Space Development Steering Committee

The Space Development Steering Committee (SDSC), founded in 2006, is a committee dedicated to the development of the space frontier. Members include the second astronaut on the moon, Buzz Aldrin, the sixth astronaut on the moon, Edgar Mitchell, the Chief of the Future Science and Technology Exploration Branch of the US Air Force, Peter Garretson, the National Science Foundation Program Director for Control, Networks & Computational Intelligence, Paul Werbos, the Chief Scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center, Dennis Bushnell, NASA Senior Aerospace Engineer and Head of Risk Assessment and Management at Goddard Space Flight Center, Feng Hsu, Boeing Phantom Works' Ed McCullough, Air Force Research Laboratory veteran James Michael Snead, and the world’s leading expert on space solar power, 25-year NASA veteran John Mankins. The SDSC also includes the heads of the National Space Society, the Space Frontier Foundation, and the Mars Society.
The founder of the SDSC is mass behavior specialist Howard Bloom, a former visiting scholar at NYU’s Graduate Psychology Department, a former Core Faculty Member at the Graduate Institute, and the author of six books.
The SDSC is an organization member of the Alliance for Space Development. References to the SDSC have appeared in publications such as Scientific American and in books.
Projects
The SDSC has five active projects as of April 2008—including two TV series in development and a global space event to be held in India. The Committee is small, imaginative, and informal. The committee holds a weekly teleconference throughout the year.
The primary activity of the committee currently is to produce press releases as needed. These press releases are intended to inform people about important happenings regarding space development and to have a positive influence on space policy. The press releases may be found on the Space Development Steering Committee's official website.
Criticism
In some of the press releases the SDSC has taken a strong stand against two major NASA programs, namely the Space Launch System and the Orion spacecraft. These programs are government programs utilizing cost-plus contracts. Instead, the SDSC advocates competitions to develop equivalent capability through public-private partnerships utilizing Space Act Agreements and fixed-price contracts, as was done with the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program.
NASA officials and others, however, maintain that cancelling the SLS and Orion would be wasteful of the large amount of money already spent on these programs and would set our beyond earth orbit human spaceflight endeavors back by years.

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