders who, if they thought something was not on the right track, they would say it," Abbey explains. . "They do not have that kind of leadership right now, they do what the headquarters tells them to do, and they think something is wrong with what they've been told to do, they remain silent. "
NASA spokesman Kelly Humphries disagrees with the point of view that the center is still threatened, noting that the center still houses the control of the mission, oversees the ISS and will play an important role in the Orion Spaceship that will help send humans further into space than we have ever dared – all the evidence that everything is fine. "The Johnson Space Center is an essential part of human space activities and NASA as a whole," he says, "as it has always been."
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In 1965, the Center for Manned Spacecraft was in full swing.
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SMartin undoes his tie and shakes his head at the cafeteria table of the Longworth Building in the United States House of Representatives. "You know, sometimes people in Houston do not even realize we still have the Johnson Space Center, they think the Houston Space Center is just a museum!"
Paul and Mitchell sighed, laughing a little at the thought.
Only 20 years ago, Johnson was the center of manned spaceflight in America, in charge not only of the ISS but of the shuttle program, and the oversight of all human space mission projects, plus a dozen small programs key to send astronauts into space. But things have a way of changing when you are subject to the vagaries of successive administrations of the White House, as well as the different levels of congressional support.
Under President John F. Kennedy, NASA went to the moon. Under President Barack Obama, the plan to return to the Moon-Constellation-has been scuttled. The idea was that Constellation replaces the Space Shuttle program, before it comes to an end, leaving the JSC without a major space flight program to anchor it.
All of this hit the JSC hard. In 2015, the center's funding was reduced by $ 1.5 billion, from more than 18,000 federal employees and contractors in 2011 to just over 10,000 employees in 2016, according to the Bay Area Houston Economic Development of the JSC's 2016 Economic Impact Statement, which contains the most recent data available.
Adding a staggering insult to the injury, Space City did not even have a real shuttle to display after the shuttle's last flight, in 2011. Instead, a replica was towed to the Gulf Coast from Florida and filed in front of the Houston Space Center. The real ones went to Florida, California, Virginia and New York.
Meanwhile, with the Constellation program and the Space Shuttle program, the United States no longer has any way to send our astronauts to ISS from our own territory. "You know, there were three other flights in the shuttle program," says Mitchell. "We had the engines ready, but they killed it, because the shuttle was" too expensive to fly. "But that would have been cheaper than what we paid the Russians for one seat, and that would have been in Houston." NASA now pays about $ 80 million per seat to transport astronauts over 240 miles to 39, ISS.
Michael Lembeck, NASA entrepreneur, former special assistant for independent evaluation of programs at NASA headquarters, explains that for years he has been talking on billboards and writing editorials, trying to alert the Delegation. of the Texas Congress and the community about the threat to the JSC. Nothing worked.
"A vote for NASA is not necessarily a vote for the Johnson Space Center," he says. "You need to take the time to understand how the budget is established, how these programs are designed and how they are distributed in the centers. I know that is what Senator Shelby of Alabama is doing, but I do not know how often our members of Congress look at the situation as a whole.
The government is currently planning to stop funding the ISS after 2024. According to the JSC website, if and when that happens, Johnson will work to develop OrionLead the commercial crew program with the Kennedy Space Center and "lay the foundation for our journey to Mars".
Almost everyone on the Capitol keeps the tone of the state of things, while noting its concern about the future of the JSC mission and the fact that its budget and its number of employees have not recovered yet.
AIf the team of three men heads to their next meeting, this one in the majestic office of US Senator Ted Cruz, they move like a well-oiled machine. Inside, an assistant in a well-cut suit scribbles notes while Mitchell exposes her concerns.
Martin, who took office in 2012, while the JSC had finished losing more than 7,000 jobs, mentions the need to increase funding for the ISS, observing that help 39; writing. During a hearing, the next day, Cruz, chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Science, Space and Competitiveness, will lobby to fund the ISS at least until the next day. 2028.
The trio goes to the office of US Representative John Culberson. Paul and Martin regularly lament their fellow legislators or shake hands with potential campaigners. Mitchell, however, never breaks his pace.
In Culberson's office, Martin takes the framed picture of Europa, one of Jupiter's icy moons, hanging on his desk. Culberson – a Republican Tea Party that will face Democrat Lizzie Pannill Fletcher in a hotly contested race for his seat in November – is a passionate defender of space exploration, particularly focused on getting to that point. distant moon. As he is currently attending meetings, the group sits down with another assistant, who notes that Culberson used his chairmanship of the subcommittee on trade, justice and science in the House to request more funding. for NASA.
Mitchell acknowledges it, but hints, with delicacy, that just getting funding for the agency to protect Houston's interest in the space program.
Martin goes through the jokes, leaning forward in his chair and revealing his frustration with the momentum that the Kennedy Space Center and the Marshall Space Flight Center are winning at the expense of the JSC. "Let's put our chips on the table." How many electoral votes did Texas bring to President Trump? How much did he receive from Alabama and Florida? It's all politics. have already lost so much, and we will continue to lose unless we fight for what belongs to us. "
The helper nods and writes a note. Martin inspires and puts a firm, polite smile on his face.
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Orion Training modules have already been built in other facilities in the country.
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OOf course, it is possible that there is nothing to do, that it is already too late. "It's a recurring fear that they have in Houston, one they've had for years," says Logsdon. "It's hard because they're right, but it's already happened." Houston is not the home of human spaceflight now. "Huntsville, Ala., Is building rockets, and the Kennedy Space Center in Florida launches them.But it has become a tradition that Houston trains astronauts and directs mission control, it's almost untouchable. "
No person or entity is to blame. Instead, as Lembeck explains, there has been a combination of factors. "What's missing is the direction," he says. "Every time Texas members ask Johnson's management how things are going, they are told that everything is fine and that they believe in it." There is not a prime contractor in Houston. to inform lawmakers of this program or program must stay here in Houston.Nobody looks enough at how this breaks down and what these decisions mean for the JSC. "
Abbey is in agreement. "Johnson was the heart of it all, but the leadership is not as visionary as in the past.The guys who started building this place thought that they were building something that would stand up to it." time – tested, and they defended the fact that the JSC would remain crucial for what was happening, but it 's different now.The center of gravity has shifted into the space program.No. is more in the middle of that. "
Logsdon also argues that the JSC, which has been slow to accept the change, shares some of the responsibility. "The JSC was a closed culture, impervious to the thought that everyone, except them, knew something about manned human flights when I examined them as part of the Columbia shuttle investigation 15 years ago [after it destructed, killing all seven astronauts on board]and I have not seen this change since.
While the Kennedy Space Center has embraced the current climate of commercialization, becoming a national spaceport and maintaining links with companies like SpaceX's Elon Musk and Blue Origin by Jeff Bezos, the JSC has not do the same, which could hurt run.
"There is an underlying and fundamental question: what is the future of government-funded spaceflight after the ISS?" Logsdon application. "Are we on a sustainable path to send humans to the moon and then march? If we get there, I think there will be an ongoing role for government-sponsored spaceflight and for the Johnson Space Center." But it's not inconceivable that the private sector can fully handle manned spaceflight in the coming years, and if that happens, well, the manned space flight program might not stay in Houston . "
From where conversations like those taking place this rainy day of May.
Inside the office of the US Representative, Gene Green, Mitchell visibly relaxes on a brown leather sofa and enjoys being on his feet as the end of the day approaches. . Ellen Ochoa, the director of the JSC since 2012, will retire tomorrow, and Mitchell returns home in the morning to attend his retirement party. There he will discuss with Mark Geyer, the longtime Ochoa MP, who has already been hired to replace her.
Green, a Democrat who has served for decades, is retiring at the end of his tenure. Men have known each other for years. Mitchell does not need to pass through the spiel, as Green surely knows it by heart. "I'm not going to ask you anything," Mitchell said, "because you've always been there for us."
"Johnson is too important not to be," Green said, shaking his head. "We have lost many programs that should have been sent to the JSC in recent years."
"Well, you can not control the headquarters," Mitchell replies.
"You can control the money that controls the headquarters, though," Green replies, raising his eyebrows. Everyone agrees. The conversation will only take you so far.
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