NASA, smallsats, and students

The annual AIAA/USU Conference on Small Satellites is taking place this week at Utah State University. I’m not able to attend this year’s conference, but the Salt Lake City newspaper Deseret News has an article about NASA administrator Mike Griffin’s keynote address at the conference Monday afternoon. And while there were apparently some generic questions […]

New Mexico, investment firm dispute space investments

A disagreement involving risk associated with investments in two space companies has apparently caused the state of New Mexico and an investment firm to part ways, the Albuquerque Journal reported Sunday. (The site requires a subscription, although a Salon-like ad-supported day pass is available; otherwise, the text of the article is available here.) According to […]

Bigelow and Nevada politics

Robert Bigelow is best known in space circles as the founder of Bigelow Aerospace, developer of inflatable space habitats, but in his home state of Nevada he’s also a significant political donor. An AP article reports that Bigelow has contributed about one quarter of the money raised this year by Bob Beers, a state senator […]

Davis still fighting for aeronautics

Rep. Jo Ann Davis (R-VA) is recovering very well from breast cancer, but she’s less interested in talking about that in a Hampton Roads Daily Press article than about one of her pet peeves: the neglect of NASA’s aeronautics programs at the hands of the Vision for Space Exploration. “I’m not against space,” she said […]

Senators support ISS research funding

The online edition of Space News (registration required) reports that four members of the US Senate have requested that written a letter to NASA administrator Mike Griffin asking him not to cut ISS research funding. The letter, by Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), Bill Nelson (D-FL), Richard Shelby (R-AL), and Barbara Mikulski (D-MD)—the chair and […]

Stricter export control laws?

At the end of an interview in this week’s print edition of Space News, David Cavossa of the Satellite Industry Association brought up some new legislation regarding everyone’s favorite topic, export control:

Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) has introduced a bill to make the export control act even tougher (H.R. 4572) so we’re following that. Unfortunately, […]

James Van Allen and the human spaceflight adventure

As you’re no doubt aware, James Van Allen passed away yesterday at the age of 91. Van Allen was an exemplary scientist, best known for the discovery of the radiation belts surrounding the Earth that bear his name. That discovery was made using instruments he flew on Explorer 1, the first US spacecraft to orbit […]

Griffin Mars Society address podcast

In the latest in an irregular series of “space polcasts”, I’ve created an MP3 of Mike Griffin’s speech and Q&A session at last week’s Mars Society conference in Washington. (The file is approx. 6.45 MB and runs a little over 56 minutes, including a brief introduction from Robert Zubrin.)

The debate between science and exploration

Friday morning’s sessions of the Mars Society conference featured a couple of talks on the relative importance of science versus exploration. First up was Scott Horowitz, NASA associate administrator for exploration:

There’s a basic paradigm shift here from where we were a few years ago. We were “science driven, exploration enabling”; that’s the phrase we […]

Earth science debate notes

A couple of quick notes about the debate on the deletion of the reference to planet Earth in NASA’s mission statement: in a comment in earlier post on the topic, Oliver Morton provides an excerpt of an editorial in last week’s issue of Nature that is critical of the move. (It is also perhaps the […]