[Updated Friday 12/21] CAPITOL HILL: It looks like the country’s getting a defense bill for Christmas, with provisions on everything from boosting cybersecurity to sanctioning Iran to loosening export controls on satellites. In what passes for high efficiency in Congress these days, the House and Senate Armed Services Committees completed their conference on the National… Keep reading →

At 1:03 pm today, the US Air Force launched a robotic space plane that can stay in orbit for over a year. That’s good news for the nation’s troubled space program. The X-37B, as it’s called, is pretty cool — and highly classified. But beyond the veil of secrecy, what’s it really good for? The… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: Congress sometimes has a strange way of rewarding the armed services when they actually manage to save some of the taxpayers’ money. For example, when an Air Force program manager managed to reduce the expected cost of a program in half Congress cut half the funds allocated for his program. That was the complaint… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: The head of Air Force Space Command worries that tightening defense budgets and looming force structure cuts could reduce his critical space and cyber capabilities. “Because these capabilities are so vital, and the need to maintain local and global capabilities, space and cyber capability doesn’t really scale well with force structure reductions,” Air Force… Keep reading →

In a move toward a more efficient National Reconnaissance Office, analysts for the agency operating the nation’s spy satellites are on the verge of getting their information through a top-secret open-source cloud environment housing intelligence data. Jill Singer, the agency’s chief information officer, offered the latest details on the project at this week’s Red Hat… Keep reading →

ORLANDO: (Story Delayed Due to Software Problems) A study by the intelligence community raised industrial base “concerns” about the merger between commercial spy satellite companies GeoEye and DigitalGlobe but found no showstoppers. That’s the word from Letitia Long, director of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA). I asked Long today if industrial base issues had… Keep reading →

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… Keep reading →

There’s not much to say about this photo of an F-35A and the Space Shuttle Endeavour preparing for take-off on NASA’s specially modified 747. We’re not going to use the promotional stuff that the Lockheed Martin folks offered to describe this. But it’s such a fabulous photo we decided to share it with our readers.… Keep reading →

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.

WASHINGTON: The Pentagon named three Air Force officers to high-level assignments in military space today: the man who oversaw the first successful launch of the troubled Space-Based Infrared System (SBIRS), a veteran of the space shuttle program, and the outgoing overseer of the nation’s ballistic missile defense efforts. Brig. Gen. Roger Teague pinned on his… Keep reading →