Other science money troubles: NASA’s climate and astronomy programs face delays due to cost overruns and rocket failures.
NASA is about to decide on its shuttle heavy-lift replacement, and it looks like it will be almost entirely shuttle-derived.
As I have said previously, this rocket will almost certainly never fly. NASA has to start over after spending billions and years developing Constellation, and is being given less money and time to do it.
And even if I am wrong and this rocket does fly, I bet it will do only one flight and then be retired as too costly.
The debate over arsenic-based life continues.
Turf war: SpaceX has sued a NASA safety expert (with ties to the Ares rocket program) who questioned the safety of the Falcon 9 rocket.
The pork goes on: The shuttle’s end has still left NASA with a half billion dollar pension bill.
Don’t bet on it: A memo signed today by a senior NASA official marks the end of the Constellation program.
All this does is make the name change of the program-formerly-called-Constellation official. The pork continues nonetheless!
The Republican presidential candidates discussed the space program’s future at the New Hampshire debate last night.
NASA has finally released the photos of Endeavour docked to ISS, taken from a departing Soyuz.
The James Webb Space Telescope: The disaster that destroyed NASA’s astrophysics program.
Former astronaut calls for the dismantling of NASA.
This week there was a bit of a political kerfuffle during House hearings over a House report [pdf] that stated that the cost per pound for launching cargo to ISS was much cheaper using the shuttle versus the new commercial companies under the COTS program. This is shown in this table from page 5 of the report:
The problem is that these numbers are a complete lie, as they are based on a yearly cost of $3 billion to operate the shuttle (highlighted in yellow). I have been following NASA budget battles now for decades, and the shuttle operational budget has never, ever been that low. Routinely, NASA figures the cost to operate the shuttle per year, regardless of number of flights, to be about $4 billion per year.
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NASA lunar lander test sparked a grass fire yesterday.
Budget deficits signal a decline in spending for astronomy telescopes, both on the ground and in space, for the next decade.
Asteroid sample return mission on slate for NASA in 2016. The asteroid chosen in 1999 RQ36, which is significant.
The space rock has been classified as a potentially hazardous asteroid, since its orbit brings it close to Earth in the year 2182. There is an extremely remote chance (a recent study pegs it at about 1-in-1000) that the 1,900-foot-wide (579-meter) asteroid could pose a threat to Earth.
More evidence to me it will never fly: Orion must wait for heavy-lift rocket.
NASA has decided to abandon efforts to contact the rover Spirit, incommunicado for more than a year.
NASA announces that the Orion program will continue, though under a different name.
This is a non-announcement, made to appease those in Congress who are requiring NASA to build the program-formerly-called-Constellation. NASA will do as Congress demands, and in the process will build nothing while spending a lot of money for a rocket and space capsule that can’t be built for the amount budgeted.
Facing a launch window that ends December 18, the next rover mission to Mars was damaged last week upon arriving at the Kennedy Space Center.
All your Moon rocks are belong to us: A NASA sting nets a woman offering to sell a Moon rock for $1.7M.
Damaged shuttle tile to get closer look.
Last shuttle launch scheduled for July 8.
From Jeff Foust: Another sign of tight budgets ahead.
The possibility that NASA’s budget might cut by several billion doesn’t bother me a bit. Unlike it seems everyone else, I ain’t gonna be one of those who says “We need to cut the federal budget, but just don’t cut MY favorite program.” NASA shouldn’t be immune to cuts. In fact, NASA could easily lose the several billion dollars per year that’s going to be wasted on the program-formerly-called-Constellation.
And if Congress decided to cut the subsidies to the new commercial space companies as well, I probably wouldn’t cry that much over that either. I think these companies can make it on their own. I think there is a market for their product. By taking NASA’s money up front, they are then forced to take NASA supervision, something I think will be very damaging in the long run.
Pork and more pork: NASA is considering turning Congress’s heavy-lift rocket requirement, the program-formerly-called-Constellation, into a shuttle-derived rocket that would cost $10 billion and only fly once.
NASA management appears ready to approve combining SpaceX’s next two test flights of the Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 rocket into one test flight. This despite Russian opposition.
Websites run by NASA, JPL, and Stanford University were hacked by search engine scammers today.
The last launch of Endeavour has now slipped to at least May 16.
The countdown for Endeavour’s last launch has begun.
In picking the winners for its commercial manned space subsidizes, NASA gave more priority to the spacecraft — either capsules or spaceplane — above the rockets needed to launch it.
Eric Berger at the Houston Chronicle asks: Will fewer humans in space lead to more robot explorers?
In a word, no. In the past fifty years, every time the budget of the manned space program has been cut, the unmanned program shrank as well. And every time the budget of manned space grew, so did the budget for unmanned missions.
