Space Politics

The Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee had scheduled a hearing this week on “NASA Passenger Aircraft: Mission Required or Expensive Perk?” However, at last report the hearing, which had been planned for Thursday, has been rescheduled for September 7, after Congress returns from the August recess.

Wouldn’t you know that just after I write up a long-overdue summary of NASA authorization activities in the House that there’s some activity on the legislation. Aerospace Daily reports Thursday that the full House is set to consider the bill on Friday. One issue that will have to be dealt with is a proposed amendment […]

A bill that passed the House last week would result in some commemorative coins for NASA. The “NASA and JPL 50th Anniversary Commemorative Coin Act” (HR 68), introduced back in January by Rep. John Culberson (R-TX) and with 290 co-sponsors, passed the House on a voice vote July 12. The bill would require the Treasury […]

While NASA appears to have shifted the direction of Project Prometheus from nuclear propulsion to nuclear power systems, there are still some, particularly in Congress, who are fighting to maintain the original orientation of the program. In a guest editorial in the July issue of the AIAA magazine Aerospace America, Rep. John Culberson (R-TX) compared […]

A routine markup session by the House Science Committee’s on a long-awaited NASA authorization bill took a surprisingly partisan turn on Wednesday. While there is typically a strong sense of bipartisan cooperation among committee members, during Wednesday’s hearing Democratic members expressed their opposition to the authorization bill, HR 3070. Reps. Mark Udall (D-CO) and Bart […]