Plus: America needs a Space Academy that invests in people, not buildings
By Dan Robitzski
Welcome back to our weekly newsletter highlighting the opinions and perspectives of the SpaceNews community.
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NASA and Katalyst Space Technologies didn't succeed in their attempt to save the Swift Observatory. But their quickly executed plan to grapple the telescope and boost its orbit offers valuable lessons for preserving Hubble, former NASA headquarters official Brett Silcox, currently the vice president of government relations & civil space business development at Astroscale U.S., argued in a recent commentary article.
"The Swift mission demonstrates why the United States needs to move on spacecraft servicing earlier, before orbital mechanics, aging hardware or impending mission loss turn a difficult engineering challenge into an emergency," Silcox wrote.
He warned that while the "speed was impressive, ... it should not become the model for Hubble or for servicing other assets in space."
Read the full SpaceNews commentary here. |
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The White House wants to create a United States Space Academy, a NASA-run federal institution meant to educate and train up new generations of the space workforce, which is facing a squeeze.
Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and an Air Force ROTC graduate, wrote in to offer advice on how to approach and organize the academy.
He said that "United States Space Academy should be created as a national scholarship-for-service program. Students would compete for full-tuition scholarships at any accredited U.S. institution offering an approved field of study. Scholarships would be awarded by major, and the number could be adjusted each year based on projected workforce needs across NASA, the Space Force, NRO and other government space organizations. In return, graduates would commit to a period of government service."
This scholarship model, he argued, would be "faster to establish, easier to scale as workforce demands change from year to year, and able to draw from the full range of specialized programs already operating across American higher education."
See the full article here.
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