By Jeff Foust on 2013 June 2 at 9:46 am ET As previously noted here, Friday’s relatively close (cosmically speaking) flyby of asteroid 1998 QE2 provided NASA and the Obama Administration an opportunity to promote the agency’s asteroid initiative, including plans for an asteroid retrieval mission. That outreach did achieve one benchmark of effectiveness: the asteroid flyby made it into Friday’s White House press briefing, when […]
By Jeff Foust on 2013 May 30 at 9:22 am ET With NASA’s plans for an asteroid retrieval mission not currently winning widespread approval, particularly in Congress, as seen as a recent House Science Committee hearing, the space agency and the administration appear to be stepping up their efforts to build support for the mission.
The Office of Science and Technology Policy announced this week plans […]
By Jeff Foust on 2013 May 15 at 8:19 am ET Late last year, when Congress passed a defense authorization bill with export control reform language included, advocates of such reform noted that this legislative provision was not the end of their efforts. The language in the bill simply returned to the President the authority to move satellites and related components off the US Munitions List […]
By Jeff Foust on 2013 May 1 at 5:51 am ET When President Obama spoke Monday at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, to mark that institution’s sesquicentennial, space got only the briefest of cameos in his address, and even that managed to rub some scientists and space activists the wrong way. “Today, all around the country, scientists like you are developing therapies to regenerate […]
By Jeff Foust on 2013 April 22 at 6:51 am ET Sunday afternoon Orbital Sciences Corporation successfully launched its Antares rocket on its inaugural flight, a test mission carrying a demonstration payload and several smallsats. Company officials said the launch, one of the final milestones in the company’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) award from NASA, went well, paying the way for a launch this summer […]
By Jeff Foust on 2013 April 10 at 11:41 am ET The White House has released its documents for the FY14 budget proposal, including a fact sheet for NASA. The administration is seeking approximately $17.7 billion for NASA, about the same as its FY13 proposal. The proposal, as expected, includes funding to begin work “on a mission to rendezvous with—and then move—a small asteroid.” There’s also […]
By Jeff Foust on 2013 April 9 at 7:13 am ET Everything is set for tomorrow’s unveiling of the administration’s fiscal year 2014 budget proposal. The overall budget proposal will likely show up on the OMB website Wednesday morning, with NASA posting its detailed budget proposal documents at 1 pm Eastern. At 1:30 pm, the Office of Science and Technology Policy will hold a budget briefing, […]
By Jeff Foust on 2013 March 29 at 7:09 am ET At a media telecon Thursday afternoon to talk about the just-completed Dragon mission to the International Space Station, NASA administrator Charles Bolden said that budget sequestration could have an adverse effect on the agency’s commercial crew program if it extends beyond the end of this fiscal year. “So far, we don’t see any significant impact […]
By Jeff Foust on 2013 March 2 at 11:14 am ET Friday evening, President Obama signed an order officially enacting the across-the-board budget cuts known as sequestration after the White House and Congress failed to develop an alternative deficit reduction package. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released at the same time a report to Congress detailing the amounts of those cuts. The table below […]
By Jeff Foust on 2013 February 20 at 6:57 am ET The transition to the second term of the Obama Administration has resulted in a number of key administration officials choosing to leave, most notably the Secretaries of State and Defense. The administration’s top science policy official, though, suggested over the weekend that he plans to stick around.
“People always ask me what the job is […]
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