Last week, a Senate Appropriations Committee “marked up” the FY 2016 Commerce-Justice-Science (CJS) bill which funds among other things, NASA. For supporters of several NASA programs, including Commercial Crew, it was a simply put, a very bad day. Despite repeated impassioned pleas from NASA Administrator Charles Bolden to fully fund Commercial Crew at the requested […]
Last week, a U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee passed an FY 2015 bill for NASA, one with ominous portents for the Commercial Crew program. As pointed out in several media sources, the bill contains a “poison pill” provision which appears to be deliberately calculated to increase the administrative costs of the program to contractors, with SpaceX […]
Image credit: JPL A fascinating news release out of JPL suggests once more just how weird and wonderful our own solar system is turning out to be. Today’s story offers speculation that Jupiter’s moon Ganymede may have “layered” oceans in which water alternates with different tiers of ice, depending on the relative salt content. Furthermore, […]
The U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee held a sub-committee hearing this morning to examine changes taking place in the Department of Defense Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle Program (EELV.) Prior to today’s hearing, the GAO released a report regarding cost accounting in the EELV program, and like a number of prior reports it leaves the clear impression […]
For those who haven’t been following it, NASA is currently caught in a rather bizarre funding bind. With only two and half months to go in the FY2013 year which ends September 30th, the agency still does not know what it is allowed to spend in this year because differing House and Senate Committees have not […]
NASA today signed an agreement with Russia to extend the current arrangement for U.S. crew flights aboard Soyuz into 2017. The full press release, included below, is noteworthy in that it calls for crew return, as well as rescue capability, but not necessarily crew transport to the station, through Jun 2017. This represents perhaps the last hopeful […]
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