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Spy vs spyBy Marc Erikson During the 1974 US Senate Watergate hearings that led to the resignation of president Richard Nixon, Tennessee Republican senator Howard Baker (later, the US ambassador to Japan) famously asked witnesses time and again, "What did the president know, and when did he know it?" Will another senator soon be asking what President George W Bush and top officials of his administration knew (and when) about Iraq's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD)? I doubt it. The Bush administration has now conceded that one key intelligence element to justify war on Iraq, alleged uranium purchases...

Once again, NASA has proposed to develop a replacement for the troubled Space Shuttle. This year's project goes by the ungrammatical moniker "Orbital Space Plane". An interim version of OSP called the CRV (Crew Rescue Vehicle) to be developed by 2010 will take over the International Space Station lifeboat task now done by Soyuz. An improved OSP called the CTV (Crew Transfer Vehicle) will assume the ISS crew exchange task now done by Shuttle in 2012. To minimize development costs, the OSP will be launched on one of the new EELV family of expendable boosters, Delta 4 or Atlas V....

One key argument for war was the peril from weapons of mass destruction. Now top officials are worried by repeated failures to find the proof - and US intelligence agencies are engaged in a struggle to avoid the blame The Iraqi military base at Taji does not look like a place of global importance. It is a desolate expanse of bunkers and hangars surrounded by barbed wire and battered look-out posts. It is deserted apart from American sentries at the gate. Yet Taji, north of Baghdad, is the key to a furious debate. Where are Saddam's weapons of mass destruction?...

NASA Sets Initial Requirements for Orbital Space Plane System PRESS RELEASE Tuesday, February 18, 2003 NASA today released the top level requirements for the Orbital Space Plane – a next generation system of space vehicles designed to provide a crew rescue and crew transport capability to and from the International Space Station. These requirements set the foundation for the design of the vehicle and its associated systems. The Level I requirements for an Orbital Space Plane system were developed based on NASA's missions as defined in the Integrated Space Transportation Plan and inputs from the industry and Department of Defense...