NASA budget
For where NASA stands right now go
here
oral history
Interviews with key space program leaders are available on the web from
the National Air and Space Museum.
around the blogs
Jeff has found some interesting information on current shuttle safety procedures.
Jamel has several interesting news stories.
Seth has a thoughtful post on NASA technology to monitor earth resources. I would comment that sometimes it is hard to know what the high tech sensor data means. Ecologists were excited about using satellite data to measure something called the vegetation index, because nice clear variations showed up. But for a long time they didn't know what the vegetation index meant on the ground. They thought if an area showed up with a high vegetation index it meant that there was a lot of standing biomass there, but it actually turned out to be something more like a measure of how fast the vegetation was growing.
Kacy has some more thoughts on how much basic science NASA should support.
search for extraterrestrial life
The role of finding life as a goal of the space program is suggested by a new
SETI project.
small nuclear weapons
Here's an article on small nuclear bombs and current debates about whether we should develop them.
military space ambitions
Does
this article on Air Force space plans sound familiar? Some other studies are available
here.
around the blogs
Jeff discusses an article in the Tiger and says politicians use the space program to get votes. Kennedy didn't decide to go to the moon until after he was elected, but he certainly used claims of a missile gap in the campaign. But do you think these days proposing an expanded space program gets you many votes?
Kacy has some other thoughts on politics.
Jamel has interesting information on funding issues for Bush's space plan.
Joseph found a source for an explanation of the film
2001, if you are wishing for one.
Nick would have preferred to watch a movie that was more historical. I admit
2001 is a weird movie, but what interests me, historically, is how people thought the space age was going to transform the world. So far it has turned out to be a lot more mundane than expected.
