Space Politics

With the House Science and Technology Committee’s space subcommittee scheduled to markup HR 6063, the NASA authorization bill for FY 2009, later today, it’s worth looking at some of the other provisions of the bill not covered in previous discussions:

The bill would reauthorize the Glory mission, which ran into the NASA equivalent of the […]

The full text of HR 6063, the NASA Authorization Act of 2008, is now available on Thomas. I have not had time to review it yet, but wanted to be sure people were aware it’s available and open up any discussion about its provisions (some of which has already started in the earlier post about […]

An article in the Houston Chronicle yesterday said that members of Congress who represent the Houston area had declared Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison their “last best hope” for increasing NASA’s budget. The focus here is on the FY2008 supplemental appropriations bill working its way through Congress, which has an extra $200 million for NASA in […]

Wednesday’s hearing of the space subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee on the planned reauthorization of NASA and the Vision for Space Exploration covered familiar ground: discussion of the Shuttle-Constellation gap, the belief that NASA is being asked to do too much for too little money, worries about being dependent on the Russians, and a […]

While the attention of most people has been focused on issues like food and fuel prices, the presidential campaign, and so on, a problem has been developing that potentially could have repercussions for space policy. In the last few weeks tensions have been rising between Russia and the former Soviet republic of Georgia over two […]