It’s here…

The full Augustine committee report is now online.

Sometimes a star party is just a star party

The president assembled quite a group at the White House last night: NASA administrator Charlie Bolden and deputy administrator Lori Garver, former astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Sally Ride, and science advisor John Holdren. A space policy summit? Nope, a star party, attended by 150 middle schoolers with a focus on science education, not space policy. […]

Budget and policy discussion area

I am tied up all day today at a space debris workshop at McGill University in Montreal, so I won’t be providing updates on the budget details released later today until tonight. So I’m leaving this post open to comment on the budget and any other policy announcements (such as the anticipated Constellation review) that […]

Astronaut’s wife to chair space subcommittee

The Democratic leadership of the House Science and Technology Committee announced its subcommittee assignments Thursday. Picked to chair the space and aeronautics subcommittee is Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ). Entering her second term in Congress, Giffords is probably best known in space circles not for her legislative work—she was on the science committee, but not the […]

Obama statement on Indian lunar launch

Late yesterday India launched its first lunar mission, Chandrayaan-1. In response to that milestone, the Barack Obama campaign issued the following statement from the candidate that ties that launch into his space policy:

With India’s launch of its first unmanned lunar spacecraft following closely on the heels of China’s first spacewalk, we are reminded just […]

McCain and Obama talk space on Orlando TV

Central Florida News 13, a cable news channel serving Orlando and surrounding areas, took advantage of visits this week by presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama to speak at the VFW convention there to interview them, including asking them about space policy. (The McCain interview was even performed with a Mercury capsule replica in […]

Space in the Democratic platform

The Democratic party has completed work on its party platform for 2008, which will be adopted at the convention in Denver later this month. The text of the platform hasn’t been released yet (at least officially on the party’s web site) but a near-final draft was published by The Atlantic.com late Thursday. And, at least […]

For teachers in space, political preschool

Last night several organizations co-hosted a “Teachers in Space” roundtable at George Washington University. The idea behind Teachers in Space, unlike NASA’s Teacher in Space program in the 1980s and the current group of educator astronauts, is to fly current teachers on suborbital spaceflights using any number of commercial vehicles currently under development, then get […]

Energy vs. space

That’s the topic of an article in this week’s issue of The Space Review that I wrote about the potential risk to civil space programs posed by growing concerns about energy and desires for crash programs to develop alternative energy sources. Both major presidential candidates have appropriated arguably the biggest accomplishment of the Space Age […]

Commemorating just about everything

Is there anything that the House didn’t honor yesterday? The House took up no fewer than four resolutions recognizing people, agencies, organizations, and even years with space-related links:

H.Res, 1315, commemorating the 50th anniversary of NASA; H.Res. 1313, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the shuttle flight of Sally Ride, the first American woman in space; […]