McCain’s more detailed space policy

I discovered while doing some research late last night that the campaign of Republican presidential candidate John McCain has issued a far more detailed space policy statement. This document replaces the one the campaign issued in January, just before the Florida primary. While the original document was only one paragraph long and made only vague […]

Space policy and the campaigns: recent developments

A few recent items of note about space and the presidential campaigns:

In today’s issue of The Space Review, I examine the recent statements on space policy made by Democratic candidate Barack Obama regarding Constellation and other issues. This is an expansion of a post on the issue I made a week ago immediately after […]

Gingrich’s billion-dollar space prizes

It should be no surprise to anyone that former House speaker Newt Gingrich is a big fan of prizes for a variety of applications, including space. In an op-ed in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, Gingrich uses prizes as a way to answer a question posed by the paper: “How would you spend $10 billion of […]

Space in the Democratic platform

The Democratic party has completed work on its party platform for 2008, which will be adopted at the convention in Denver later this month. The text of the platform hasn’t been released yet (at least officially on the party’s web site) but a near-final draft was published by The Atlantic.com late Thursday. And, at least […]

Curious commentary

Is there a “potential fracture in the Democratic party over space”? That’s the claim of a piece published last week by the newspaper chain Examiner.com by Patricia Phillips, a “former NASA information officer”. One one side, she claims, are people like Sen. Bill Nelson, who she perceives as strong supporters of NASA, and on the […]

US-South Korea space cooperation

When President Bush met with South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak this week, the main issues on the table had to deal with topics like free trade and North Korea. But the two also reached an agreement about cooperation in space. The official White House statement is short on details, saying only that the two countries […]

CATS on The Space Show

A heads up: Charles Miller and I will be guests on The Space Show today at 5 pm EDT to talk about the series of articles we’ve authored on The Space Review about Cheap and reliable Access To Space (CATS, or CRATS, or CARATS, or whatever), the National Coalition for CATS announced last month, and […]

Putting Obama’s speech in perspective

While Barack Obama’s speech in Titusville, Florida was big news there, and in the close-knit space community, outside of it the speech was ho-hum. The Washington Post published an article Sunday with a Titusville dateline but only wrote that Obama “talked of protecting Social Security, funding space and ocean research, dealing with the threat posed […]

Evolutionary, not revolutionary

A lot has been said about Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s speech Saturday in Florida where reversed plans originally published in an education policy white paper last November to delay Constellation by five years. “I told my staff we’re going to find an entirely different offset, because we’ve got to make sure that the money […]

Obama coming to the Space Coast

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama will be speaking Saturday in Titusville, Florida, near the Kennedy Space Center. In a location like that, one would expect the candidate to mention space policy to some degree. If he doesn’t, he’ll likely be asked about it since this will be a “town meeting” with Q&A. The question, though, […]