NASA

Preventing Asteroid Armageddon: It’s Deja Vu All Over Again

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The public experienced a moment of angst in 1997 when it looked like Asteroid XF11 might threaten the Earth in 2028. It didn’t. But that doesn’t mean the threat doesn’t exist or that we should do nothing about it.

Asteroids and comets that come close to Earth are collectively known as Near Earth Objects (NEOs). In 1998, Hollywood released two movies dealing with NEOs, Deep Impact and Armageddon. The first movie, Deep Impact, focused on the human emotions related to impending doom, while Armageddon was an action-hero film. In it, Bruce Willis and his rag-tag band of oil drillers save humanity from an approaching killer asteroid, taking off in the Shuttle and within just 18 days of the asteroid being sited, deflect it away from Earth. Keep reading →

Published April 10, 2013 at 2:14 PM

Sequestration Whacks National Space Symposium: NASA Drops Out, Some Air Force Cancel

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WASHINGTON: For those who aren’t part of the insular space community, you need to know that the National Space Symposium is the most important conference on space issues in the world. Everyone goes: the intelligence community; the Air Force; Army; Navy; industry; allies; even senior Chinese officials show up fairly regularly these days. Some 9,000 people attend in a good year.

But this year no one from NASA – that’s right, those people who gave us the Moon landings, Mars Rover, Voyager and are sort of synonymous with space — will attend NSS at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs next month. Keep reading →

Published March 20, 2013 at 2:45 PM

Space Policy Needs A Reset Too

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OSD recently appointed a new acting deputy assistant Secretary of Defense for space policy, and, assuming he keeps the job beyond January, he (or his replacement) might consider shifting his attention to some of the very difficult challenges facing space programs in the Defense Department.

First among those would be efforts to build military space systems that better serve the joint fight. We have long known that our dependence on space ensures that adversaries will try to negate its advantages. Russia and China have been exploring various ways to do so, and India has announced that it, too, perhaps for other reasons, is interested in developing anti-satellite capabilities. Making sure that military missions depending on space will be assured is one of the loud imperatives in the current US National Space Policy. Keep reading →

Published September 25, 2012 at 5:01 AM

Lawmakers Propose Radical Redo Of NASA’s Management Structure

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Borrowing insights gleaned from the FBI and the National Science Foundation, six U.S. lawmakers introduced legislation today to revamp NASA’s leadership structure, using the FBI and the National Science Foundation as models.

Published September 20, 2012 at 5:44 PM