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Several hearings this week by House and Senate committees will examine NASA’s 2014 budget request and its overall space exploration plans. The hearings start this afternoon with one on “Challenges and Opportunities for Human Space Exploration” by the Senate Commerce Committee’s space subcommittee. Scheduled to testify are NASA associate administrator for human exploration and operations [...] Sunday afternoon Orbital Sciences Corporation successfully launched its Antares rocket on its inaugural flight, a test mission carrying a demonstration payload and several smallsats. Company officials said the launch, one of the final milestones in the company’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) award from NASA, went well, paying the way for a launch this summer [...] When the administration released its fiscal year 2014 budget proposal last week, Rep. Lamar Smith, chairman of the House Science Committee, expressed some skepticism about NASA’s new asteroid initiative contained in it, including plans to redirect a small near Earth object to lunar orbit to be visited by astronauts. “Seemingly out of the blue, this [...] NASA’s commercial crew program and the Space Launch System (SLS) and Orion programs have been sources of heated debate on Capitol Hill that last couple of years. But, as both efforts make progress, could the tensions that often pit the two programs against one another be easing? Not necessarily, based on comments from a couple [...] Just days after NASA admininstrator Charles Bolden said that a NASA-led human return to the Moon would not take place “probably in my lifetime,” a group of mostly Republican members of the House introduced a bill that would require NASA to do just that, and within a decade. The “RE-asserting American Leadership in Space Act,” [...] Everything is set for tomorrow’s unveiling of the administration’s fiscal year 2014 budget proposal. The overall budget proposal will likely show up on the OMB website Wednesday morning, with NASA posting its detailed budget proposal documents at 1 pm Eastern. At 1:30 pm, the Office of Science and Technology Policy will hold a budget briefing, [...] Details about the fiscal year 2014 budget are supposed to be embargoed until Wednesday, when the administration formally releases its budget proposal. When NASA administrator Chalres Bolden spoke before the joint meeting of the Space Studies Board and the Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board in Washington on Thursday, he said he knew some people there [...] When the House Science Committee met last month to discuss the threats posed by near Earth objects (NEOs), they indicated that there would be at least one other hearing on the topic in April. That hearing has been scheduled: “Threats from Space: A Review of Non-U.S. Government Efforts to Track and Mitigate Asteroids and Meteors, [...] The Senate Commerce Committee’s space subcommittee hearing last Wednesday on “Assessing the Risks, Impacts, and Solutions for Space Threats” was seen by many as the Senate’s counterpart to a House Science Committee hearing the day before on the subject of threats posed by near Earth objects (NEOs). While it didn’t have the star power of [...] The good news for NASA and other federal agencies is that they finally have a fiscal year 2013 budget. On Thursday, the House passed the Senate’s version of a 2013 spending bill as expected, a day after the Senate approved it. The passage ends any worries about a potential government shutdown when the current continuing [...] |
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