While NASA watchers are still guessing at what direction the incoming Trump administration will assign to America’s space agency, it is increasingly obvious that it won’t include the outgoing Obama administration’s badly beleaguered and generally unloved Asteroid Redirect Mission, or ARM. That mission would see a small boulder plucked off a Near Earth Asteroid by […]
Last week, astronomers announced the discovery of a small “quasi satellite” of Earth, asteroid 2016 HO3, which is locked into a rather rare orbit which has it circling our planet at a variable distance in a dance between the Earth and the Sun. While not totally stable, it could last for some time. The complete […]
Congress Give’s President ARM the Finger What may ultimately go down as one of the the strangest and most half-hearted space policy proposals in American history is finally just going down. As spacepolicyonline reports in its usual excruciating detail, a Congressional committee has essentially de-funded the Obama Administration’s Asteroid Redirect Mission, or ARM. Yesterday, the […]
A key element of NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission, or ARM, is being pushed back one year. According to reports from a meeting of the NASA Advisory Council’s human exploration and operations committee which took place last week, ARM’s program director Michele Gates said: “Under the new schedule, the ARM robotic mission would launch in December […]
For many of who take pride in NASA, it is embarrassing enough that the agency which once went to the Moon, and now says it is on a “Journey to Mars” has as its only defined human exploration goal, the Asteroid Redirect Mission. ARM’s objective, radically reduced from the original 2010 proposal of sending astronauts to […]
The results of a new study indicate that a return to the Moon is clearly within NASA’s reach and existing budget, providing the agency is willing to follow the commercial model employed in the COTS and CRS programs to get there. The full title of the study, which was partially funded by a grant from […]
Dawn of New Era : KSC Clock Adds Up the Minutes of the First SpaceX Launch to ISS If Project Constellation was the clear victim of President Obama’s Kennedy Space Center address, the immediate beneficiary was without a doubt the International Space Station program. Slated for de-orbit as soon as 2016 in some Constellation planning […]
President Obama at the Kennedy Space Center / April 15th 2010. Image Credit : NASA The following is Part I in a multi-part series looking back at changes in American space policy put forward by President fiove years ago. Wednesday, April 15th was perhaps not the best of days for many Americans. While for those […]
On Wednesday, March 25, NASA announced that it had reached a decision regarding which option the agency is to pursue as part of its Asteroid Redirect Mission, or ARM. In what came as no great surprise to those who have been following the space agency’s painful struggle to come up with an achievable mission plausibly […]
After a delay of 24 hours due to bad weather, NASA is preparing to move the Orion spacecraft mounted aboard a Delta Heavy rocket to SLC-37 this evening. The launch, which will test Orion’s heat shield and basic systems, is scheduled for December 4th. Meanwhile, an article in Scientific American adds to the growing criticism […]
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