NASA « Space Politics

Space policy challenges and strategies to be discussed this week

By Jeff Foust on 2012 December 3 at 6:15 am ET

Much of the space community has its attention focused this week on the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco. Although NASA has tamped down the wild speculation in the last couple of weeks about a major discovery by the Curiosity Mars rover, there will still be news coming out of […]

Amendments to defense authorization bill cover export control and NASA policy

By Jeff Foust on 2012 November 30 at 12:04 pm ET

The Senate is debating this week S. 3254, its version of the fiscal year 2013 defense authorization bill, including handling a mountain of proposed amendments to the bill: more than 360 as of this writing. A couple have space policy implications, as Space News reported yesterday. One amendment deals with export control, while the other […]

Is Bolden’s number up?

By Jeff Foust on 2012 November 28 at 8:08 pm ET

On Wednesday, NASA administrator Charles Bolden visited the United Launch Alliance (ULA) factory in Decatur, Alabama, where the company assembles Atlas and Delta rockets. During his visit, local media quizzed him on a variety of topics, from the looming threat of sequestration to rumored discoveries by the Mars Science Laboratory Rover to even whether he […]

What can $300 million a year buy for NASA’s planetary program?

By Jeff Foust on 2012 November 15 at 9:00 am ET

In its continued quest to restore $300 million to NASA’s planetary science program, The Planetary Society described in a blog post this week what that restored funding could provide. According to “newly-formed internal budget numbers” provide to the organization from unnamed “sources within the planetary science community,” that additional funding could, in the long term, […]

Planetary Society congratulates Obama, asks for more planetary funding

By Jeff Foust on 2012 November 9 at 6:14 am ET

What do you do when the candidate who won the election was the one whose budget cut your favorite program? In the case of The Planetary Society, the answer is to congratulate himâ€”and ask him to reverse those cuts. In a statement Thursday, the organization congratulated President Obama on his reelection Tuesday while asking him […]

Before the next four years, focus on the next eight weeks

By Jeff Foust on 2012 November 7 at 12:49 pm ET

Last night’s results indicated that something close to the status quo will reign in space policy in the near future. The balance of power remains unchanged: the Obama Administration will be in office for the next four years, while the Senate remains in Democratic hands and the House in Republican hands for the next two. […]

Houston Chronicle cites space policy in its Romney endorsement

By Jeff Foust on 2012 October 21 at 12:19 pm ET

On Sunday, the Houston Chronicle formally endorsed Mitt Romney for president, four years after the paper had endorsed Barack Obama. The Chronicle’s editorial focused on a few major issues, including its disappointment with the Obama Administration’s approach to space:

It has been an insult to the memory of American heroes like Neil Armstrong and […]

Mars food and other space waste highlighted in report

By Jeff Foust on 2012 October 17 at 5:29 pm ET

Dining Martians? Not exactly what NASA is doing. (The illustration is taken from the Waste Book 2012 report.)

Ask different people in the space community to identify wasteful spending at NASA and you’re likely to get a range of answers. Some will argue that NASA is wasting money by supporting three commercial crew competitors […]

The Planetary Society looks ahead to planetary science funding in the 2014 budget

By Jeff Foust on 2012 October 13 at 6:47 pm ET

The space advocacy organization The Planetary Society has been pushing for months to try and undo the proposed cuts in NASA’s planetary science program in the 2013 budget proposal the administration released earlier this year. While the results of those efforts are yet to be determinedâ€”Congress has yet to pass a final 2013 appropriations bill […]

Undue credit (and blame) for the Obama Administration and CRS

By Jeff Foust on 2012 October 12 at 12:30 pm ET

This week marked a major milestone for utilization of the International Space Station and for commercial spaceflight: the (largely) successful Falcon 9 launch of a Dragon cargo spacecraft, which berthed with the station on Wednesday. (The successful launch is caveated because of the failure of one of the nine engines on the Falcon 9’s first […]

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