Orion Medical Blog

NASA’s Constellation Program — including the deployment of the Orion crew vehicle replacing the space shuttle — will first be assigned to international space station flights, then propel humans and cargo to the Moon. Expeditionary missions to Mars and beyond will follow.

But there’s ongoing discussion of mounting a piloted mission to an asteroid — a voyage by astronauts to a near-Earth object. These proponents feel certain of the scientific payoff from reaching, first-hand, an asteroid — perhaps even becoming able to exploit these chunks of celestial flotsam to further humankind’s plunge into the cosmos.  Read more

Brushing aside the threat of a presidential veto, the U.S. House of Representatives passed an over-budget spending measure July 26 that would provide $17.6 billion for NASA for 2008.

The $53.8 billion Commerce, Justice, Science Appropriations bill (H.R. 3093) passed by a vote of 281 to 142 following two days of debate that left the NASA portion largely unchanged from the amount that had emerged from the House Appropriations Committee two weeks earlier.  Read more