In an op-ed in Sunday’s Houston Chronicle, Scott Spencer and Chris Kraft make a last-ditch bid to extend the space shuttle program as a cornerstone for a “robust manned space program”. The op-ed takes a curiouser turn later on, though, as the two advocate development of a “modular, reusable Planetary Transport Vehicle (PTV) System” for human missions beyond LEO—modules that, of course, would be sized to fit in the shuttle’s payload bay, but with crews ferried to them in LEO by commercial vehicles. It’s worth nothing that the two sent a joint letter to President Obama in April asking him to extend the shuttle program (but without the discussion of the PTV system) when Spencer made a short-lived attempt to run for the House from Delaware.

The James Webb Space Telescope is the topic of an editorial in the Orlando Sentinel on Saturday, which expresses concerns about cost overruns and delays in the program. “Such cost overruns and delays are unacceptable,” the editorial states, but expresses support for the program’s scientific potential. “Making the Webb telescope a success deserves to be a national priority. Its promise is almost unfathomable.”

Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) is optimistic about the commercial prospects of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) at Wallops Island in Virginia, she tells the local newspaper, the Daily News. The spaceport will start hosting launches next summer of Orbital Sciences’ Taurus 2 rocket, carrying cargo spacecraft to the ISS. Wallops, she said, “will be like the Southwest Airlines of space. It’s an upstart, lower cost, cheaper and safer way because it doesn’t require human flight.” The metaphor seems a little tangled: Orbital, it seems, would be in line to be Southwest while Wallops would be like Dallas’s Love Field, or, closer to home, BWI Airport, both major hubs for Southwest.

The legislation faces two major challenges. One is that there’s no offset for the cost of the legislation, which would depend on just how many companies and investors take advantage of the bill. The second is that Nelson is introducing the bill very late in the current Congress: given the limited time left this year, even with a lame-duck session after November’s elections, it seems at first glance unlikely that the bill would make it through unless attached to other legislation.

In addition to Nelson’s legislation, details are emerging about the plan to provide $40 million in support to the Space Coast to help offset job losses and other economic impacts from the retirement of the shuttle. President Obama, who announced the funding in his April 15th speech at the Kennedy Space Center, asked for a plan by August 15th. Most of that money, $35 million, will go for grants to support businesses in several markets, including aviation, clean energy, homeland security, information technology and life sciences. The other $5 million would be for a proposed FAA commercial space center at Cape Canaveral, few details of which were disclosed. More details about the plan are due out today.

The European Space Agency, its member states, and the European Union are all grappling with a number of problems, including potential budget cuts that could force countries to decrease their contributions to ESA next year by 20 percent or more, the Journal reports. There’s also debate about supporting developing of a new launch vehicle to succeed the Ariane 5, with Francois Auque of EADS complaining that major ESA countries don’t have “the impetus or the stamina” to carry out this or other major projects, or complete development of a long-term strategy. “Space exploration is quite low in the European priorities,” he said.

He actually had a lot more to say about the current administration’s proposed new direction for NASA, and none of it was particularly complimentary. For example, the administration’s plan to hold off on a decision for a heavy-lift vehicle to no later than 2015 had interesting timing, he thought. “By the time there was any budget year that would actually have to support the development of a real heavy-lift rocket, the president who is promising to do it will be gone,” he said.

He also took some time to address what he perceived to be a conflict between government and commercial that has developed with the policy’s direction where “LEO is to be set aside essentially as a commercial preserve,” as he described it. He said it was important to have a government system capable of carrying humans to space for a variety of reasons, from its strategic geopolitical value to providing a backup should a commercial provider have an accident (and thus likely be forced out of business, he argued) to preventing a commercial provider from wielding monopolistic pricing power. “We seem to be setting up for an adversarial position between government enterprises and commercial enterprises,” he said. Both have their own values and can be complimentary, he said. He did say later that he expected that the final compromise to come out of Congress would fund commercial crew programs at a level close to the Senate version, but no higher. “I don’t think the administration is going to get their way.”

Griffin mentioned the House and Senate versions of NASA authorization bills currently in Congress, but didn’t indicate that he had a preference for one over the other. “Either one—both of those bills are, in my view, radically better than the administration’s plan,” he said. “They’re not as good, in my view, as we had, but radically better than the administration’s plan.” In a Q&A session later, though, he did appear critical of the provision in the Senate version that called for immediate development of an HLV capable of placing 70 tons into LEO. “The question is what payload do you need for human exploration,” he said, noting that various studies concluded that the Saturn V “was about the lowest useful capability for exploration beyond LEO.” The Saturn V, of course, could put about 130 tons into LEO, nearly twice the capacity of the proposed vehicle in the Senate bill (although the bill’s intent is that vehicle could be upgraded later to launch heavier payloads).

The fundamental issue of the ongoing debate, he said, is this: “Does this nation want to have a real space program or not?” (“Yes!” at least one person in the audience shouted.) “A real space program goes somewhere, goes somewhere worthy, it does something worthy when it gets there. It does it in a timeframe that is of interest to normal human beings.” And, he added later, “we’re going to pay for it. We don’t decide that we’re going to do it on half of what people tell you is needed.”

Tuesday morning Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX), ranking member of the House Science and Technology Committee, will be the featured speaker at a Space Transportation Association (STA) breakfast on Capitol Hill. Certainly the status of a House version of a NASA authorization bill will be a subject of discussion at that event. The STA will also be presenting an award to Gary Payton, the Deputy Under Secretary of the Air Force for Space Programs, who is retiring this month.

On Wednesday afternoon The Planetary Society is hosting the first in a series of webcasts on NASA’s new space exploration plan. This first webcast, at 5 pm EDT, will focus on destinations in the new plan and will feature Bill Nye and Louis Friedman, the incoming and outgoing executive directors of the organization.

Add to that list of people the NASA administrator. Charles Bolden presumably had no idea what he was triggering when he said in an interview with al-Jazeera that President Obama charged him with “foremost” with the mission “to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with predominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.” And trigger something he did.

Although the video, posted July 1, showed up on NASA Watch almost immediately thereafter, it wasn’t until the holiday weekend, when it was noticed by primarily right-wing blogs, cable news shows, and talk radio programs, did it get much more attention. Maybe the space community shrugged its shoulders, knowing that NASA’s mission is clearly more than education, international relations, and making Muslim nations “feel good”. Maybe they realized that Bolden at times can be less than completely clear when responding to questions. Or maybe it was just the holiday weekend.

But Bolden’s statements did catch fire primarily among conservative commentators, who expressed varying degrees of outrage about Bolden’s comments, but have done little else, like digging into the issue to see if NASA’s actions, beyond the administrator’s comments, matched their rhetoric. That’s one of the lessons of this event: there are plenty of people with hair triggers ready to pounce on their keyboards, microphones, and cameras at the least little offense to their worldview. This is true on both the liberal and conservative ends of the political spectrum: recall the controversy Bolden’s predecessor, Mike Griffin, generated when he said back in 2007 that while he agreed that global warming existed, he wasn’t sure it was an urgent problem by questioning whether the current climate “is the optimal climate”, a statement he later admitted was impolitic.

NASA, though, isn’t an innocent victim of bloodthirsty bloggers and commentators. The agency waited until late Tuesday, long after the issue had gained traction, before the agency responded to criticism of Bolden’s statements, a response that has done little to slow the negative reaction. Yes, there was a three-day weekend in the middle of that, but that doesn’t stop the flow of news nor the response to it: the blogosphere operates continuously and 24-hour news channels have, well, 24 hours of programming a day to fill.

“We’re far too thin-skinned, starting federal investigations every time someone says something stupid,” syndicated radio host Michael Smerconish told the Journal, something he blames in part on “political partisanship and a 24/7 media looking for ‘gotcha’ moments.” Since neither partisanship nor the continuous media cycle appears likely to go away anytime soon, the agency is going to need to react better to it: faster, more effective responses and, preferably, a better choice of words to begin with. That’s going to be an interesting challenge for David Weaver, the agency’s new associate administrator for communications. Hopefully recent events haven’t given him second doubts about starting the job later this month.

In an op-ed in Wednesday’s South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Space Frontier Foundation co-founder Bob Werb calls for Republicans to continue the fight against socialism—in space. He notes that while the administration’s plan would rely on commercial providers to transport astronauts to LEO while canceling the “socialist boondoggle” called Constellation, “Republicans have been either silent or opposed” to the proposal. “You might think that Florida’s Republicans in particular would embrace this change because it means more jobs for Florida than the prior ‘program of record,’” he writes. “You would again be wrong. Maintaining the socialist status quo seems to be more important than either Republican ideology or jobs for the people of Florida.”

About a month ago Daily Kos published a poll on space spending performed by polling firm Research 2000, that had some interesting results, including that Republicans were more likely to think we spend too much on space. Yesterday the site announced that the polls the company performed for Daily Kos were “likely bunk” based on an independent analysis that found irregularities in the data. Not all the polls were analyzed in the study, and the space spending poll was not specifically mentioned, but “I no longer have any confidence in any of it, and neither should anyone else,” Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas said in a post yesterday.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also issued a statement, calling the policy “a strong statement of our principles and goals regarding U.S. national interests and activities in space.” The State Department, she said, “will expand our work in the United Nations and with other organizations to address the growing problem of orbital debris and to promote ‘best practices’ for its sustainable use,” among other areas. And in a brief statement, Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke praised the commercial elements of the policy. “It recognizes the sea changes occurring in the space community, with federal budgets tightening at the same time that commercial space capabilities and markets are gaining momentum,” he said

The new policy got some third-party endorsements as well. The Aerospace Industries Association said that the policy “takes important steps needed to maintain our global leadership in space and ensure continued competitiveness and innovation”. The AIA noted its strong support of international cooperation provisions in the policy and its goal of strengthening US leadership in space. The Union of Concerned Scientists, in a statement apparently prepared and released just before the policy’s release Monday, supported the policy’s shift in language back to policies from the Clinton and earlier administrations. And the Secure World Foundation “salutes” the new policy, calling it “a highly pragmatic approach to the international space regime that substantially enhances the long-term national security interests of the United States in space.”

The Space Foundation, though, had a mixed assessment of the policy. On one hand it supports elements of the policy ranging from improved space situational awareness to the “recognition” of space nuclear power in the policy (although the previous policy also had a section on that subject). However, it’s concerned that the new push for international cooperation will exclude India and China. It also claims that the policy statements on developing and retaining space professionals “ring hollow” given “plans for NASA continue to put thousands of American space professionals out of work”.

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), meanwhile, “blasts” the policy in a statement late Monday. “The Administration is yet again trying to sell this country a failed space policy that irrevocably diminishes our central role in space exploration,” he said, citing plans to make the US “more dependent” on Russia and other nations as well as plans for “dismantling a proven and effective space program that has propelled our nation to tremendous heights.” Sen. Hatch concluded: “I urge the President to rethink this flawed policy, because while this might be a new direction for manned space flight, it’s a direction we don’t want to take.”

So what will be in the policy? Donley said Thursday he expected the policy would reflect the changes in the space domain over the last couple of decades, as Earth orbit becomes more congested and even contested. Meanwhile, Laura Grego and David Wright offered their opinions on what should be in the policy in a white paper published by the Union of Concerned Scientists this week. They hope to see the Obama Administration walk back some of the changes in the 2006 policy that represented, in their view, “a more aggressive U.S. approach to space”. They expect the new policy to include language “restoring a balance among civil, military and commercial uses of space”.

Update 6:45 pm: Space News reports that the new policy could come out as soon as Monday. One of the areas of emphasis of the new policy, according to a one-page fact sheet obrained by the publication, is “to strengthen our domestic commercial space industry”; improved international cooperation is another.

What few pointed out, though, is that this is hardly the first time Glenn has advocated for extending the shuttle. Back in May 2008 Glenn called for extending the shuttle, saying that the shuttles are “still working very well” and that it will be “expensive to contract with the Russians”, themes similar to what he expressed in Monday’s letter. Glenn also recommended a shuttle extension when he testified before the House Science and Technology Committee in July 2008, as well as extending the life of the ISS. Elements of that written testimony are very similar to Monday’s letter.

The claim in his letter retiring the shuttle would result in “minimal, if any” cost savings don’t appear to add up, something overlooked in media accounts of his letter. The shuttle program currently costs NASA about $3 billion a year, according to NASA budget documents. Assuming an average of six NASA-purchased Soyuz seats a year (half those available on the four Soyuz flights to the ISS) at $55 million a seat the price starting in 2013, that’s $330 million a year. One can add to that cargo costs from the CRS contracts ($3.5 billion to Orbital and SpaceX through 2016), but that adds up to no more than about $700 million a year. Even if you’re able to reduce shuttle operations costs to about $2 billion a year, as some suggest, shuttle operations still appear significantly more expensive.

In the letter Glenn has mixed impressions of the administration’s new plan for NASA. It’s clear he supports plans to extend the ISS to at least 2020, and he also agrees with plans to defer a return to the Moon. “To establish a lunar base is extremely expensive and can wait, at least for now,” he writes. “Other expenditures pale beside that one.” He is more critical of plans to rely on “smaller, less experienced companies” for commercial crew access, saying that “at this early stage of their experience they should be phased in only after they demonstrate a high degree of competency and reliability, particularly with regard to safety concerns.” (No word on what he thinks of bigger, more experienced companies like ULA and Boeing.)