Sunday’s edition of the Cumberland (Md.) Times-News promised a “faceoff” between two newspaper staffers on hoary question of whether space exploration should be done by humans or robots. If you’re looking for insightful commentary on the (space) age-old question, keep looking. The pro-robot argument reads as much like an attack on President Bush as a […]
On the heels of the somewhat overblown story that NASA had changed its mission statement to delete a reference to Earth sciences come some editorials in major newspapers critical of NASA’s overall priorities. The New York Times published one such editorial Friday, claiming that “earth studies seem to be in trouble”. Evidence for this includes […]
NASA’s Crew Exploration Vehicle program, a cornerstone of the Vision for Space Exploration, is now facing criticism from two sides. On Tuesday the Space Frontier Foundation released a white paper calling the agency’s CEV development plans “unaffordable and unsustainable”. The Foundation is particularly critical of the “Block 1″ CEV, designed for low Earth orbit operations, […]
I have been trying very hard the last several days to get worked up by the New York Times story Saturday that NASA has quietly changed the mission statement of the space agency, deleting a reference to studying the planet. I haven’t been successful, but a lot of other people, particularly in liberal neighborhoods of […]
Thanks to the grand publicity machine that is the Internet (and you thought it was just a series of tubes) you may have already read the op-ed I wrote for the latest issue of SEED magazine on the burdens facing NASA now and a way out. But there’s an interesting backstory about this essay worth […]
By a voice vote, the House passed Monday H.Res 892, a resolution that thanks those employees of the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans who “risked their lives in dedication to the space program and faced down one of the greatest natural disasters in this Nation’s history” by staying behind at the factory during Hurricane […]
It’s common knowledge in the space community that a significant fraction of the general public overestimates—often wildly—the amount of money NASA gets. A particularly egregious example of this is a letter to the editor that appeared in Monday’s issue of the Courier-Post newspaper, which serves the New Jersey suburbs of Philadelphia:
I shudder when I […]
On Thursday the House of Representatives passed a resolution commending NASA for the successful completion of the STS-121 shuttle mission this month. The resolution, H.Con.Res.448, was approved by the House 415-0. The resolution is pretty standard stuff, praising the shuttle crew and the space agency for “its pioneering work in space exploration which is strengthening […]
Just a brief note that I’m in Las Vegas for the next several days for the NewSpace 2006 conference, which will be taking up all of my time throught the weekend. As a result, don’t expect much activity here (unless there are some good policy-related sessions or related developments during the conference) until early next […]
A reader sent me a notice about a new web site, Spacedebate.org, which describes itself as “an effort to expand the debate on the weaponization of space through a collaborative wiki-like tool for structured debate on a topic.” The site is devoted to collecting arguments and evidence on both sides of the issue. Spacedebate.org is […]