Space Politics

NASA looks to be getting about a half billion dollars less than what it anticipated for FY2007, depending on how Congress completes the year-long “joint funding resolution” that will replace the uncompleted appropriations bills left by the previous Congress. Aerospace Daily reports that Griffin, in an interview yesterday, said that the agency will seek to […]

Remember when NASA administrator Mike Griffin got into a bit of hot water when he told USA Today that the shuttle program had not put NASA on “the right path”? Griffin, apparently chastened to some degree by the reaction, clarified his remarks in a memo a short time later. However, in today’s New York Times […]

On his excellent blog, Selenian Boondocks, Jon Goff seems surprised when he finds that the current NASA exploration architecture is really geared towards Mars. That revelation came from a discussion thread on NASA SpaceFlight.com’s forums, where one of the key authors of the ESAS study, Doug Stanley, makes the point that the architecture’s key elements […]

I’ve received a couple of email queries about this subject recently, so it’s worth a brief post. While the House included some money for Centennial Challenges in its FY2007 appropriations bill (the exact amount I don’t have at my fingertips at the moment), the Senate has not included any funding for the program in its […]

A New York Times editorial today congratulates NASA for the COBE mission, which netted a Nobel Prize in Physics earlier this week for John Mather of NASA Goddard and George Smoot of UC Berkeley. The editorial notes, though, that COBE was a relatively small Explorer-class spacecraft, the type of mission getting squeezed out in the […]