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NASA: Instead of awarding our retired space fleet to museums, we should be awarding contracts to go to Mars and beyond. Once we triumphed over the vacuum of space. Now we face a vacuum of leadership. A nation whose world leadership was unquestioned once held its breath as an American spacecraft placed American astronauts on the surface of the moon. It was a triumph of exceptionalism that was officially laid to rest this week as a nation held its breath to see which museums our space shuttle fleet would be awarded to. In these difficult economic times and with a...

General Motors Corvette ad at YouTube here.GM's new ad for the Corvette makes a not-so-veiled swipe at the Obama administration, implying Chevy will keep building manned rockets even if — thanks to the President's budget cuts — NASA won't. It's brilliantly Amerigasmic. The new ad for the 2011 Chevy Corvette line-up is the product of their new firm Goodby, Silverstein & Partners and features the awesome Corvette ZR1 along with nostalgic video of NASA's Saturn V program from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. It also features a knock at the current space policy with this line: "While time has marched...

Competitiveness: The president spent Tax Day reassuring Florida voters that money will keep flowing to NASA. But in space as well as on Earth, we'll be an unexceptional nation. In space, no one can hear you scheme. President Obama's speech at the Kennedy Space Center will never be confused with President Kennedy's clarion call in 1961 to send an American to the moon within a decade. Rather it was an admission that we will now boldly go where no one wants to go.

WASHINGTON (AFP) – US President Barack Obama will host a space conference next month in Florida to chart his vision for the future of human spaceflight, the White House said Sunday. The April 15 event comes after Obama last month proposed dropping the massively over-budget Constellation program launched by his predecessor, George W. Bush, to develop a rocket aimed at returning Americans to the moon by 2020. The White House said it wanted to ground Constellation because it was too costly, used outdated technology and would not be ready to ferry humans to the moon before 2028. In its place,...

Achievement: The nation that put the first man on the moon may have put its last as budget cuts slash NASA's plans to return. Men will return to the moon, but they will likely speak Chinese. On May 25, 1961, President Kennedy announced in front of a joint session of Congress the dramatic and ambitious goal of sending an American to the moon by the end of that decade. It was a clarion call to the American spirit and technology to rise up and prove that America's best days were still ahead. Forty-one years after Neil Armstrong set foot on...

NASA needs more cash in order to meet its goal of finding nearby space rocks that could hit Earth in a devastating impact, a new report says. Congress ordered NASA in 2005 to find and track 90 percent of the large asteroids near Earth by 2020, but did not set aside the necessary funds required to do the job, according to a report released Wednesday by the National Academy of Sciences. Without that funding, NASA will not be able to build the new facilities and telescopes required to track potentially threatening asteroids down to the size of about 460 feet...

Congress assigned the space agency four years ago to watch 90 per cent of potentially deadly rocks hurtling through space by 2020 but never gave it the money to build the necessary telescopes, according to a report by the National Academy of Sciences. The agency estimates that about 20,000 asteroids and comets in Earth's solar system bigger than 460 feet in diameter are potential threats to the planet. Rocks between 460 feet and 3,280 feet in diameter can devastate an entire region Lindley Johnson, NASA's manager of the near-Earth objects program, said. So far, scientists know the whereabouts of about...

“Obama's NASA selection is a boost for manned spaceflight” proclaimed the headline to the May 24 Los Angeles Times story. Apparently, “the choice of astronaut Charles Bolden as NASA administrator reassures many who feared that Obama was lukewarm on future manned missions,” and is being interpreted as supporting NASA’s goal of humans once again going to the moon by 2020.“Clearly Charlie Bolden would not have taken the job if he were being asked to shut down human spaceflight," said John Logsdon, a space policy expert in Washington, according to the Times. If approved by the Senate to take the captain’s...

WASHINGTON — The White House has ordered a complete outside review of NASA's manned space program, including plans to return astronauts to the moon. Officials want a report from an independent panel by August. White House science adviser John Holdren said Thursday that the new panel will look at the design of new spacecraft to replace the space shuttle and go to the moon, as well as consider possible alternatives to the current design. In a letter to NASA, Holdren wrote that because of the magnitude of the manned space program's ambitions and its expense, "it would be only prudent...

More than two months into his presidency, Barack Obama has yet to name a replacement for former NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin, leaving the 18,000-man space agency flying without a navigator.

The fiscal 2010 NASA budget outline to be released by the Obama Administration Feb. 26 adds almost $700 million to the out-year figure proposed in the fiscal 2009 budget request submitted by former President Bush, and sticks with the goal of returning humans to the moon by 2020. The $18.7 billion that Obama will request for NASA - up from $18.026 billion for fiscal 2010 in the last Bush budget request - does not include the $1 billion NASA will receive in the $787 billion stimulus package that President Barack Obama signed Feb. 16. Aviation Week has learned that in...

VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. (AP) - A rocket carrying a NASA global warming satellite has landed in the ocean near Antarctica after a failed launch. The Taurus XL rocket carrying the Orbiting Carbon Observatory blasted off early Tuesday morning from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base. But launch managers say that several minutes later, the payload fairing, which shelters the satellite, apparently failed to separate from the launch vehicle. Taurus program manager John Brunschwyler says the rocket splashed into the ocean. He's with the rocket's maker, Orbital Sciences Corp. THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further...

 NASA, when it isn't finding rogue space lights or mysterious BOOMs of the non-Steve Jobsian variety, is apparently sending rogue science teams to brief President-elect Obama on the future of the space program.These teams weren't sanctioned by NASA top brass, so in a way they are effectively going rogue, not unlike an Alaskan governor in a Saks Fifth Avenue. They were also not towing the company line about the future of the space program. In fact, they argued that NASA should scrap the upcoming Ares rocket program in lieu of a new program called Jupiter Direct, which relies heavily on...

NASA readied the launch early Tuesday of a satellite that will produce the first complete map of the Earth's human and natural sources of carbon dioxide, CO2, the gas most closely linked to climate change. The Orbiting Carbon Observatory, or OCO, was scheduled to be launched at 0951 GMT (1:51 am) from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on board the Taurus XL rocket built by Orbital Science Corp., NASA said in a statement posted Monday on its website. It would be the first time NASA has used a Taurus rocket. NASA said the observatory would map the geographic distribution...

.S. President Barack Obama's recent pledge to seek a ban on space weapons drew a mixed reaction from experts in the field, with some saying the president might be better off pursuing something more modest and less complex, such as a set of international rules governing space operations. Arms control advocates nonetheless applauded the statement as a welcome departure from the space policy stance of former President George W. Bush, who rejected the notion of banning or limiting space weapons via treaty arrangements. "The Bush administration rejected space diplomacy," said Michael Krepon, co-founder of the Henry L. Stimson Center, a...

OPINION SPACETime To Raise The Warning Flag On US Space Program File image of the last American flag to be hoisted on the Moon by Staff WritersHouston TX (SPX) Dec 29, 2008 The Coalition for Space Exploration, the leading collaboration of space industry businesses and advocacy groups, announced today the release of a statement by James Lovell, who served as part of the crew of Apollo 8 - the first human voyage to a celestial body in December 1968. Apollo 8's successful mission to orbit the Moon paved the way for Apollo 11 to realize U.S. President John F. Kennedy's...

OPINION SPACESpace And The Obama Administration The bottom line on space in the Obama era seems to be a continuation of security-related programs with less funding for expensive civil programs. This is not a rosy projection, but it is realistic. by Staff Writersfor LaunchSpace.comBethesda MD (SPX) Dec 23, 2008 In a few short weeks we will have a new administration and a new set of mandates to be addressed by President-Elect Obama. Unfortunately, the mandates of major national concern do not seem to include government-funded space exploration. Mandates that are on the minds of most Americans include the state of...